Author Archives: zephoria

limited email March 16-25

I’m headed to Hong Kong with my partner for Eastover (what happens when Passover needs to be celebrated during Easter because that’s when people have vacation). I will be checking my email sporadically, but don’t expect much in the way of communication – In addition to family time, I’m also using this time to focus on some writing without the internet nearby. ::smoooch::

curing the ills of sociology

I was reading some background bits on Erving Goffman when I came across this passage, commenting on the state of sociology. Having sat through painful discussions of “what is an information school?” and been grilled about my own disciplinary affiliations, I read this and burst out laughing. I always love reading scholars’ takes on disciplinary squabbles, especially when they can step back and see the absurdity in it all. I figured the academics who read my blog might get a kick out of this too.

“I have no universal cure for the ills of sociology. A multitude of myopias limit the glimpse we get of our subject matter. To define one source of blindness and bias as central is engagingly optimistic. Whatever our substantive focus and whatever our methodological persuasion, all we can do I believe is to keep faith with the spirit of natural science, and lurch along, seriously kidding ourselves that our rut has a forward direction. We have not been given the credence and weight that economists lately have acquired, but we can almost match them when it comes to the failure of rigorously calculated predictions. Certainly our systematic theories are every bit as vacuous as theirs: we manage to ignore almost as many critical variables as they do. We do not have the esprit that anthropologists have, but our subject matter at least has not been obliterated by the spread of the world economy. So we have an undiminished opportunity to overlook the relevant facts with our very own eyes. We can’t get graduate students who score as high as those who go into Psychology, and at its best the training the latter get seems more professional and more thorough than what we provide. So we haven’t managed to produce in our students the high level of trained incompetence that psychologists have achieved in theirs, although, God knows, we’re working on it.”

— Erving Goffman in “The Interaction Order” (1983) reproduced in The Goffman Reader (p. xvii)

how youth find privacy in interstitial spaces

The NYTimes ran a piece today called Text Generation Gap: U R 2 Old (JK). (Note: the article is very American-centric – in the States, older folks tend to be texting illiterate.) The article begins with an anecdote of a parent shuttling around his daughter and her friend. They are talking and dad butts in and they roll their eyes. And then there is silence. When dad comments to his daughter that she’s being rude for texting on her phone rather than talking to her friend, the daughter replies: “But, Dad, we’re texting each other. I don’t want you to hear what I’m saying.”

First and foremost, the notion of “privacy” is about having a sense of control over how and when information flows to who. Given the structures of their lives, teens have often had very little control over their social context. In school, at home, at church… there are always adults listening in. Forever more, there have been pressures to find interstitial spaces to assert control over communications. Note passing, whispering, putting notes in lockers, arranging simultaneous bathroom visits, pig latin, neighbor to neighbor string communication… all of these have been about trying to find ways to communicate outside of the watchful eyes of adults, an attempt to assert privacy while stuck in a fundamentally public context. The mobile phone is the next in line of a long line of efforts to communicate in the spaces between.

At the same time, the mobile phone changes the rules. Texting allows people to communicate even when they aren’t at arms length or can’t arrange simultaneous interactions. Because texting happens silently, it’s far more effective as a backchannel mechanism than whispering. Codes are not necessarily about hiding from adults as much as efficiency; deleting sent/received messages is far more effective than codes.

Over the years, parenting has become more and more about surveillance. In this mindset, good parents are those who stalk their kids. Parents complain that their children ignore them when they’re in the same space, preferring their friends. When was this not the case? What’s different now is that there are fewer siblings/cousins running around to team up with. There’s less free time to just “hang out.” There’s no openness to go out after school and “be home by dark” (a practice that used to start in early childhood). With activities and scheduling and this and that, I’m always amazed that children don’t demand more time for friend time.

