Monthly Archives: November 2004

youth: exotification and hysteria

In a cover story on urban youth in India called Aliens! (ref Stowe Boyd and Dina Mehta), Business World begins the article with “If men are from Mars and women from Venus, is the species known as ‘youth’ from the moon orbiting the distant Pluto?” This kind of framing inevitably worries me because it signifies that the writer is going to speak about youth as a fascinating ‘other’ where adults exotify youth. Throughout the article, they refer to different age groups as different species while trying to classify different groups of youth using models that would make sense to adults. ::cringe::

Deeper inside the magazine is an article entitled IMHO*, IM Rulz. I begin the article concerned. For the most part, the article discusses practices, but there are embedded assumptions that really get my goat. Here’s the one that upset me the most:

IM is a kind of metaphor for the mindset of the new millennium youth. It fulfils a deep-seated need for constant stimulation. And keeps pace with their shorter attention spans.

In July, i spoke about how designers are building technology off of the assumption that everyone has ADD. We often joke about the fact that the MTV generation has no attention span, but i have never seen anything that empirically validates this. Without concrete data, i’m absolutely convinced that this is just an adult projection onto youth. There is no doubt that the prescription of ritalin and adderall are way up but there are tons of reports on misdiagnosis of ADD. Interestingly, more kids are diagnosed in the wealthier districts of the States. Why? Well, frankly, almost everyone i know sees an improvement in their attention span when they’re on these meds and pressure parents who are determined that their kids get into the best schools and calm down and otherwise act proper are bound to see this as a perfect remedy. That does not mean that these kids have less attention than any previous generation.

What we do know is that there is far more media available to consume today. With thousands of TV stations and the Internet, there’s almost infinite choice. Guess what? With more choice, people are needlessly asking themselves “is there something better?” Channel surfing is not a new phenomenon. Given choice, people are worried that they might be missing something.

And what is this deep-seated need for constant stimulation that they are referring to? And why is this particular to youth?

Aside from my irritation at their projection of ADD onto youth, i think that their causal relationships are all screwy. Youth exist in an always-on culture. With mobile phones and computers at their finger tips, they are able to maintain relationships constantly, unbarred by physical geographical constraints. Always-on culture is not the product of a deep-seeded need for constant stimulation. Alternatively, the perception of this need for stimulation probably results from the opportunity of having an always-on culture.

Identity formation amongst youth is deeply rooted in being able to connect and relate to others of the same age. Remember the paper cup phones that kids would string between neighboring houses to talk late at night? Remember teenagers and land lines? IM is no different. It’s just a new opportunity to keep in contact with one’s friend group, not the production of some mental deformity.

My gut reaction says hysteria around IM culture has to do with hysteria over what adults don’t understand about youth because of generational differences with regard to access to media. Thus, i groan.

on being a talking head

I just finished giving a talk at Sosial og Digital. It is 10AM in Norway and 3AM in Chicago. I spent the last hour talking into the ether about Friendster with virtually no visual and absolutely no audio feedback. It was a very very very peculiar thing. Here’s a segment of my pre-amble for everyone’s amusement:

There’s something very odd about this situation. It’s 2AM in Chicago. I’m sitting in a musty hotel room by myself, talking into a camera that is being projected into a different time zone. It is dark outside and even with all the lights turned on, it is still dim here. The ethernet cable is screwed into the table so that i won’t steal it. As a result, i’m sitting at a wooden desk which faces a very large mirror.

If i look above the camera, i’m staring at myself in the mirror. If i look below the camera, i’m staring at the captured version of myself on the iSight. No matter where i look, i’m staring at myself talking into the ether. I’m trying very hard to resist the temptation to make faces at myself because growing up, that’s what my brother and i did whenever we saw ourselves on surveillance cameras and in mirrors.

I cannot really see you. I have no idea about the temperature of your room, the smell of the morning coffee, the sense of shared presence that you’re currently relishing, the looks on your face as i speak too fast. I understand that if i look down at my notes, my eyes move away from you and this must be very disconcerting since i assume that my face is ridiculously large in front of you. In order to get feedback from you, i have to wait for information from iChat, which results in me appearing to turn away just as you talk to me. It is a very peculiar situation that we’re engaged in.

