Author Archives: zephoria

it’s time for SXSW!!

After taking a break to finish my dissertation, I’m heading back to SXSW and I. Cannot. Wait. SXSW is one of my favorite-ist conferences evah. It’s filled with fun folks who are truly engaged with the web, social media, and other forms of culture. There’s such a large contingent of cool and interesting people that I’m always overwhelmed, overstimulated, and otherwise bouncy as could be. The parties don’t hurt either. Tehe.

Anyhow, I do very little scheduling at SXSW because I personally do better when I’m unscheduled and just go with the flow. That said, I find that it’s useful to show up at one’s own talks and parties. And it’s even more fun to attend said scheduled activities when your friends know about it and want to come and play along. Sooo, since all of my BIG events are on Saturday, I thought I’d take a moment to share these bits in the hopes that those of you attending might come along!

Panel #1: Is Privacy Dead or Just Very Confused?

  • Who: me (moderator), Judith Donath, Siva Vaidhyanathan, Alice Marwick
  • When: Saturday March 14, 10-11AM in Room A
  • Abstract: While many assert that “privacy is dead,” the complex ways in which people try to control access and visibility suggest that it’s just very confused. Rather than throwing the baby out with the bath water, let’s discuss people’s understanding and experiences of privacy and find ways to 2.0-ify it.

Panel #2: Everything I Needed to Know About the Web I Learned from Feminism

  • Who: Heather Gold, me, Betty Flowers
  • When: Saturday March 14, 3.30-4.30PM in Room 9
  • Abstract: Last year’s panel on Gossip packed up via twitter word of mouth and was described by Get Satisfaction’s Lane Becker as “the best panel I’ve ever seen at SXSW.” This year we might top it and revive/re-frame feminism at the same time. Feminism teaches “the personal is political” and the web shows that the personal is now public. Christmas newsletters and recipes are the social media of their time, and women are the key social nodes of our culture. In her comic and though-provoking style, Heather Gold brings together amazingly smart women and the people f/k/audience to discuss what makes social networks strong and predict where they’re heading next online.

Party: StandardAnswer Launch Party

  • StandardAnswer is an online community built around questions and answers (think personality quizzes). This is a new startup; I’m on the advisory board and this is the launch party.
  • When: Saturday March 14, 8PM-2AM
  • Where: Red Eyed Fly, 715 Red River
  • Deets: all welcome, music by Black Joe Lewis, American Princes, and White Denim; RSVP is required

Sooo… if you want to see me be all serious, come to the panels. If you want to see me all goofy and bouncy, come to the party! Saturday is bound to be loads of fun so I hope you’ll join me!!!

“Social Media is Here to Stay… Now What?”

Last week, I gave my first talk at Microsoft since joining MSR. This talk was part of the annual Tech Fest where researchers from labs around the world come and share their work to the broader Microsoft community. For the most part, it’s like a large science fair. There are booths and demos and posters and swarms of people descending to ask questions of researchers. It was pretty trippy to be thrown into this mix after only being with the company for a month. I had the privilege of “demoing” (a.k.a. waving my hands and trying to explain what I do) to Bill Gates. There was great humor involved because I gave my “demo” immediately following one of my colleagues’ (Henry Cohn’s) brilliant explanation of optimizing the Gale-Berlekamp lightbulb game. (Think: pure math to pure ethnography in under 60 seconds.)

Anyhow, I wrote up the crib of my talk in case anyone outside of Microsoft might find it interesting:

“Social Media is Here to Stay… Now What?”

This talk is intentionally not a research talk, but an applied talk. It’s a sampler plate of my work as it applies to developers, policy makers, community managers, product designers, and other folks who work inside companies like Microsoft. Enjoy!!

I want to evolve to not hear the cell phone

Whenever I’m in a public space where folks are blabbing away on their phones, I want to scream. Trains, cafes, busses… they all drive me batty. I’m dreading the day in which cell phones are viable on planes. Or when VOIP isn’t blocked. When I’m forced to listen to half of a conversation, I start fuming. First, I mentally grumble about how rude the person is. But then I start berating myself, lamenting my age, and wondering if I were younger or from a different culture if half-conversations wouldn’t drive me so utterly insane.