There’s an arms race going on: parental surveillance vs. technology to assert privacy. We aren’t seeing the radical OMG technology ruins everything stage. We’re seeing the next in line of a long progression. And it’s just the beginning. The arms race is heating up. As parents implement keyboard tracking, kids go to texting. How long until parents demand that companies send them transcripts of everything? What will come next? We are in the midst of the privacy wars and it’s not so clean as “where’s my privacy” vs. “kids these days are so public.” The very nature of publicity and privacy are getting disrupted. As kids work to be invisible to people who hold direct power over them (parents, teachers, etc.), they happily expose themselves to audiences of peers. And they expose themselves to corporations. They know that the company can see everything they send through their servers/service, but who cares? Until these companies show clear allegiance with their parents, they’re happy to assume that the companies are on their side and can do them no harm.

Generation gap and technology ruining everything stories will be forever more. These do sell and they are fun to read. Yet, for parents and teachers and other concerned folks wanting to get a clear perspective of what’s going on, it’s important to remember that at the end of the day, the intentions and desires aren’t changing… it’s just the architecture that makes the practices possible that is. The refraction of light is changing because the medium through which it is channeled is changing, but the light itself stays the same and to guide our children, we need to remember to pay attention to the light, not the refraction or the medium that’s causing the refraction.

cultural sustainability

Since Davos, I’ve been thinking about cultural sustainability. This isn’t a term that I heard there, but one that I wish that I had.

These days, when people in business talk about sustainability, they mean environmental sustainability. Traditionally, the environment was an externality that was ignored. More and more, with the conversations of “carbon neutral,” people are starting to think about what it means to environmentally sustainable. At the same time, a company can be environmentally sound and completely destroy local economies and other aspects of culture through their moves.

To me, the idea of “cultural sustainability” is about companies whose actions offset the consequences of their presence (or disappearance). For example, when large companies abandon cities that they’ve been in for years and where the entire city revolves around them, their move has a HUGE culturally destructive force. How do they offset this in a functional way? How does this get considered to be an externality that needs to be factored in? (It used to be through layoff benefits and pensions that kept going no matter what… this is no longer viewed as critical.) Large companies who come into a town and put out of business a variety of different local merchants have another kind of culturally destructive practices. This is why the conversations around Wal-Mart get so heated: capitalism vs. cultural sustainability.

When companies were smaller and local, there were pressures put upon them to be good local citizens. They invested in the towns where they were present and operated as key actors in creating culturally sustainable systems. It was normal for a company to help out with a local school event because education made sense for the company because it meant better employees. As companies get bigger and bigger (and “globalized”), there’s less pressure to be invested in the culture. Even if there was, what culture should they invest in when they’re so big? Mostly, big companies give back to communities for PR purposes.

There are numerous points of pressure placed on companies right now to be environmentally sustainable, but this is not the only kind of sustainability that matters. That said, there are lessons to be learned. For a long time, the conversation tended to devolve into capitalism vs. environmental sustainability. More and more, folks are saying BOTH and finding ways to make that work. How do we do this with cultural sustainability? What pressure points need to be put into place where culture is evaluated as an externality in the models that economists draw up?

enough already!

Last night, I turned off NPR in a state of complete disgust. It wasn’t just the ongoing hellish pledge drive that drives me away from NPR for months at a time. (I _want_ to give to NPR, but the pledge drives tend to make me turn my back on NPR instead.) No, it was the framing of the election results. It was the way the story has been and continues to be framed. And it wasn’t just NPR, but Fox News, CNN, and NYTimes have all made me blazingly angry this week. And it wasn’t just about winners or losers, but about how the story is framed dramatically to get people to tune in.

I was really excited about this election. A variety of factors in my life motivated me to get really engaged, to research candidates, to persuade other people into engaging. I started reading and watching MSM again rather than waiting for it to be filtered through Stewart/Colbert or the blogosphere. But in doing so, I watched an ugly pattern emerge. The moment that one candidate was seen as pulling ahead, MSM started dredging up crap on them… or creating stories from nothing. My favorite story was the one the NYTimes wrote on how they couldn’t find anyone to prove for certain that Obama did drugs. They published this the night before Virginia/Maryland/DC. The last two weeks, the NYTimes has done some of the worst reporting possible. The whole McCain story made me really sympathize with him personally (even though, politically, he scares the shit out of me). And then this week, they started reporting on how people are saying Clinton should step down if Obama wins in Texas and Ohio. Both of these articles seemed set up to do one thing: keep the election cycle going by amplifying the competition by any means necessary, but primarily by making the front-runner look dreadful.

