Author Archives: zephoria

dear principal

Dear Principal,

Please excuse danah from school and all activities for a few days. She seems to have contracted the deth flu and is working on building an intimate bond with the white porcelain bowl. Don’t worry – she has made the tub a cozy bed and is very thankful that her landlord put a heating vent in the bathroom. I am watching out for her, keeping her clean and cuddled. I will meow loudly if there are any problems. Please be patient with her as she’s a bit on the delusional end of things.

Sincerely,
Marbellio

first impressions based on tag clouds

The other day, someone pointed me to LJ Tags which shows the top tags on LiveJournal. I was really startled at how much this reflects the cultural difference between LJ and other blogging tools. Where else do you see meme as the top tag and life, school, work and music as the other key ones? And how cool is it that rl, fanfic, harry potter, and a bunch of russian terms are on there? Take a look at the following tag clouds:

Live Journal:

Technorati (a fraction of English tags):

del.icio.us:

Visually, they look awfully similar but the actual words included say such dramatically different things about their communities. Fascinating fascinating…

video games perpetuate A Clockwork Orange

Did you know that teenage video game players are the 21st century version of the droogie gangs depicted in the novel, ‘A Clockwork Orange’? Yes, that’s right – video games are forcing kids into an evil lair where their minds are dreadfully manipulated and they’re learning terrible lessons.

Of course, my favorite part of this article is:

In this connection, we recall the horror of Columbine High School in Colorado. Both Columbine shooters were drenched in the play of ultraviolent video games. At the time, the murders caused a backlash against violent video games, but nowadays, the old ultraviolence has returned like an old friend.

I guess no one informed the authors of this article that it was pretty well shown that Columbine had NOTHING TO DO WITH VIDEO GAMES (or goths or industrial kids). It had everything to do with alienation though. But fear of violence sells newspapers. Just as fear of our kids does. And thus, here we are, another completely inaccurate portrayal of youth and technology.

Here’s another great quote:

Moreover, the addictive quality of video games also encourages kids to stay inside and play in virtual reality. But kids need to be out in the world to become socially capable as well as physically fit. How many of our youth have become emotionally stunted from years of seclusion, unable to relate in normal fashion to the demands of ordinary social relationships?

How many parents allow their kids to go out and play? I live in San Francisco – do i ever see kids on the streets? No. Why? Because parents are afraid. They’re only allowed to go out under supervision, only allowed to play in very specific ways, in formalized activities, in community centers. They can’t hang out on their stoop, play on their streets, play in the park. They can’t socialize because parents won’t let them. Video games let them go into a world that is not controlled by adults, a fantasy world where creativity and exploration are allowed. It is quite common for youth to play with their friends, to have a fantasy world to share. Who wouldn’t prefer the fantasy world to the surveillance world? What would happen if we allowed fantasy to come back to the physical interactions for youth? What if kids could go on adventures outdoors like we used to? Until we deal with our culture of fear, video games are going to be *much* more appealing than everyday space. Not because they are addictive, but because they are simply more fun.

teenager repellent

At the back of Ms. Magazine, there’s a section called “No Comment” where they re-post advertisements of various sorts that are just so wrong it hurts. They don’t analyze them but they know their audience will get it given their voice in general. Well, given my actively pro-youth culture voice, check this out:

What’s the Buzz? Rowdy Teenagers Don’t Want to Hear It

::sigh::

Continue reading →

Attention Networks vs. Social Networks

(originally posted on centrality)

Network analysts often speak about (un)directed graphs. In essence, this refers to whether or not someone you know knows you. If reciprocity is required by the system, it’s an undirected graph. The vast majority of online social networking tools assume that users are modeling friendship and thus if you’re friends with someone, they better damn well be friends with you. As such, they use undirected graphs and you are required to confirm that they are indeed your friend.

Well, what about fandom? Orkut actually put the concept of fan into their system, but in order to be someone’s fan, you had to be their friend first. Baroo? I’ve noticed that Friendster introduced fans, although it is not consistent across the site; the system decides who is celebrity. I can be a fan of Pamela Anderson but i cannot be a fan of Michel Foucault or Henry Jenkins. While i can understand that the former is clearly a Fakester, the latter is actually a real academic with a Friendster Profile that i genuinely admire (far more than Ms. Anderson). Even on MySpace where bands have a separate section, i have to add them to my friends; i cannot simply be fans.

