Author Archives: zephoria

conference circuit

I’m about to begin my crazy spring conference circuit. First up is SXSW where i’m speaking about teens at 11.30 on Saturday and interviewing Henry Jenkins at 11.30 on Monday. For those attending the conference, do *not* miss the latter. Henry’s ideas are of utmost importance to those involved in social media and i’m excited to help him share with a new audience. Following SXSW, i will be interviewing teens in Texas before heading to ICWSM to talk about social media. Immediately following that is Etech where i will be giving a fun talk entitled “Incantations for Muggles.” Humor me. I think it’s a hysterical title and it makes me giggle every time. Each of these conferences will provide a different slant on social media and i’d encourage you to attend the ones most relevant to you (aka: all).

After the tech circuit, i will be off to New York, Kansas, and Iowa for a combination of speaking gigs and interviewing teens. And then back to LA for 10 days. It’s gonna be brutal but i’m looking forward to it.

Anyhow, i’m letting you know this because my response time is probably going to go below its normal terrible time. I’m really stoked for the conferences though so i hope you’ll join me and come out and play. I apologize that i won’t schedule meetings during these events – i treat them as a mini-vacation where i release myself from schedules. Join me on that level and i promise they will be fun and goofy!

CFP: Public Practices, Social Software: Examining social practices in networked publics

Nicole Ellison, Scott Golder, and i are putting together a workshop for the 3rd Annual Communities and Technologies Conference on Public Practices, Social Software: Examining social practices in networked publics. Below is the basic description:

This full-day workshop proposes to bring together researchers interested in studying social software. We use this term loosely to include social network sites (e.g., Cyworld, MySpace, orkut, and Facebook), contemporary online dating services (e.g., Friendster, Spring Street Personals, Match.com), blogging services (e.g., LiveJournal, Xanga, Blogger), tagging tools (e.g. del.icio.us, Digg) and media sharing sites (e.g., YouTube, Flickr). Although the functionality of these sites differs greatly, there are some common features: a user-generated profile, visible linkages between users, public communication forums (such as message boards or comments), and persistent traces of user behavior.

Although we intend to appeal to broad range of researchers, we expect that we will primarily draw the attention of those studying social network sites. At the same time, we recognize that there is a lot of crossover between social network sites and the broader realm of social software. We are hoping that cross-pollination would be helpful to both. While we are aware of and have access to dozens of researchers interested in social network sites, we are not certain of the number of researchers looking at other forms of social software.

If you are interested, please see the workshop homepage for more information on how to apply. Note: the deadline for workshop proposals is April 23, 2007. The workshop will take place at the C&T conference on June 28, 2007.

government demands UGC surveillance

The Bush administration has accelerated its Internet surveillance push by proposing that Web sites must keep records of who uploads photographs or videos in case police determine the content is illegal and choose to investigate. — Declan McCullagh, CNET News.

::jaw on ground:: I really hope Declan is wrong on this report because if he’s not, we’re in deep shit. Can you even imagine what this would mean for civil liberties and freedom of speech? This data retention idea is on par with the China policy. ::eyes wide open::

My favorite part of the article is:

Only universities and libraries would be excluded, one participant said. “There’s a PR concern with including the libraries, so we’re not going to include them,” the participant quoted the Justice Department as saying. “We know we’re going to get a pushback, so we’re not going to do that.”

No shit you’d get a pushback. And yet this is the same government that wants to require that all schools and libraries block all content-sharing sites for minors. Put together, there’d be very little in the way of sharing.

Does anyone know if this is real? Links for more information?

(Tx Xeni)

IRB issues covered by NYTimes

In the New York Times today, there’s an article on Institutional Review Boards (the board that handles human subjects issues for academic institutions). I’m definitely amongst the people who constantly bitch about the absurdity of IRBs (even if their intentions are good) and this article discusses my frustration in much more polite terms than i ever could. I’m glad to see this issue being publicized because it’s at the core of my existential crisis. I am most likely going to graduate next year. I’m trying to decide whether or not to go on the academic market. Currently, i’m leaning against it purely because i want to get some research done without the limitations and bureaucracy of an IRB. There’s a part of me that finds that unbelievably depressing. I wonder how many others slink away from academia or choose not to pursue a particular research question purely because of IRB.

(Tx Irina)

calling Steve Jobs an opportunist

In Salon today, Cory calls Steve Jobs out on his coy efforts to throw up his hands and say “not my fault” when it comes to DRM.