I’m disgusted. In the back of my mind, I’ve always known that MSM is all about creating drama to sell more papers. As an infrastructure, MSM are not really partisan (although individuals are)… it’s that the infrastructure of MSM feeds off of people being engaged. And there’s nothing more emotionally engaging (and exhausting) than conflict and fear mongering. The MSM doesn’t create an accurate picture of what’s going on because the Corporation behind the MSM doesn’t feel a responsibility to, even if individual reporters are well-intentioned. Journalists, by and large, are extremely well-intentioned but they’re caught up in a system. They are pressured to write stories that create conflict and while senior folks can step back and take a higher stance, they can’t become senior if they don’t meet the needs of the Corporation for a while. Uphold hegemony and then maybe you get some wiggle room… but by then, you are the institution. Besides, even if you want to speak truth to power, good luck – your article is not likely to sell well or be widely read.

Many journalists are idealists. But they aren’t independent and what’s “newsworthy” is inevitably what’s dramatic. Whatever stance they take on those dramatic incidents, their small part of the pie feeds into a much larger structure whose incentives are to keep the wheels turning.

I’ve been avoiding reporters a lot lately. They always tell me that I should talk to them “to tell the other side.” But we both know that’s not what really happens. They use me to tell the story that they need to tell but they have to at least give nods to “the other side” for appearances. There’s no story in reality. Reality is boring. It’s not made for 24/7 news. Fear sells. Conflict sells. Making someone else’s life miserable sells. Reality doesn’t. The incentives are all screwed up and it’s just downright disgusting.

People always ask me what it will take to get teens to listen to news. Why should they? What do they gain by being sent on an information roller-coaster for the news industry to turn a buck? Does consuming news really make you more informed or ready to engage? Have you watched MSM on TV lately?

The more I try to engage, the more my passion and desire to make change is destroyed. Years ago, after a different egregious move by the NYTimes, I cancelled my subscription. I can’t cancel it again, but I would if I could. More than anything, what I’m realizing is that I need to check out of the news again. It doesn’t make me more well-informed; it simply makes me more angry and depressed. It’s good timing… one less thing I can do while procrastinating writing.

As for the election, I’ve become pretty apathetic once again. At this point, I don’t care. No matter what, I don’t think that it will be fair or representative or in the best interests of the people. Everyone likes to complain about how the candidates don’t give real opinions, but we all know the reason why they don’t: the media would destroy them. Paying attention to their efforts to dance cautiously with the media gets me nowhere. There’s no way to know the candidates, no way to actually get a sense of how they will navigate the nasty waters of the media, industry lobbyists, political pressures, and really complicated decisions. It’s all guess work so all we do is vote on charisma and guesswork about who will handle which parts of the puzzle best. I still believe in Obama, but I’ve lost faith in the system. All I know is that come November, I will vote against the Republican party. McCain is only one small fraction of that party and actually the least of my concerns. I want that whole corrupting, demeaning, destructive party out of control now. I wish I could say that I would be voting for the Democrats, but I’m not sure that’s true. I just don’t think that they’ll screw it up as badly. And the fact that at the end of the day I resort to that logic is depressing.

I wish I could find the energy to care, but I’ve completely lost it once again. I really had hope. I was so excited to see so many people energized and believing that they could make change by engaging. I was really excited to see conversations occur that were not previously occurring. But things have gone stale and at the end of the day, I realize that the media and other powerful people are once again controlling the election. And it’s hard to sustain hope when that’s what plays out.

In the meantime, I wonder if it’s possible to change the incentive structure around MSM? (And no, I don’t think that bloggers are the answer.)