Years ago, I read a study (that I now can’t find) about why half-conversations are so disruptive. Your brain is pretty good about tuning out conversations in a restaurant, but it sucks at tuning out just half of a conversation. Y’see – your brain wants to fill in the other half. It worries that it’s supposed to respond and so it listens even when you tell it not to. You can’t just close your ears and blasting other sounds into them may not achieve the desired serenity either, especially if you’re like me and the urge to dance kicks in with the music.

This all makes sense for those of us whose brains stabilized pre-mobile phones. But I can’t help but wonder if this is changing. If you grow up in a world where half-conversations are everywhere, does your brain cope with it better? Does it learn to tune it out? If you grow up in a culture where everyone is always rattling on loudly in public, can you tune out noise better than if you grew up in a culture where silence is more than norm? I’m always fascinated by cross-cultural events involving people from more quiet cultures (say Japan, Finland) and those from louder ones (say Russia, Israel). Do these cultural differences affect your ability to tune out noise?

More importantly, can I be retrained? Can I evolve to not hear those blasted half-conversations? I know that I can learn to tune out car noise after a few weeks in a new apartment. What will it take for me to stop fuming? I feel far too old and crotchety before my time on this one.

when research is de-contextualized

This week has been filled with news stories that make me sigh. Since everyone keeps asking me about them, I feel the need to comment. Scratch that, rant.

Let’s start with the Economist’s Primates on Facebook. This article is framed around Robin Dunbar’s classic work published in Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language. Dunbar argued for a parallel between humans gossiping and monkeys grooming. He found that there appeared to be a cap of how many people one could maintain in one’s network. This “Dunbar number” never referred to how many people you could possibly know, but how many people you could actively “groom.” Your contacts on Facebook are not equivalent to the people you groom. These can contain close and dear friends, but it can also be used as a rolodex for ties you don’t actively maintain.

The bigger issue is that performed network ties (“Friends”) are NOT the same as the personal networks that sociologists and anthropologists have historically measured and theorized about. Comparing them is futile at best and dangerous at worst. The Economist article mixes apples and oranges, creating a sense that the networks people maintain are the same that they perform through the public articulation of contacts. Marlow’s work is extremely interesting, but the framing of this piece is problematic. One of the reasons that I wrote Friends, Friendsters, and MySpace Top 8 back in the day was to highlight that Friends and friends are different. I think that we need to keep remembering this.

And then there’s the discussion of Lady Greenfield’s claims that social network sites are “infantilising” the human mind. She made a speech to the House of Lords to encourage people to research her hypothesis. There is NO EVIDENCE to prove her claims. Listening to her talk, it is very clear to me that she has no idea how social network sites work. She bemoans users’ practice of collecting friends on social media, saying that no one _really_ has that many friends. She claims that today’s youth are spending more time with social network sites than any previous generation spent with TV or rock-n-roll (with no evidence to back that claim). She clearly doesn’t understand how people are using these, how they are being integrated into people’s lives. Nor does she have evidence for her claims. But the press has picked up her call to action as a formal report, often juxtaposing it with the MacArthur Digital Youth Report as a counterpoint. I find this deeply frustrating because I think that the fears of how the brain are being reworked are driven by a misunderstanding of youth engagement with social media.

That said, I think that there’s something to be said for how today’s youth are thinking differently than their parent’s generation. But I don’t think that it’s simply “caused” by new technologies. I think that we’re living in a society that has different priorities and I think that multi-tasking is more deeply prioritized than sustained attention by professional circles today. I think that we are being trained to be “creative” thinkers rather than productive doers and I think that this means that we are encouraged to draw connections between new things. I think that we are living in an environment that is structurally divided and that sociality is increasingly mediated. But I don’t think that the technology is to blame. I would argue that we’re addicted to our friends, not the computer. When the computer lets us get access to our friends, we look like we’re addicted to the computer. I think that a lot of the claims that are being made about the technology have more to do with systemic factors in today’s lifestyle. And I think that we do ourselves a disservice when we focus on the technology instead of the larger systemic picture.

Anyhow, I’m disappointed that the coverage of social media continues to be so sensational. Le sigh.

———–

Italian Translation of this blog post:

Quando si decontestualizza la ricerca

traduzione di Luisa Doplicher, revisione di Isabella Zani

Questa settimana sono uscite moltissime notizie di quelle che fanno sospirare ohimè. E visto che tutti continuano a chiedermi cosa ne penso, mi sa che devo proprio dire la mia. Leviamoci questo sfizio, partiamo con la tirata.

