Author Archives: zephoria

irritated by process

While Berkeley is far more like Brown than MIT could ever dream to be, one thing drives me batty: there is way too much of the Northern California process, self analysis shit in the classroom. I just sat through 2 one-hour classes where over half of each class was devoted to process, analysis of the professors (section) or self-analysis by the professors (lecture). We’re no longer in the first week of school so i have *no* patience for this.

I’m also having a really really hard time dealing with the slowness of speech of most professors. Out of all of my professors, one of them is a New Yorker/total East Coaster. He talks as fast i do, makes no apologies for it and demands that you keep up just by his assertive manner of speaking. It’s odd how refreshing this is for me. (And added bonus is that while he can do the whole post-structuralist speak, he keeps it to a minimum instead of trying to validate his existence through incomprehensible combinations of discourse words.)

As most of my SF friends are actually natives of the East Coast, i forget how much the slow-paced, process-centric Californian tendencies drive me up the wall. I just want to plow through the material. If i don’t get something in the first round, i’d rather repeat it than think that a slow version will allow for better comprehension. That never works for me and by going slow, my mind wanders.

I think i need more sleep.

Cybersalon on Habits of the Heart

In case you want to hear me babble:

Cybersalon: Matchmaking for Love and Money, Online and Off
September-21

Some social interactions can’t be automated–yet, but technologies can
certainly help folks pursue a quicker denouement.

The founders of online and offline career and dating services will
explain how new technology and new social norms are changing the way
people find love and money at the Hillside Club in Berkeley, on
Sunday, September 21 (5:30-9PM).

Speakers include:

* Jonathan Abrams, CEO, Friendster
* danah boyd from UC Berkeley
* Julie Paiva, President, Table for Six
* Mark Pincus, CEO, Tribe
* Cynthia Typaldos, Principal, Typaldos Consulting
* Ned Engelke, Managing Director, North America, OIS/SmartFlirts

Note: for anyone who had hoped to go to this talk to heckle Jonathan instead of me, you’ll need to redirect your tomatoes as Jonathan has seemed to have bailed on the panel.

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would you pay $5?

Folks keep asking me for my honest opinion on last evening’s MIT/Stanford Venture Lab panel and i keep avoiding this, but peer pressure works so well.

First, one must dissect the purpose of people’s attendance. In theory, the goal is to see a panel of experts talk about the business issues around the “social networking space” (even if some panelists want to pretend as though there is no “space”). I may not have an MBA or any entrepeneurial experience, but i’m not so naive as to think that there is any expert on the business end of this phenomenon. Everyone is riding on theories; there are no success stories to say how this is going to work, how this is going to make money. Since everyone’s bank rides on their theories, suddenly there are experts because when you lack data, you need to back your ideas with confidence so as to encourage others to do so as well, thereby increasing your likelihood of succeeding (business is a strange world to me).

Thus, we had a panel of five people who have a lot invested in making this work, and particularly in making this work for them.

Now.. let’s look at the audience. Why on earth would you pay $30 to hear a panel of people who have a lot invested banter about something that has yet to pan out? One of the audience members answered this reflection when she turned to the audience, asked how many grad students were in the room and whether or not they would pay $5 more to get a list of who was attending. The room was filled with people who also wanted to see and be seen. Of course, to be seen, you must also be heard, so most questions were also about being seen, not reflecting on what one was hearing.

[Of course, i’m a part of this absurdist drama as well since i went to watch and analyze and to show face given that i’ve been dreadfully busy. Plus, i wanted to get a sense of what was missing in preparation for the remake of this play on Sunday.]

Unfortunately, very little of the panel got into the content of the topic. Instead, it was a pure dance that would’ve made Goffman proud. The interaction ritual between panelists was full of snide remarks and ego cutting (or soothing); it was like watching a geek version of a wrestling match… (of course, i wonder whether it was more like the WWF than a set of professional wrestlers… performed or realistic spite?) I will say that Jonathan has become much better at responding to sarcastic cuts in kind and even better at dodging the opponents.

I should note that prior to the panel’s dance, Reid gave a 20 minute talk with interesting data for those who might know the space. In the talk, he had one nugget that got me thinking. He noted that Jonathan believed that people have one social network; Reid countered that they have multiple.

Perhaps those of you who know me know that their disagreement brings up one of my buzzwords in a flash: faceted. (Yes, yes, don’t roll your eyes.) People maintain a coherent social network. The multiple contexts in which we interact create facets in our social network that we know how to maintain quite meaningfully. We certainly reach out to different people for dates than we do for jobs, but that is not a segmentation of our network into convenient chunks. Instead, we manage what is appropriate when. We don’t want to maintain multiple networks; we want to maintain one network that we can facet as we see fit. This is a trick that no one in this “space” has figured out yet. This means that we don’t always want a public network, because we’re not always willing to collapse those facets. (More to come on this topic, i’m sure…)

Anyhow, as you can see, i quite enjoyed myself, but i always do enjoy good entertainment full of outrageous actors and an interactive audience.