Actions speak louder than words. Artists have asked — begged — Apple to sell their music without DRM for years. From individual bestselling acts like Barenaked Ladies to entire labels of copy-friendly music like Magnatune, innumerable copyright holders have asked Apple to sell their work as open MP3s instead of DRM-locked AACs. Apple has always maintained that it’s DRM or nothing. These artists believe that the answer to selling more music is cooperating with fans, not treating them as presumptive pirates and locking down their music.

As Cory rightly points out, if Jobs was sincere, he wouldn’t wrap Creative Commons publications in DRM and he wouldn’t prevent artists/labels from putting their music up as MP3s. By blaming everything on the corrupt music industrial complex, he’s trying to make himself look clean, but the truth is, his shit kinda stinks. For anyone interested in the issues surrounding DRM, music, and Apple, this article is a must read.

At the end of the day, DRM is the biggest impediment to a legitimate music market. Apple doesn’t sell music because of DRM — it sells music in spite of DRM. The iTunes Store proves that you can compete with free. People have bought billions of dollars worth of music from Apple because it offered a better user experience. But no one bought for the DRM. Some people bought in spite of it, some bought in ignorance of it, but there’s no customer for whom DRM is a selling point. No one woke up this morning wishing for a way to do less with her music.

musing on making things real

“The presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves.” — Hannah Arendt

Have you ever found yourself not saying something that is on your mind because you’re afraid that if you say it, it will become real? This is a really interesting conundrum in the context of blogging because it has to do with the ways in which public performances make ideas real. Arendt argues that one of the primary roles of the public is to make things real. People seek out witnesses to validate their emotions, ideas, actions, or mere existence. Our stories become real when we have other people to share them with, when other people saw and experienced what we experienced. Having no access to public life can be maddening (literally) because everything might as well be a fable with no witnesses to validate what took place. Ah, Pan’s Labyrinth.

The Internet has allowed us to take the most “intimate” thoughts and ideas and perform them in a public before witnesses. This makes real every neurosis and stupid act – stuff that might simply have slipped away before. It makes it possible to be heard. But at the same time, when you know you’re going to be heard, you have to think twice. Do you really want that fleeting thought to be that real, to be that present for collective memory?

I was going through some notes i took when interviewing bloggers and teens about the things that they did to try to erase relationships that once existed. They went through a series of public and private erasures. De-Friend on every site imaginable. Erase all blog entries and profile posts professing love. Change from “in a relationship” to single. Erase from address book and block on the buddy list. Erase all SMSes. Erase all emails. Erase all comments. Burn all letters. The goal of course is “out of sight, out of mind” but the problem with the entwined nature of technology is that it doesn’t work out this way. People stumble across their exes on others’ profiles, in their friends’ comments. They pine away, obsessively checking their ex’s blog/MySpace to see if there’s any sign of misery that will make them feel better because even if they know better than to track them down in person, they can’t resist the anonymous stalking online, even if it prolongs the hurt.

Relationships are funny things because while they are extremely intimate, they are also quite public. Going back to the horrid holiday of pink confetti, it’s interesting to think about how relationships are to be performed in public through romantic dinners, PDA (even holding hands), and simple physical proximity. People want to be seen to be in an intimate relationship – no matter how rough that relationship is in the backstage, there’s a desire to make the frontstage look all rosy. Yet, when it ends, the desire to erase all is confounded by the public performance of it. Sure, Amy can erase all of the “I (heart) Kevin” comments on her profile but the effects of a public performance of a relationship can outlive the documentation of it. And the publicness of each person means ongoing heartache and reminder. This, in many ways, is the flipside of being able to continue friendships after one moves or goes away to college. Relationships continue even when one wishes they wouldn’t.

I can’t help but wonder about the “realness” constructed by networked publics. How does persistence of some performances screw with this? How does the intertwined nature of things not allow for forgetting? How do people respond by refusing to acknowledge aspects of themselves in networked publics? Why is it that some people desperately want to make real the most sordid “intimate” details?

Enough musing… back to work…

Facebook’s little digital gift

Last week, Facebook unveiled a gifting feature. For $1, you can purchase a gift for the person you most adore. If you choose to make the gift public, you are credited with that gift on the person’s profile under the “gift box” region. If you choose to make the gift private, the gift is still there but there’s no notice concerning who gave it.