The world is not an undirected graph and very little about social life online is actually undirected. Many social relations are unequal; they are rooted in directional graphs – fandom, power, hierarchy. So why do we use undirected models?

Of course, there are many systems that have directed graphs. I can read blogs by bloggers who who don’t read me; blogrolls are directed. I can have friends on LiveJournal that do not reciprocate. I can subscribe to del.icio.us feeds of people that i admire without forcing them to do the same. I can make a Flickr user a contact simply so that i can watch their photos. I do all this because i know the world is not undirected.

Part of the problem is that we’ve built a model off of social networks instead of attention networks and there’s a very subtle difference between the two. Attention networks recognize power. They recognize that someone may actually have a good collection of references or be a good photographer and that someone else may want to pay attention to them even if their own collections are not worthy of reciprocation. Attention networks realize that the world is not an undirected graph.

There are many good reasons to use attention networks in systems instead of social networks. Do you really want to force people to get permission to subscribe to public material of someone else? Do you really want to put people through the awkwardness of having to approve someone that they don’t know simply because one person respects the other? Of course, the awkwardness of social networks does not disappear simply by having directed graphs. Reciprocity is still an issue whenever the networks are performative (visible as a statement of connection). This is most apparent in the blogging community where people feel insulted that they are not included on the blogroll of a blog that they read regularly. Thus, people feel the need to perform a relation of someone that they do not read simply for good social measure.

Attention networks are far more visible when people actually use the network for some purpose. Friendster networks are meant to be performative first and foremost. There’s minimal cost to having more friends. It may foul up your gallery searches but, really, does it make a difference if you see 4,325,935 people instead of 4,311,266? Attention networks like LiveJournal and Flickr combine the network with the subscription process. You want to keep your Friends page clean and to only get information from people you care about. Of course, LJ also recognizes that there are times when you need plausible deniability. It allows you to create a separate group of LJ folks that you actually watch (separate from your “friends” list). The subscription process is inherently a process of attention relations, not friendship.

Of course, the computation needed for directed graphs is much greater than for undirected graphs. Is that the main reason that most services require reciprocity? Even when it’s not the best mechanism for the system? Or are there other reasons why folks are obsessed with undirected graphs?

capturing changes in news

This weekend, i managed to see two distinctly different movies concerning radical shifts in journalism and the differences were chilling – Capote and Good Night, and Good Luck.

Capote is a portrayal of Truman Capote, focusing on his work in creating In Cold Blood. In Cold Blood was the first journalistic novel, taking a true story and adding literary flair to draw you in. It allowed people to fetishize real news. In the film, you see Capote devolve as he creates the masterpiece that makes him famous. Writing the book, getting to know and helping support the murderers killed him… Capote never wrote another book and died an alcoholic. Of course, what is only hinted at in the film is the role that his book had on the living people he portrayed, on the people who were intimately affected by this tragedy. If it weren’t for Capote, the murderers would not have gotten their appeals, a the small town in Kansas would never be infamous, and the people could’ve moved on from the horrors without their lives perpetually being invaded for Capote’s gain. Legacies have a price.

Good Night, and Good Luck is the story of how Edward R. Murrow took on Joseph McCarthy by taking advantage of his privilege as a trusted reporter to offer editorialized reporting in order to reveal the underlying problems of McCarthy’s approach. Murrow took on McCarthy when no one else was willing and many credit him for ending the Red Scare. In doing so, Murrow was accused of being a red, his good friend committed suicide and he almost lost his job at CBS. Yet, there’s a reason why he’s an icon to most journalists – he did what was right. Of course, every ounce of this movie makes you think of contemporary times… (are there any journalists today who would stand up to the current regime?)

Both films portray characters who made a choice to write in a way that frames a story, recognizing that the true facts are only one part. Yet, Capote did it for personal gain at a great cost to both him and the town portrayed. Murrow, on the other hand, did it for what he felt was a moral responsibility. Both realized that the reporter did the framing. And yet, at what cost?