Cominciamo con l’articolo dell’Economist intitolato Primates on Facebook [in inglese], basato sull’ormai classico scritto di Robin Dunbar ne La nascita del linguaggio e la babele delle lingue. Dunbar tracciava un parallelismo tra gli esseri umani che spettegolano e le scimmie che si spulciano a vicenda, affermando che a quanto pare esiste un limite al numero di persone che si riescono a mantenere nella propria rete di amicizie. Questo «numero di Dunbar» non si riferiva mai al numero di persone che è possibile conoscere, ma a quelle che si riescono effettivamente a «spulciare». I nostri contatti su Facebook non corrispondono alle persone che spulciamo: possono includere amici intimi e persone care, ma Facebook si può anche usare come agenda di contatti che di fatto non coltiviamo.

Il punto centrale è che i legami stretti sui social network (gli Amici) NON coincidono con le cerchie di amicizie personali storicamente oggetto di misure e teorie sociologiche e antropologiche. Confrontarli è inutile nel migliore dei casi, dannoso nel peggiore. L’articolo dell’Economist mette insieme pere e mele, dando l’impressione che coltivare una cerchia di amicizie personali sia identico al crearsene una tramite la pubblica gestione di contatti. Il lavoro di Marlow è interessantissimo, ma la base teorica di quell’articolo è discutibile. Uno dei motivi per cui tempo fa ho scritto Friends, Friendsters, and MySpace Top 8 [in inglese], era proprio sottolineare che gli Amici sono diversi dagli amici: bisogna continuare a ricordarselo.

E poi c’è la discussione sulle tesi di Lady Greenfield, secondo la quale i social network “infantilizzano” la mente umana [in inglese]. La baronessa ha tenuto un discorso alla Camera dei Lord per incoraggiare studi della sua ipotesi: ma non c’è ALCUNA PROVA che corrobori le sue affermazioni. Ad ascoltare il suo discorso, mi sembra chiarissimo che Lady Greenfield non ha alcuna idea del funzionamento dei social media: deplora l’abitudine di collezionare amici in quel contesto, dicendo che nessuno in realtà ha così tanti amici, e sostiene che oggi i giovani passano più tempo sui social network di quanto ne passassero le generazioni precedenti davanti alla tv o a sentire musica rock (senza citare prove a sostegno di quest’affermazione). È chiaro che non capisce come la gente usi i social network, come questi vengano integrati nella vita delle persone: e non fornisce prove di quanto sostiene. Però la stampa ha preso la sua chiamata alle armi per una relazione formale, accostandola spesso al MacArthur Digital Youth Report [in inglese] nel ruolo di altra campana. Cosa che trovo molto irritante, perché mi sembra che i timori di lavaggio del cervello siano guidati da un equivoco rispetto al modo in cui i giovani interagiscono con i social media.

Detto questo, penso ci sia davvero una grossa differenza tra il modo di pensare dei giovani di oggi e quello dei loro genitori: ma non credo che le nuove tecnologie ne siano la causa. Credo che la società in cui viviamo abbia priorità diverse e che al giorno d’oggi l’ambiente lavorativo metta molta più enfasi sul multi-tasking che sull’attenzione prolungata. Penso ci preparino a diventare pensatori «creativi» invece di esecutori produttivi; e secondo me vuol dire che ci incoraggiano a tracciare collegamenti fra cose nuove. Credo che viviamo in un sistema dalla struttura frammentata e che l’interazione sociale sia sempre più mediata. Ma non penso che la colpa sia della tecnologia. Direi che noi siamo dipendenti dai nostri amici, non dal computer; solo che quando lo usiamo come mezzo per raggiungere gli amici, pare che siamo dipendenti dal computer. Credo che molte tesi riguardanti le nuove tecnologie siano molto più legate a fattori intrinseci allo stile di vita odierno; e credo non giovi a nessuno concentrarsi sulla tecnologia anziché allargare lo studio al complesso di questi fattori intrinseci.

