I ran into an old article from the NYTimes:

Patrick Coston has been keeping lists of everyone he knows since he was 16 — and he’s now 39. Several years ago he consolidated his paper lists into one online file, making public a tabulation of “People I’ve Known in My Lifetime” (patcoston.com/home/people.htm). “It’s a way of helping me remember the past,” he said by e-mail.

I can’t help but think about the relevance of this to the HICSS paper that Fernanda and i’ve been working on. We realized that the power of our email visualizations was in part due to their power to operate as an artifact for storytelling, to provide a prop for one’s memory. In effect, the visualization serves as a tabulation of email relations. I have to wonder what it would mean to be such a Connector that one would do this.

Of course, it also reminds me of friends of mine who take pictures every day as records and other systematic means of marking time, place and people. Of course, the irony of Patrick’s system is that the public archive is tapped into search engines and thus helpful to a wider range of folks.

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Trepia seems to have hit my social network, as i’ve received like 10 messages about it this week. It has also hit the press. I signed up in beta form but i’m very weary of it. For starters (as i’ve noted before), i’m never a fan of software that requires me to give age and sex information. I understand it in dating software (i.e. Friendster), but for general purpose meeting, why is this information required? So, i just tend not to log in. At least with Friendster, i can keep a certain distance from the strangers that write to me; in Trepia, i know that there in close proximity to me and i really don’t want folks to know that. Or at least, i want to be able to control it in a safe manner. Hmm.. i need to think more about what Trepia makes me uncomfortable.

In the last month, i’ve been privvy to a handful of email hiccups – individual messages that were sent out to a list accidentally, messages that were far too personal to be sent out as such and thus revealed some very disturbing aspects of the senders. It’s also been interesting to see who has apologized and who has not and what form that apology has taken.

These messages, intended for one context and presented in another are quite powerful. They reveal the character of the individual and the importance of perceived context for written communication. More importantly, they are a clear reminder of how easy it is to accidentally shift contexts online and the potential reprocussions of that socially and politically. Of course, the easy RTFM answer is a reminder that all emails should be written as though they are public. In reality, no one ever does this. It drives me batty to think that some technologists think that overriding social tendencies is the best approach.

I met with my new advisor today, which is sooo exciting. The best part about conversations with him is that he is truely interested in issues of sex, race, class, gender and sexuality. And he doesn’t think it odd to randomly go to a cafe and chat about ideas.

In talking, i started to wonder about the maintenance of social networks. I wonder if women are more likely to operate as bridges between diverse clusters. I wonder if this is true even online.