Before getting into this, let me take a moment to voice my annual bitterness over Hallmark Holidays, particularly the one that involves an obscene explosion of pink, candy, and flowers.

The gifting feature is fantastically times to align with a holiday built around status: Valentine’s Day. Valentine’s Day is all about pronouncing your relationship to loved ones (and those you obsess over) in the witness of others. Remember those miniature cards in elementary school? Or the carnations in high school? Listening to the radio, you’d think Valentine’s Day was a contest. Who can get the most flowers? The fanciest dinner? This holiday should make most people want to crawl in bed and eat bon-bons while sobbing over sappy movies. But it works. It feeds on people’s desire to be validated and shown as worthy to the people around them, even at the expense of others. It is a holiday built purely on status (under the guise of “love”). You look good when others love you (and the more the merrier).

Of course, Valentine’s Day is not the only hyper-commercialized holiday. The celebration of Christ’s birth is marked by massive shopping. In response, the Festival of Lights has been turned into 8 days of competitive gift giving in American Jewish culture. Acknowledging that people get old in patterns that align with a socially constructed calendar also requires presents. Hell, anything that is seen as a lifestage change requires gifts (marriage, childbirth, graduation, Bat Mitzvah, etc.).

Needless to say, gift giving is perpetuated by a consumer culture that relishes any excuse to incite people to buy. My favorite of this is the “gift certificate” – a piece of paper that says that you couldn’t think of what to give so you assuaged your guilt by giving money to a corporation. You get brainwashed into believing that forcing your loved one to shop at that particular venue is thoughtful, even though the real winner is the corporation since only a fraction of those certificates are ever redeemed. No wonder corporations love gift certificates – they allow them to make bundles and bundles of money, knowing that the receiver will never come back for the goods.

But anyhow… i’ve gone off on a tangent… Gifts. Facebook.

Unlike Fred, i think that gifts make a lot more sense than identity purchases when it comes to micro-payments and social network sites. Sure, buying clothes in virtual systems makes sense, but what’s the value of paying to deck out your profile if the primary purpose of it is to enable communication? I think that for those who actively try to craft a public identity through profiles (celebrities and fame junkies), paying to make a cooler profile makes sense. But most folks are quite content with the crap that they can do for free and i don’t see them paying money to get more fancified backgrounds when they can copy/paste. That said, i think it’s very interesting when you can pay to affect someone else’s profile. I think it’s QQ where you can pay to have a donkey shit on your friend’s page and then they have to pay to clean it up. This prankster “gift” has a lot of value. It becomes a game within the system and it bonds two people together.

In a backchannel conversation, Fred argues with me that digital gifts will have little value because they only make people look good for a very brief period. They do not have the same type of persistence as identity-driven purchases like clothing in WoW. I think that it is precisely this ephemeralness that will make gifts popular. There are times for gift giving (predefined by society). Individuals’ reaction to this is already visible on social network sites comments. People write happy birthday and send glitter for holidays (a.k.a. those animated graphical disasters screaming “happy valentine’s day!”). These expressions are not simply altruistic kindness. By publicly performing the holiday or birthday, the individual doing the expression looks good before hir peers. It also prompts reciprocity so that one’s own profile is then also filled with validating comments. Etc. Etc. (If interested in gifting, you absolutely must read the canon: Marcel Mauss’ “The Gift”.)

Like Fred, i too have an issue with the economic structure of Facebook Gifts, but it’s not because i think that $1 is too expensive. Gifts are part of status play. As such, there are critical elements about gift giving that must be taken into consideration. For example, it’s critical to know who gifted who first. You need to know this because it showcases consideration. Look closely at comments on MySpace and you’ll see that timing matters; there’s no timing on Facebook so you can’t see who gifted who first and who reciprocated. Upon receipt of a gift, one is often required to reciprocate. To handle being second, people up the ante in reciprocating. The second person gives something that is worth more than the first. This requires having the ability to offer more; offering two of something isn’t really the right answer – you want to offer something of more value. All of Facebook’s gifts are $1 so they are all equal. Value, of course, doesn’t have to be about money. Scarcity is quite valuable. If you gift something rare, it’s far more desired than offering a cheesy gift that anyone could get. This is why the handmade gift matters in a culture where you can buy anything.

I don’t think Facebook gifts – in its current incarnation – is sustainable. You can only gift so many kisses and rainbows before it’s meaningless. And what’s the point of paying $1 for them (other than to help the fight against breast cancer)? $1 is nothing if the gift is meaningful, but the 21 gift options will quickly lose meaning. It’s not just about dropping the price down to 20 cents. It’s about recognizing that gifting has variables that must be taken into account.