Comunque, il sensazionalismo con cui i mezzi di informazione continuano a trattare i social media è proprio deludente. Ohimì ohimè.

feature requests for my blog

As many of you have probably noticed, my blog is crashing beneath its weight. It’s time for it to be updated and given new life so that I can integrate my various output in a way that is useful for others. I intend to do that in the next couple of weeks. So, given that y’all do the reading, I thought you should have a chance to share your thoughts.

  1. What blog features would make this blog more useful to you?
  2. What other types of output would you like me to integrate into my blog and in what form? (e.g., twitter, video, delicious, etc.)
  3. What design fixes would you like me to address?
  4. Are there any bugs that are driving you batty?

Thanks for reading and hopefully an upgrade can make it a more enjoyable experience.

“Elsewhere, U.S.A.” by Dalton Conley = FABULOUS

It is not that often that I find myself cheering “Yes! Yes!” as I read a book, but Dalton Conley’s “Elsewhere U.S.A.: How we got from the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, Blackberry Moms, and Economic Anxiety” made me do precisely that. As a result, I feel the need to urge you to go and buy this book. He has captured an essence that we all know, but grounded it in a way that really helped me put two and two together at a time when we’re all trying to work out what the hell is happening to our society. He hits a nerve in a way that helps you see what’s right in front of you.

If you don’t know Dalton Conley, he’s a brilliant sociologist at NYU who is mostly known for his work on race (“whiteness” in particular). [If you’re a geek, you’re probably more familiar with his partner Natalie Jeremijenko.]

In Elsewhere, U.S.A, Conley starts by painting two portraits – one of Mr. and Mrs. 1959 and one of Mr. and Mrs. 2009. Using broad strokes, he highlights the differences in lifestyle between the educated, white collar families of those two different eras. From there, he weaves us through a discussion of changes in the economic, social, and corporate levels. Mixing enticingly delicious prose with sociological theory (conveyed in a unbelievably accessible manner), Conley starts mapping out changes that have taken place and how they’ve panned out.

For example, he explains why the upper classes have become so insecure and anxious about their jobs, resulting in the first point in history where the wealthier you are, the more you work. A good quote on that one: “This constant fear of being exposed, cut out, or outsourced, and thereby having one’s ‘capital’ rendered valueless, is the principal pathos of the era.” Conley investigates how two-income households have created new pressures, forcing families to work harder to keep up. He examines how technology has helped us work harder, more often, and everywhere instead of relieving burdens.

Moving from the tax code to the dinner party, he also looks at how “leisure” is being blurred with work in new ways and how people in the upper echelons invest in social activities in an effort to maintain status at work. This gets into a broader notion of networking and how being social is key to having high status. “Whereas in the industrial epoch, the ability to cloister oneself off from the hoi polloi was a mark of power; in the post-industrial, networked economy, being surrounded by as many people as possible, all seeking your attention, is the ultimate manifestation of rank.”

While the focus of the book is on the upper classes, Conley introduces the working class as a backdrop, noting how some of the upper class dynamics have altered working class culture. He examines the shift in power between the employee and the employer, using relations like the nanny and mother as a way of looking at how traditional structures of power and status maintenance have broken down. But he also looks directly at how the structure of poverty has changed. “Poverty in a post-industrial economy is less about the ability to meet basic material needs and more about the lack of control over life choices and the personalized humiliation that the poor experience in their work lives.”

Anyhow, “Elsewhere, U.S.A.” is chock full of good information that’ll make you think about the lifestyle we live and how it shapes and is shaped by modern society. Plus it is written in such a fun way that it’s hard to put it down. For many of those who read this blog, this book is a tremendous social critique of your (and my) lifestyle. I cannot recommend this book enough. (I especially recommend reading it while on a plane or otherwise living the “elsewhere” lifestyle… then it’ll really hit a nerve.)