LiveJournal Advisory Board

I have exciting news. I’ve decided to join the advisory board of LiveJournal. It’s been brewing for a while, but it became official today. (Today seems to be the day for announcing things that have been brewing for a while…)

Anyone who has been following my work for a while knows that I heart LiveJournal with a passion. I’ve been on LJ in one form or another since 1999/2000 and it’s still the only community that I check in with daily for personal purposes. While I love LJ personally, I also deeply respect its history professionally. From its earliest years, LJ was home to many thriving subcultures: geeks, playa obsessed freaks, queers, goths, fans, camgirls, and even post-structural feminist cultural studies scholars. Because I’ve identified with or dated members of each of these subcultures, I’ve ended up back at LJ time and time again. Of course, LJ is much more than its subcultures. LJ is also home to teenagers, Russian activists, literary aficionados, knitters, and many many more. Like the community systems of the early web, LJ brings together communities around shared passions. Like contemporary social network sites, LJ serves as a hangout space for friends. Combined, LJ is one of the most powerful tools for people to gather, share, communicate, connect, and chill.

As much as I love LiveJournal, it has not been without drama. From the early days of camgirls to the fights between SixApart and fanfic folk, the various LJ communities have been active in defining what LJ should be about and what community identity looks like. The cultures that flourish inside LJ are vibrant, but often happily underground. Part of what makes LJ the ideal home for this is that LJ has some of the best tools for communicating and negotiating audience (think privacy features). When SixApart bought LJ back in 2005, I wrote a panicked essay called “Turmoil in Blogland” (published in Salon). I was worried that the well-intentioned folks at SixApart meant well, but didn’t understand what the cultures of LJ looked like. While they didn’t do that bad by LJ, their fights with the community over monetization and censorship showed that they were in over their heads. Not surprisingly, each incident incited a revolt by passionate LJers determined to stand up for what they believe. Each time, I couldn’t help grinning. I do love subcultural passion. At the same time, the last round of fanfic revolts saddened me. I understand why there are many who want to up and leave LJ, but I also feel as though much will be lost if they do. Given that LJ is not a psycho corporation and that I think most people on the inside wanna do what’s right, I kept wishing that LJ and its subcultural participants would find a way to resolve their issues.

Then, in December, I learned that SixApart was selling LiveJournal to the Russian company SUP. I have to admit that I panicked a bit. I knew that SUP had been pretty good to the Russian continent (having been running it for over a year), but I didn’t think they knew diddly squat about the communities that I loved dearly. I was also terrified of some logistics wrt the acquisition; Russia’s not exactly known for being a liberal nation state. Within days of the sale, one of the SUP founders (Andrew Paulson) contacted me. He had read my concerned blog post as well as my old essay on LJ. He asked if we could meet to discuss the future of LJ. He wanted to know if I had questions that he might be able to address and advice that might help in guiding the transition. We met and the one-hour meeting turned into four, at which point I had to bail out. Our conversation was intense. We debated some issues, educated each other on others. We found commonalities and talked about how we might resolve some of our disagreements. Above all, what struck me was that he was very willing to listen and open to ideas that would help LJ. We talked about how to handle different communities’ needs and how to make sure that activists, outcasts, and rabble rousers would feel safe. In the end, he asked if I would join the advisory board to help guide SUP and LJ in the right direction.

As the advisory board started coming together, I got even more excited. Brad Fitzpatrick, Esther Dyson, Lawrence Lessig… These are all people that I love and trust, that I feel confident will work to protect community interests. SUP has also decided that LiveJournal shall have two positions on the advisory board set aside for user representatives that will be elected by the community (more info on that coming later). To top things off, Jason Shellen will be leading the U.S. LJ product team. (Jason and I worked very closely together at Blogger/Google and I know that I can trust him to be community-minded.) In other words, lots of folks I respect and lots of opportunity for meaningful connections between users and the company.

The mandate of the LJ advisory board is as follows:

An international group of informed and trusted thought leaders from the online community, who will advise the management and Board of Directors of LiveJournal Inc in the operation and development of the LiveJournal platform;
Charged to meet, discuss, and post their position on the issues that are important to the community. The board will likely discuss a broad range of topics: freedom of speech, privacy, legality, policy, and security, to name only a few;
Charged to provide guidance to LiveJournal, Inc. management and the Board of Directors on new issues and controversies as they arise;
Charged to speak to and for the users, offering them a voice not only in LiveJournal, Inc., but also on LiveJournal’s role in the world;
Charged to oversee ongoing charitable work which the LiveJournal, Inc. Board of Directors supports.