Of course, as a blogger, one might assume that this is a comfortable position. After all, i write long treatises and throw them into the wind, never aware of the reactions of my readers, never even aware of who my readers are. [interlude about Walter Ong and embodiment]

The difference has to do with my conception of my audience conception. For me, the plausible deniability invoked in blogging is strong. I can convince myself that i write for me and me alone ::wink:: and convince myself to be shocked when i receive feedback. I can check my stats, but those are just numbers – nameless, faceless people. Yet, here i am, speaking to nameless, faceless people, only i’m required by this situation to convince myself that you do really exist, even if i cannot see you. In this situation, i have the expectation that i am a face to you and you’re just an assumption to me. It really brings life to the idea that i’m just a talking head.

Of course, the first question i got was to prove that i’m not just a Fakester talking to them from next door. I love it!

Flash Forums and ForumReader

If you don’t believe that visualizations can be used to navigate large bodies of data, you MUST check out the work done at IBM called Flash Forums and ForumReader (Kushal Dave, Martin Wattenberg, Michael Muller). Kushal presented the work at CSCW and it without a doubt the most compelling work i saw here this year. Their ForumReader is ideal for addressing forums with massive audience participation and a need to navigate crazy amounts of data with varying levels of quality (think Slashdot). FANTASTIC work!

apologies

I’ve gotten quite a few messages from folks concerned that i stopped blogging. I didn’t. I’m just traveling and not able to blog this week. Apologies! Coming back soon!

Scoping “Social Tools”

[From OM]

I’ve never enjoyed coming up with pithy terms, labels or titles. While i loathe this form of production, i recognize that articles need a title and a phenomenon needs a label. We need common language to talk particular issues or sites. For this reason, i have acquiesced to the term “social tools” even though my deconstructionist tendencies cringe at the limitations of this particular term.

Instead of deconstructing the term, which will inevitably lead to dismissal, i think that it would be proper to begin this project by scoping what i believe we are addressing. I would like to begin by scoping “social tools” in the context of this blog’s intentions. Perhaps doing so will provide a framework for future discussions or at least articulate the boundaries that i will use in constructing my posts.

Let me begin by acknowledging that this term has striking parallels in intention and consideration to “social software.” For this reason, i think that it might be prudent to consider Christopher Allen’s attempt to trace the evolution of the term, my concerns with the term, and Clay’s disagreement with me. This should provide the right amount of angst and echo-chamber behavior to begin. Now let’s add the positivist spin.

When one is social, one is inevitably interacting with other people, whether they are intimate friends or strangers. Sociability may include (non)verbal communication, shared behaviors, movements towards community creation or productions that lead to the creation and maintenance of a society. To be social is not simply to communicate, but to engage in practices dedicated that will affect the relationship between people.

Social tools (or software, technologies) are fundamentally the tools dedicated to helping people be social. Tools for instant messaging, blogging, emailing, social networking, photo-sharing are all tools to help people be social. One could argue that tools that help people create content generally may help them in sociability. For example, if emacs helps me build software that … I respectfully disagree with this approach. In scoping social tools, i am only interested in the tools that not only allow for and encourage sociability, but are designed for such. Furthermore, social tools are seen by their participants as first about sociability and second about content production. Of course, there are always exceptions – there are certainly bloggers who have no intention of being sociable. For this reason, i see social tools as a radial category and i am only interested in the prototypical tools and behaviors. When appropriate, i will address the non-prototypical cases, but that is not going to be my emphasis.

There are a series of features that many prototypical social tools have: – textual, audio or visual communication capabilities – opportunity for identity formation and projection (not limited to profiles) – social networking (exposed or unexposed, articulated or behavioral) – “speaker”/audience relationships (and thus, power dynamics)

In most social tools, the content might be the most visible production, but for most participants, it is these features that motivate participation, as these allow for sociable interaction. These are also the features that signify the context in which content production is occurring. For this reason, my posts will be centered on these features first, the social tools’ participants second and the actual technologies third.

the mourning after

I voted in SF before heading to LA to watch the returns with Justin, Mary, Barlow and Friendz. As the night progressed, depressing returns made it hard to engage. I watched Jon Stewart instead.

I went to USC where i ended up in an intersection with ecstatic Bush/Cheney fans celebrating. Onlookers hung their heads or scowled at their audacity, shocked at their value system. I just started crying. I boarded the plane which was on its second leg with folks from Ohio, Move On folks were on board, somber.

DNA sampling deteriorating innocence until proven guilty, institutionalized homophobia, a country divided. This land is not my land. The free are no longer home here and what does braveness have to do with war?

My friend Jo Guldi sent the following to me this morning. I thought it would be good to share.