What are the moral responsibilities in reporting? In speaking in public? When we recognize that there is no neutral truth, no fair and balanced anying, everything is framed.. then what? How many more Red Scares can we perpetuate? How many communities can we destroy by fetishizing their losses?

framing the discourse of drugs and death

Last week, a friend of many of my friends died. Frostbyte (Kevin McCormick) was a brilliant light artist whose live should be celebrated. Unfortunately, the circumstances of his death have introduced some troubling conversations about drugs and production. What is most horrifying is how it has been taking up by the media; i can’t help but watch the news clippings with absolute horror.

What we know is that when police officers investigated Warehouse 23, they found an array of chemicals and glassware. According to the Herald, “Police say they found hundreds of chemicals used to concoct club and date-rape drugs such as crystal methamphetamine and ‘Special K.’ … Investigators found chemicals used to manufacture crystal meth, ecstasy and the date-rape drugs gamma hydroxy butyrate (GHB) and ketamine hydrochloride (‘Special K’).” In response, the “state Senate passed a bill that would prohibit consumers from buying more than 9 grams of pseudoephedrine at a time” and the Fort Point district was closed down to investigate (Globe). In much of the coverage, the lab is being called “impressive” and the Northeast’s largest. (And of course, then the articles discuss the fear and horrors of crystal meth.)

There are three different things that are bothering me about what’s going on. First, producing meth is very different than producing GHB. Meth labs are highly toxic (and thus the reason for the hyper panic involving the closing down of Fort Point) because they produce byproducts; they also usually involve large containers, not glass vials. The coverage focuses entirely on the presence of chemicals for meth; there is no mention of byproducts. Interestingly, the chemicals for meth are also used in producing other drugs (both legal and illegal). If this were a large meth production house, there would be byproducts, not just potential chemicals. This itself made me very wary of the information i was getting.

Based on information about the presence of chemicals, it has been taken as a given that this is a meth lab. The result is a moral panic in Boston which the legislature responds to by passing laws that do little in the way of stopping meth production. So much for innocent until proven guilty or logical outcomes. What role does the press have in actually determining someone’s innocence or guilt? I get very very worried about this. What’s worse is that when the police realize that it’s not a meth lab, it won’t hit the papers, laws won’t be turned back. Everyone will continue to be convinced that it’s a meth lab. Gah.

Finally, i can’t help but scream when i see the press cover GHB as a “date-rape drug.” (And since when did ketamine become a date-rape drug too?? It requires snorting or injection!) This framing presumes that the reason to produce this drug is to engage in date-rapes, supporting the moral panic. Unfortunately, i don’t think that it would be nearly as news-flashy to talk about GHB as the “alternative to alcohol with no hangover.” GHB has a lot of problems and it makes me very nervous to see it in clubs because the OD dose is not that much higher than the desired dose. The bigger problem is that you cannot under any circumstances mix it with alcohol because this will most definitely produce a black-out (and thus, the “date-rape” claim). That said, most people who make or use GHB know this, prefer it to alcohol and know better than to mix the two. To assume that it is a precursor to rape is misrepresentative and irresponsible. Internally, i’m troubled by this framing. On one hand, it’s inaccurate and what happened to truthful reporting? On the other, i detest the presence of GHB in clubs and i understand the urge to use scare tactics to keep it out.. but does that really work? And what damage does poor reporting cause in the long run? (::cough:: This is your brain on drugs… Oh no it’s not.)

I’m worried about how much power the press has over cultural interpretations. I see a lot of my friends hurting right now, trying to come to peace with the death of their friend and cope with the chaos that has ensued. And while some things make sense, much of what is being reported does not line up. Furthermore, it’s being used to frame a larger debate in a pretty problematic way. And it sucks to having the death of one of your friends be used to such ends, particularly when he wouldn’t have wanted it that way. Some folks are outraged, arguing that we should make certain that such situations never happen again. Personally, in the back of my mind, i can’t help but think that i’d rather die having sex on E than decaying alone in a nursing home.

Update: Globe reports that it is not a meth lab but that it was most likely used to create designer (psychedelic) drugs.

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danah boyd | apophenia

making connections where none previously existed