People want gifts. And they want to give gifts. Comments (or messages on the wall) are a form of gifting and every day, teens and 20-somethings log in hoping that someone left a loving comment. (And all the older folks cling to their Crackberries with the same hope.) It’s very depressing to log in and get no love.

I think that Facebook is right-on for making a gifting-based offering, but i think that to make it work long-term, they need to understand gifting a bit better. It’s about status. It’s about scarcity. It’s about reciprocity and upping the ante. These need to worked into the system and evolving this will make Facebook look good, not like they are backpeddling. This is not about gifting being a one-time rush; it’s about understanding the social structure of gifting.

DOPA is back under a new title

While i was off getting my eyes zapped, Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) introduced a new bill into the Senate called “Protecting Children in the 21st Century Act” (S49). It has all of DOPA in it and then some. This time, it’s squashed between some small changes to child porn legislation (upping the fines namely) and restrictions on the sale of children’s personal information for marketing purposes. It’s just as infuriating and i can’t stomach the idea of going through these discussions again. God, i’d make a terrible politician.

As Marianne Richmond says, this DOPA, Jr. is definitely DOPA Extra and just as dopey as the last one. Le sigh.

Anyone have any good ideas on how to make this one go away? When will people realize that this is a bad idea?

a random shout-out

Lately, lots of folks have been asking me for a picture for this that or the other. I have a lot of low-res silly photos, but i don’t have many “good” photographs of me, let alone high-res ones. At Web2.0 2005, James Duncan Davidson took an amazing photo of me staring at my Sidekick. Somehow, i think it captures me quite well. So i begged him for it and i’ve been using it prolifically ever since. Anyhow, this photo keeps appearing all over the web associated with me and i feel guilty that he nevers gets any credit for that awesome shot. So i wanted to give him a shout-out. I’m not sure if he reads this blog so if you talk to him, tell him i say he rocks (go swarm love!).

Los Angeles is green!

Tonight, i had the fortune of attending a Hollywood Hill event featuring Deputy Mayor Nancy Sutley. She spoke about the moves LA is making to turn itself into a green city. The event took place at the home of the producer of “An Inconvenient Truth” and the room was filled with truly engaged Hollywood types invested in social change. The conversation was fantastic but what astounded me was just how many cool projects are taking place in Los Angeles.

My favorite project concerns “bio solids” (a.k.a. crap). When you flush your toilet, your feces is diverted to an old oil chamber where it is left to decompose. As this happens, the shit lets off a bunch of methane which is then converted into energy for the city. (Don’t worry – it’s clean by then.) How cool is that? Apparently, we’re the first city to really do this on a large scale.

Last year, 6% of the city’s energy came from renewable resources. By 2010, the goal is to have 20% of it coming from renewable resources. There are projects involving solar power, wind power, methane, and all sorts of other things. There are also projects underway to encourage the reduction of energy consumption. Building developers who are going to be LEED compliant have a much easier time getting their permits. There’s a group called 18 seconds working with large corporations to move everyone towards environmentally-friendly lightbulbs (lightbulbs can be changed in 18 seconds).

Apparently, in the 1990s, the city had all of these initiatives to move everyone to using low-flow toilets (giving them out for free across the city). The result was a 15% water savings. This is crucial considering LA has to get its water from all sorts of weird places. There are now initiatives underway to bring back the LA river (which was paved over in the 1930s as a flood prevention technique). This will allow more water, more green space, more bicycle lanes, and fewer movie-ified high speed car chases. There’s also a million trees initiative where the city will plant a million trees by 2010 in areas that desperately need them. Aside from being pretty, trees are critical to environmental ecosystems because they like to eat carbon dioxide and turn it into oxygen.

I can’t even remember all of the other initiatives i heard about tonite but i’m in awe of how conscious our city government is about these issues, how they are engaging with environmental organizations and city planners, how they are working on multiple levels to address environmental issues in the city, and how they are working to make it a better, more liveable city. I have to admit that i haven’t been that proud to live in land-o-Hummers but this event made me feel much better about Los Angeles, or at least those in charge of the government.

Anyhow, yay Los Angeles! And now, if we can only figure out how to get community sidewalks and eyes on the street…. (And sssshh all of you haters out there.)