Oh, and in case you want to actually know more about the content, Stewart Butterfield is far more concrete than i have been.

Other versions of commentary:
– Marc Canter (with shameful pictures of moi)
– Ross Mayfield
– CBS Marketplace
– abe

V-Day Online Organizer

I’m trying to find my replacement for V-Day. If you know of anyone in New York that’d be interested, let me know!

JOB TITLE: Online Organizer (Part-Time)

LOCATION: New York, NY

REPORTS TO: Executive Director

WORKS MOST Worldwide and College Campaign Directors, Executive Director,
CLOSELY WITH: Technology Consultants.

DESCRIPTION: The position of On-Line Organizer is classified as an exempt half-time position. In general responsibilities include: Moderate discussions on V-Day list-serves and manage broadcast messages to V-Day organizers around the world; Participate in the design and implementation of technology to support communication with and among organizers; Facilitate volunteer activities of organizers, translation services, on-line promotions and other on-line, web-based extensions of V-Day’s work; Work closely with the Directors of the College Campaign and Worldwide Campaign, and other staff on technology and communication issues; Such other tasks and duties as may be assigned.

SPECIFIC RESPONSIBILITIES:

– Manage and update and sometimes build the V-Spot (The V-Spot is the internal site for all of our organizers. It is a HTML/PHP/mySQL system)
– Manage Contractors
– Tech support for Organizers
– Create reports
– Update material on vday.org
– Manage Atof.net and make certain our boxes stay up
– Serve as system administrator V-Day staff
– Envision ways in which technology can be used to enhance V-Day

An ideal candidate would have (in the order of priorities):

– Good communication skills, patience and politeness
– An interest in building community in a digital realm
– An ability to design system specs and manage outside contractors
– A ability to negotiate data on a UNIX-based system
– HTML knowledge
– PHP, mySQL knowledge
– Perl, Javascript knowledge
– A strong working knowledge of Windows and Mac OS 9/10 and PC/Mac Office is desirable
– Experience troubleshooting PC and Mac computer problems is desirable.
– Any and all other technical skills

V-Day is a virtual organization. The Coordinator works out of his/her home office which should be in or around New York City.

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frustrated with information retrieval

For the last few weeks, i’ve been trying to appreciate the information retrieval material that is being thrown my way in my classes. For those who don’t know, i’m housed in a department called “Information Management and Systems” (i.e. what happened to librarian sciences as it evolved).

I’m utterly fascinated by how people construct and maintain information, most notably *social* information. What categories do we create to relate to others? How do we construct models of social information in our heads? How do we access this?

Needless to say, this isn’t the focus of my classes, but i’m trying to overlay my goals onto the material and find some sort of appreciation for them. [My efforts remind me of my experiences with history classes in middle school. I despised history because i couldn’t make it relevant. At one point, a friend of mine told me to twist my perspective, to think of history as one giant storybook with fascinating characters. He suggested that i tried to figure out the motives and goals of the characters. Although my school focused on dates and memorization, i latched on to the material simply because i fell in love with the storybook.]

All the same, i’m finding myself utterly frustrated. All of the information retrieval work focuses on this external data, how to categorize it, create meta-data around it, access it, etc. In the process, it gets further and further removed from the structures of the mind. The goal is efficiency and the approach is often to create systems that seem most computationally logical and than to figure out how to make humans be able to access it. While these researchers acknowledge that people need to have immense skills to follow this protocol, their approaches still seem so foreign to me.

Of course, i find myself trapped to this as well. I had to critique SecureId the other day for a fellow researcher. This was a wonderful task because i’m a bit embarrassed by my naivety on that project. People are dreadful external categorizers. But, i just keep getting stuck on how bad people are at externalizing what they do so effectively internally that i cannot appreciate these attempts to do so. I need to figure out the proper “story” so that i can find this material interesting instead of just getting caught up in my irritation at their attempts.

am i a suicide girl?

Now, i get a lot of odd messages on Friendster, which often humor me. Since i know way too many people on the damn site, many people think i’m collecting friends and ask me to add them. I ignore these, but they make me smile.

Actually, i rarely respond to anyone who writes me on Friendster (no time..), but i utterly love reading what people write. In the last few weeks, a new trend in requests has emerged in my personal account: i keep getting messages from people asking for my suicide girl page, asking if i am a suicide girl, asking for my porn site, etc. At first, this was a bit startling (although i have to admit that i was secretly honored since i adore the Suicide Girls).