In one of those sunset-rosy history-channel specials, the imperially-jawed Simon Schama says that in the 1930s the British could see the specter of history stalking among them like a wooly mammoth, parading down the streets of London, as soldiers and civilians blinked and realized that their world had changed.

The fairy-tale beast doesn’t belong among most Americans. Maybe some people always know what this beast of history is. Children of immigrants and journalists, children of politicians, children born in revolutions or depressions have prescient intuitions of change as children born in leafy suburbs never do.

I saw the beast of history for the first time last night. It was slinking through our electric city of San Francisco, marking the doors of hipsters and intellectuals with ram’s blood.

They didn?t know it; by morning many of them were back to talking about ideals that had to come true, even if it takes a hundred years: gay marriage, a multiple party system. No, my darling angel-haired idealists, those days are over. Your parents and grandparents fought for pluralism and civil rights. Your own children will inevitably be able to marry their gay lovers. But this is not the time. What passed in front of us was ever so much more complicated.

Hold on for a moment and tell yourself that you’re still in the same world. The slant of light across the electric stove where my teakettle sits will return tomorrow. The bad man in the white house can’t do that much, even in another four years.

But what happened last night was that the last feather of hope floated away. The last soft imagination that we had just enough consensus in this country to fix the forces that are pulling us apart, gone. Common sense isn’t going to triumph over sentimentality and melodrama. Neither security nor intelligence nor welfare are going to be fixed; all will be handed over to the security billionaires of San Diego and the economists in the pay of DC.

Do you remember the towers going down? The freshmen in college this year don’t; they were fourteen and barely paying attention. But in the cities, the urban youth in their twenties and thirties remember wondering what had happened, remember waking and getting a cup of coffee and first seeing the frozen looks on the faces of strangers, then the terrible faces, then the reports and months of analysis. Something had started then that wouldn’t finish for a long time.

And yet for those years there was a possibility of it turning into something else, less destructive; a chance to reach across the aisle to the other party, a chance to reconnect across America, a chance to reapproach the problems of global poverty that lead people in strange lands to become terrorists; a chance to reaccount Israel: all of this was possible.

But for four years none of these rifts of possibility turned out anything better than the grim world from which they had come. And still, resentment and anger and hope brewed across the country. Watching from the coasts, we were convinced by the Michael Moores and Deaniacs and the force of our deepest desires that something could be done.

But I assure you that it cannot, now. Not after the dark noises I heard winding through the streets last night. On the West Coast we watched as polls closed in waves, the shadow of night spreading across the country, until we in California should have been the last. As the lines continued to stand in Florida and Ohio, as newscasters measured the possibility of any Democratic chance remaining. But it was too late to influence anything. We sat around with glasses of Cabernet in a warehouse by the ocean, watching DC and New York reporting on New Mexico and Oregon, feeling horribly like it was too late. Now neither the church, nor ideology, nor science, nor economics, nor foreign policy, nor pressure, nor hope, nor organization could save us. No angry Marxist professors, no brilliant editorials in the Times could reach what needed to be reached.

The beast of history is in. Lovers in each others’ arms, wake up and look. Poets and anarchists, put down your pens. Stop all the clocks, put down the indy rock music, stop reading psychology. Move to Vancouver or Paris. Get a degree in political science or advertising or business. Because whatever we were doing isn’t working, and the deadline is past. If there were a practical way to build something out of what has happened, we’d turn to that, but the moderate conservatives have already been exiled from Washington, and none of our friends will have influence for a long time yet. What has happened is too big for us, too big for our loose ideas of a hundred-year-plan for peace and happiness. There is no more road by which to get there: the storm of the last four years has swept it away, and the wind in the street last night blew out our last bridge to safety.

All day long I had been praying, calming myself with old psalms about how the universe was all one, how God had made it, all of its corners and controversies, how providence would follow us all the way through the shadow of darkness. When I woke up this morning the only psalm I could remember was this one: Lord teach my fingers to make battle, and my hands to make war.

Vote!

I will be voting tomorrow morning. I realize this election is going to be absurd, but i feel as though it is my duty as a patriot to cast my ballot. I hope everyone else who has the privilege to vote in this country takes that responsibility seriously. What we do here will affect us and the world we live in for years to come. It is a pity that so few people stand up for their values and beliefs. My hope is that everyone who can will join me in voting tomorrow, in saying that our future does matter to us.

If you witness any trouble at any voter center, call 866-OUR-VOTE to report it.

I support John Kerry. (See Technorati).