Personally, I wanted to join the advisory board to help bridge gaps between the communities and SUP/LJ (the company). With help from the various communities, I hope that I can represent the passionate users out there. While I want to be able to advise the company to do the right thing, I also know that there will be times when compromises are necessary. My hope is that I can also help the company find the best compromises possible as well as help folks understand how decisions were made. Transparency is critical. Personally, I’m looking forward to the challenge. I believe in LiveJournal, I believe in the users. I want to see LJ be a safe home for those who have inhabited it for so long. New landlords are always a bit daunting, but I do think that these new landlords are well-intentioned and I deeply respect that they’re wanting to connect to the tenants and bring people in to serve as liaisons.

As much as change is always a bit nerve wracking (especially when it comes to community sites), I’m actually looking forward to this transition. I think that SUP gets that fucking with the thriving communities that are living inside LJ is downright stupid. At the same time, I respect that they want to figure out how to grow LJ in ways that don’t negatively affect the current active population. There are lots of issues to be addressed and innovation to be done, but I think that this can be done in a fashion that is beneficial to all stakeholders (including and especially active users). Given the opportunity to help, I just had to say yes.

My private LJ is going to remain private, but I decided to make a new public LJ as well: http://danahboyd.livejournal.com I’m not sure what all I will use this for, but I will definitely post things relevant to LJ there and be open to communicating with anyone who wants to talk.

W00t!

The Internet Safety Technical Task Force

Folks who have been following the online safety debates know that the Attorneys General and MySpace agreed to work together and with other relevant social actors to develop a Joint Statement on Key Principles of Social Networking Safety. Not surprisingly, they wanted a “neutral” party to lead this endeavor. Guess what? John Palfrey (executive director of the Berkman Center), Dena Sacco (former federal prosecutor in child exploitation cases) and I (the lovable author here) have agreed to co-direct the “Internet Safety Technical Task Force.” Our mandate is to develop recommendations for approaching online safety. The Task Force will bring together a variety of different organizations with different stakes to work out the best approach. Some of the tech companies involved include: MySpace, Facebook, Xanga, Bebo, AOL, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Google, Linden Lab, Loopt, AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon. The Task Force also includes the Attorneys General, organizations dedicated to online safety or children’s safety, and various vendors.

For more info, Berkman issued a press release and the NYTimes offers more info on their site.

Those who know me are probably thinking WTF? It’s true – both online safety issues and anything involving politics tend to agitate me. At the same time, I actually think that I can make a difference by trying to help these different groups find common ground and come up with a solution that will work for them while not further disintegrating the rights and freedoms of youth. As a youth advocate, I feel that I need to not shirk away from these types of things, but get involved so as to make certain that youth’s voices are heard by those trying desperately to protect them. This is not to say that I don’t believe in child safety – oh boy do I ever – but that I also believe that safety efforts can and should be executed in a non-opressive manner. This is what prompted me to agree to co-direct this endeavor with two amazing legal scholars who understand youth issues from complementary points of views. It should be fun, or at least an educational roller coaster. No doubt you’ll hear more about it as we proceed.

For a better sense of my research as it relates to issues of online safety, check out the video/audio/transcript of a panel that I was on last spring with Michele Ybarra, David Finkelhor, and Amanda Lenhart: Just the Facts about Online Youth Victimization (sponsored by the Internet Caucus)

Where HCI comes from (and where it might go)

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about HCI (human-computer interaction) and my relationship to that field. I’ve been kinda frustrated with HCI. The name HCI implies that the field is about people’s relationship with machines and the interaction paradigms and designs that enable more efficient or enjoyable connections between the two. Many argue that this is the crux of my research. I’ve been resistant to this because I believe that I study human-human interaction that happens to have a mediated component to it.