Note: Neither Conley nor his publisher or agent or anyone else asked me to do this review or know that I’m doing it. I wrote this post purely because I think that this book is a MUST READ.

licensing your dissertation under Creative Commons

When I wrote my dissertation, it didn’t dawn on me that using the Creative Commons license might be remotely controversial. There’s a template for dissertations at Berkeley and one of those pages is the copyright page. Initially, I edited the copyright page to match the CC license that Cory Doctorow uses in all of his books on the copyright page. Shortly before I was set to file, I talked to another grad student in my department who had just filed his dissertation. Much to my horror, I learned that he was the first student to file his dissertation at Berkeley under the Creative Commons license and that it had been a disaster. He went through many iterations before they accepted it, complete with the CC license as an Appendix. Not wanting to pick a fight, I copied his approach verbatim. I went to file my dissertation and hit a stumbling block. They told me they had never seen such a thing. I told them that Joe Hall had filed that way only a few months back. They told me that it would need approval from high up and that I’d have to wait a long time to get that approval. Frantic, I started texting and emailing Joe. Luckily, he had all of the emails on hand and forwarded them to me. As it turns out, the person that I was trying to file with as the one who filed Joe’s and when I showed her emails that she sent negotiating this process with Joe, she let me file. I suggested she might want to take note since there would be plenty more students like me and Joe.

Today, the Daily Cal ran a story about our adventures in filing. I was pleased to learn that the Dean of the Grad Division committed to making CC licenses available to students in the future. This is truly good news!

But I also want to make a plea to all of you grad students out there who are slaving away on your dissertations… Use Creative Commons. The forms you fill out when you file your diss under ProQuest encourage you to make sure to copyright your dissertation. While theft is part of the framing, it is also framed as being about you profiting off of doing so (and ProQuest brokering the sale of your diss). Realistically, 99% of all grad students are never going to see a dime directly from their dissertation. What’s the advantage of keeping “all rights reserved”? Why not let folks use it for whatever non-commercial purposes they deem fit (like teaching a chapter or two in class)? I mean… I would LOVE it if someone translated my dissertation. Or remixed it. Or turned it into a movie. That ain’t ever gonna happen, but still… why actively prevent it?

And while we’re at it… why not make it freely available? Part way through my dissertation, I realized that I had never read a dissertation. I was surprised to find that very few people make their dissertations easily available. Why? In some senses, the diss is quite embarrassing. It’s imperfect. You’re sick of it. But there are huge advantages to making it available. At the very least, it allows future students to get a sense of what they should expect. (There was nothing more nerve-calming than realizing that my mentors’ dissertations were totally sloppy at points.)

Anyhow, if you’re a student out there, consider licensing your dissertation under Creative Commons and making your diss freely available either on your website or through services like SSRN or arXiv. I’m sure that there are many others out there doing similar things, but perhaps our story and template can help you persuade your school to allow CC-licensed dissertations.

My dissertation: Taken Out of Context

Joe’s dissertation: Policy Mechanisms for Increasing Transparency in Electronic Voting

doing the math on MySpace and registered sex offenders

The Attorneys General – mostly angry at me and other researchers – have spent considerable time trying to publicly reject the ISTTF report that was published last month. This week, I watched as they blasted the airwaves with an announcement that 90,000 sex offenders have been removed from MySpace. This PR campaign is intended to provoke fears in the American psyche, to serve as “proof” that we were wrong. The underlying message is, “See, social network sites are dangerous!” Fear mongering by public officials is quite effective, but, once again, I’m frustrated to see the framing miss the reality of the data. For this reason, I want to challenge the message of the current PR fear campaign.

First, it is important to acknowledge that there are dozens of crimes that put people on the sex offenders list that have nothing to do with children. It differs state by state, but includes a variety of adult-adult crimes and even some crimes like indecent exposure in public. There is no indicator that the presence of those convicted of such crimes put children at risk.

Second, it is critical to note that it is not illegal for an individual who is on the sex offenders list to join a social network site unless it is part of their parole conditions (which constitute a very small number of cases). It is MySpace’s prerogative and they have been proactively engaged in removing these individuals as a private enterprise because they believe that it benefits the community of MySpace. Yet, many who are kicked off only learn that they are unwelcome once they are kicked off.

Now, let’s do some math. The National Alert Registry has over 491,000 registered sex offenders on its list. In data collected in December, Pew found that 35% of American adults are on social network sites. If sex offenders were a representative population, we’d expect that 172,000 of them would be on social network sites. Now, I know nothing of who is on that list, but if they were to skew younger or more urban, we’d expect even more of them to be on those sites. Regardless, the number announced by MySpace should not be unexpected or shocking.