For those who don’t know, most of the Suicide Girls are “Pin-up Punk Rock and Goth Girls” (a.k.a. a really hot soft porn site for the younger funkier market). Many Suicide Girls and other women with sites are on Friendster because 1) it’s fun; 2) they can connect with their friends; 3) it helps them connect with more people who may be interested in their site. [It’s important to note that many of the Girls neither advertise their site nor their identity as a Girl.]

Browsing through such women’s portraits, i realized something. Many of them have collections of friends that consist of young punkster friends and older white businessmen…. So do i. Interesting.

[Not so private note…. Clay – your identity play is fucking with my identity play.]

the idiot savant

Abe’s latest reflections on Friendster are fantastic. He iconifies Jonathan as an idiot savant, accidentally stumbling on brilliance.

[Side note: the notion of Friendster as the product of an idiot savant makes me deliciously happy as my dear friend used to pound a mantra in my head during college: don’t attribute to maliciousness what you can attribute to stupidity. Perhaps a rephrasing is due… Don’t attribute to brilliance what you can attribute to luck.]

In his entry, Abe argues that Friendster’s success is going to be hard to top, that its growth must be analyzed and that much of it can be attributed to Friendster’s simple no-nonsense style. He does directly attack my point about Friendster fading, which makes me think that i need to readdress it since i still believe in it, but also believe in what he is saying.

The problem with Friendster (in its current incarnation) is that it has little motivation for people to return, manage their network or otherwise keep coming back after the fun wears off. Unless Friendster figures out how to address these problems, it will fade. To do so, Friendster needs to evolve beyond a dating-only model, which seems unlikely. That is why i see Friendster as fading and others emerging. Of course, an alternate course would be that Friendster figures out that it cannot squeeze a square peg into a round hole and adjust its model. Somehow, the savant part of Abe’s conception is dropped here.

I *definitely* agree that conversion is dreadfully impossible. But i also believe that conversion implies that the best model is to maintain an articulated network. I think that’s going to continue to be problematic and i think that the next evolution of these networks will have to address that head-on. That said, i also know that the dating model does not appeal to everyone and that there is an age cut-off on Friendster that allows for a larger market than Friendster currently addresses. I definitely think Friendster will be around in a year, but i don’t think it will be the same tool. I think that it will be a dating site with limited appeal and a lot of folks who had “been there, done that.”

Of course, i’m speculating like the next person and will enjoy being proven wrong.

codifying relationships

Liz is pondering the issues around explicitly codifying relationships and i couldn’t agree more with her musings. In a state of confusion about how to label people, we often just give up. This isn’t just something that happens online. How often do i try to express my relationship to someone and get all confused. One word certainly doesn’t clarify those complications, but i still find myself making up a closest approximation, but not one that i would write down in stone. Also, given the rich relationships that i have with people, i often adjust my description of my relationship with a person depending on the audience.

Let me flesh this out with some examples. The most obvious is the newly dating couple who hasn’t really determined what their relationship is. So, what’s the likelihood that one is to exuberantly tell her best friend about her new girlfriend? Probably high – there’s a bit of bragging enthusiasm / want of support. What’s the probability of her telling her mom about her new girlfriend? Probably low – she doesn’t want to have to deal with the yes, mom, another one.. no this one’s different conversation. Same relationship but with problems codifying it.

Also, codification assumes that our terms are consistent and imply the same thing. Does friend mean the same thing to everyone? Certainly not. I have quite a few friends who i’ve learned that “friend” means anyone that they’ve met. Some codes have a definite meaning, but the implications are not given. For example, she is my mom. Well, in my case, my mom and i are pretty good friends, engage with each other for advice, etc. My mom is also my friend, but the ‘mom’ label trumps the friend label. Yet, the implications of a mother/daughter relationship are not consistent and thus one cannot assume much by simply hearing that relationship.

Liz is also dead-on when she asks what the point of codification is when we have that model internally anyhow. For most people, there is none. What’s the value? Doesn’t it cause more social trauma than it does any good? Don’t get me wrong – i’m constantly explicitly codifying information, but i don’t think that this is normal behavior. [I am, afterall, an academic whose eccentricity is just part of the process.]

Finally, i appreciate Liz’s pointers to my commentary on sex and self-monitoring. Marginalized populations are constantly trying to account for how they are being perceived, if they are getting information across as intended and adjusting what they say accordingly. They don’t have the privilege to just be whoever whenever whereever. They must determine the appropriate information at the appropriate time. Sex is just one axis in which this plays a part. The most blatant example for people is around gay identity. If you’re gay and you lack the privilege of class (overeducation counts here), what’s the likelihood that you will pronounce your sexual preference as you go for a job? Is this deception or simply trying to be unclear about your identity for your own protection? Self-monitoring. You determine the social situation and adjust accordingly. That same person is not going to hide his identity when he’s at a gay bar.