This week, a new book appeared in my mailbox: HCI Remixed: Reflections on Works That Have Influenced the HCI Community (eds. Thomas Erickson and David McDonald). This book helped remind me that human-human interaction was part of HCI, even if the field seems not to emphasize that these days.

This book gave me all sorts of smiles. First, I’m a sucker for books of essays where I know half of the authors and drool with respect over the other half. Second, I love books that trace histories that I read long ago while offering fresh perspective and new contextualization. Third, I like books that challenge me to rethink my position on something. Through the perspective of contemporary HCI scholars, this book examines some of the core literature that is at the foundation of HCI and reflects on its relevance today. In walking down this memory lane, I was reminded of the many facets of HCI. There’s the HCI that’s about interfaces. There’s the HCI that’s about development processes, foundational to contemporary industry practice. There’s the HCI that’s about taking computation into the wild while also making it ubiquitous or invisible. There’s the HCI that’s about supporting collaboration and groups. All of these HCIs are in the history of HCI and it’s fun to read these eminent and emergent scholars reflect on the work done in all of these areas. This book made me long for the days when I felt like HCI was my home because it highlights a history that is still relevant to me. (Of course, some of what they discuss – Everett Rogers and Jane Jacobs, for example – goes beyond HCI.)

While this book has unbelievable breadth, my frustration with contemporary HCI often stems from my feeling that it has narrowed its focus over the years. While experimental psychology has been fully embraced by the field, many HCI scholars reject qualitative social science as irrelevant to HCI. There are plenty who embrace it, but the experimental psych approach dominates the conversations and work that does not follow the normative formula tends to not get published. Personally, I’m wary of most publications that make broad claims based on user studies with n=6 CS grad students. (While there are sound reasons for this methodology in certain subfields of psych, most of how it gets executed in HCI scholarship makes my toes curl.) As HCI tries to become a field in its own right, I feel increasingly alienated by it. I stopped going to CHI a few years ago because it no longer felt like my home (and the cost was way prohibitive). I stopped reviewing this year because I felt as though my criticisms were with the methodological approach of the field and thus I was doing a disservice to CHI.

Yet, HCI and its sister CSCW really were the beginnings of thinking about how people communicate in computer-mediated environments and it’s nice to see that history recounted. It’s nice to be reminded that qualitative work really was valued. Much of that seems to have been forgotten in an era of scholarship that requires user tests and design implications to be considered valid. What happened to work that focused on the interaction between humans and computers in the wild? Personally, I love work that analyzes how mega collective action by inhabitants of a system result in behaviors never predicted by the designers. This, unfortunately, doesn’t fit neatly into the build/test/explain cycle that dominates the field; thus, it tends to get published elsewhere. I hear things are changing and HCI is evolving in new ways, especially now that iSchools are starting to engage with the topic. Perhaps this book will remind more folks where HCI came from and open new doors for where it might go.

The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet

When I was last in DC, I had lunch with Daniel Solove and we were talking about book publishing. He had been thinking of making his book downloadable under Creative Commons and I was like DO IT DO IT! This is the kind of book that is sooo relevant so many different audiences who would never hear about it through traditional advertising. My thought is that if it were available online, it could whet folks appetite before buying it (cuz printing it out is painful and reading it online is not wonderful either and your Kindle doesn’t support PDFs). Introducing…

The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet

This book examines the darker side of personal expression and communication online, looking at some of the social costs of what I’m always rambling on about as “persistence, searchability, replicability, and invisible audiences.” Our reputation is one of our greatest assets. What happens when our own acts or the acts of others sully that? What role does the technology play in enabling or stopping that? How should the law modernize its approach to privacy and slander to address the networked world?

While this book is written by a professor, it’s written in extremely accessible manner and should be devoured by parents, marketers, technologists, teachers, HR professionals, policy makers, and anyone else who might have a stake in the world of reputation. I also found excerpts helpful for students who are trying to make sense of the costs of their practices. Oh, and it’s a fun read.

If you hate reading from the screen, just go and buy the book. The author and his publisher will thank you.

(Oh, and go Yale University Press! You’re batting well in the CC/open-access publishing baseball game!)

danah boyd | apophenia

making connections where none previously existed