One of the worst parts of dealing with quantitative numbers of any kind is our tendency to read into them what we want to read into them. We see a number like 90,000 and expect that it’s high and outrageous. But it is not more than would be expected by statistical patterns. And it’s not an automatic indicator of a problem. We need to know WHO those registered sex offenders are and WHAT they are doing to get a critical assessment of the risk. By focusing solely on the number, we introduce a red herring and, in doing so, miss the whole point of our report: there are children online engaging in risky behavior who desperately need our help. Blocking adults who have raped other adults, while likely desirable in general, does NOTHING to help at-risk kids.

Why are we so obsessed with the registered sex offender side of the puzzle when the troubled kids are right in front of us? Why are we so obsessed with the Internet side of the puzzle when so many more kids are abused in their own homes? I feel like this whole conversation has turned into a distraction. Money and time is being spent focusing on the things that people fear rather than the very real and known risks that kids face. This breaks my heart.

Update: Others have been responding to this issue with some very valuable and relevant content that I feel should be shared:

my first week

What a crazy week it’s been. I came back from vacation and landed in Boston just seven days ago (during a winter snow storm, of course). On Monday, I started at Microsoft Research New England and have been working my toosh off to get settled (battling network connections, apartment searching, etc.). I have to admit that I’m totally overwhelmed. I’ve interacted with more humans this week than I have in the last year. And I’m surrounded by brilliant people who do research that I don’t understand at all. So I’m on a crash course, trying to grok what my colleagues do and figure out how I fit in and how I can collaborate with them. But I’m totally up for the challenge, in part because I really really really like the people I work with and our conversations are totally inspiring. Even if they think that I’m an odd duck.

More writing coming soon. But first, settling in and finding my feet. Have I told you lately how awesome it is to not be working on my dissertation? OMG. So much relief.

I hope all of you are well!

using Facebook while ill

Yesterday, I received an email about one person’s Facebook usage that I felt the urge to share:

A little over 6 months ago, my stepmom was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She is doing alright now, but during her chemotherapy she was isolated from friends and family due to a compromised immune system. She could still see people, but had to keep human interactions to a minimum. During that time, Facebook became this way for her to communicate and interact with the world. Being able to see pictures of friends and family and receiving comments would brighten her day. It was really amazing how she was able to adopt this technology temporarily and how valuable it became to her. As her life has returned to normal, she has had less time for Facebook. Originally, one of her friends had helped her create the profile, but it wasn’t part of her normal life. So now that things are more “normal”, she has talked about how it is hard to maintain her Facebook relationships.

In following up with the son, he shared an additional element with me that is also important: “Even though she is older, she has friends that are college age that she knew through her religious activities. So most of the people she was talking to were of college age. But as the technology becomes more pervasive among older generations, I could totally see being able to communicate with a broader range of friends.”

What I find so compelling about this account is that it is a reminder that in-person encounters are not always possible or ideal. Geography isn’t the only limiting factor. I’m always intrigued to hear stories of people with disabilities using the Internet to build connections that were otherwise impossible for them. Likewise, it’s astonishing the role that the Internet plays in helping people who are ill.

I’m also reminded of all of the awkwardness that occurs when illness gets in the way of friendship and the role that technology can play. In this case, the woman is unable to see her friends frequently. But there’s another layer here. When someone’s sick, the topic is always hanging in the air. In some cases, it’s always the topic of conversation. In others, it’s a difficult subject to broach. Back when I was studying blogging, I spoke with an HIV+ man who told me that he started blogging so he could let his friends know about his health. He had found that there was no comfortable way for them to ask in social settings. “Can you pass the ketchup? Oh, and how are your T cells?” didn’t quite work. Likewise, there was no good way for him to bring it up without creating awkward moments. So he decided to anonymously blog about his illness. His friends could get a sense of how he was doing and he could share it and everyone could look when it was most appropriate for them and their in-person interactions could have a more sane cadence. One huge challenge in being sick is figuring out how to participate “normally” in social settings. Mediated interactions can often be quite valuable in this regard.

There are many other important nuggets in this account. Technology’s value is often dependent on where one’s at in their life. Inter-generational relationships can be enhanced through these tools. Social awareness can be tremendously fulfilling (and should not be seen as purely vacuous). I don’t want to go into a proper analysis here, but hopefully this story makes you think.

Anyhow, I like being reminded of how these tools fit into people’s lives in different ways and I thought maybe you would too. Oh, and if you have a story of your own to share, I’m all ears.