Author Archives: zephoria

reprieve (new Ani song)

For the Ani fans out there, i just uploaded lyrics to Reprieve. In theory, one can watch her perform this song on FabChannel but i can’t get the damn thing to work.

and the patriarchy that looks to shame me for it is the same one making war
and i’ve said too much already but i’ll tell you something more
to split yourself in two is just the most radical thing you can do
so girl if that shit ain’t up to you, then you simply are not free
cause from the sunlight on my hair to which eggs i grow to term
to the expression that i wear, all i really own is me

i mean to split yourself in two is just the most radical thing you can do
goddess forbid that little adam should grow so jealous of eve
and in the face of the great farce of the nuclear age
feminism ain’t about equality, it’s about reprieve

It made me smile to see that she played De Melkweg on 9/11. I will never forget seeing her there years ago with about 100 other people when she started singing “In a coffee shop in a city which is every coffee shop in every city EXCEPT THIS ONE… what’s up with this town??” This devolved into a very funny conversation about coffee shops.

announcing “Operating Manual For Social Tools”

While i was traveling, a new site that i’ve been helping with launched: Operating Manual for Social Tools. Stowe Boyd, David Weinberger and i are exploring what the issues are critical to consider in the process of building social tools. This is a topically-driven blog that is sponsored by ZeroDegrees. [Given the crap i’ve gotten about this, i’ve written an explanation in the extended entry.] We will be covering various issues relevant to the social tech space and this may be of interest for those of you who really liked my “connected selves” blog that got rolled into my main one.

I should note that i’ll probably repost some of my blog entries from there here for my own searchability.

Continue reading →

psychological overhead of responsibility

A friend asked if i wanted children. This prompted a long conversation about what i call psychological overhead and i’m curious to know if there’s a proper psychology term for it.

Psychological overhead is the amount of cognitive work that must be done to make certain that a responsibility is taken care of. In other words, if two members of a household split all chores but one is in charge of making sure that they’re split and completed, there is no equality because the psychological overhead is at play. It takes a rare housing situation for everyone to equally maintain the psychological overhead.

This connects to children because in most families that i know, one person maintains psychological overhead even when the responsibilities are purportedly shared. This is almost always the mother in a het parenting structure. This is the person who will by default take care of things or ask the partner to take care of things. In older children, this inevitably is the parent who is by-default called when something happens.

This conversation turned to queer culture and how psychological overhead plays out in marginalized populations. It is usually the queer person’s responsibility to translate society’s het structures into a model that makes sense. Queers also typically verbalize their experiences in a het structure in order to be accepted (fuck you HRC). There’s a psychological overhead of responsibility here, whereby the queer gets to do all the translation for the normative community.

Anyhow, i have to imagine that psychologists have a term for this and something that can be read. Anyone?

declaring ostrich

I’m declaring ostrich.

There are 12 unopened NYTimes in my living room. I’ve just /dev/nulled all mailing lists that mention politics at all. I apple-w blogs that mention red, blue or purple faster than a fundamentalist finding porn. I changed my morning radio station to not-NPR.

I’ve always been told that escapism is bad. I respect that view. But i went running full speed into a tornado and standing in the eye of the storm on November 2, i realized that i needed to duck before i got picked up and whisked away into nether-nether land. Politics are in the air; i haven’t stopped breathing, but i’m trying not to light fires either. My political allies are too angry, too confused, too frustrated to think clearly or move forward in an effective manner. I can’t join them in that state because i just end up angry with them and that’s not fruitful. Sometimes, deconstruction is not the best tool in the shed. I know that this nightmare has temporal and spatial implications beyond my imagination and it is harrowing to hear the anger and fear in the voices of those beyond our borders. I just cannot hold on to all of these messages and emotions without crumbling.

I’m a true liberal. I believe that i need to be personally strong in order to fight on a larger scale. I can’t fight with anger – i must fight with respect. I need to find grounding and in order to do that, i believe that stepping back is healthy and responsible. I live in an overly mediated world and sometimes, i just have to go back to my roots. Instead of reading the paper, i’m doing yoga.

Please respect me on this one. And if you’re on one of those bazillion lists whose topic is purportedly not politics, please understand that i am taking a break.

PS: This is not a long-term solution, just a temporary one for me to get grounded.

considering the goals of social network modeling

[From OM]

At CSCW, one attendee asked me what made Friendster a social network? He was frustrated because the term social network did not simply refer to a group of people who could be modeled in a graph-like structure, yet that is how it is being used these days. I have to wonder if the anthropologists are giggling since their term for the same behavior has not been co-opted.

Both sociologists and anthropologists have tried to understand and model social relationships since the beginning of their fields. They want to know how these relationships are connected with practices, culture, organizations, etc. They want to know how these relationships affect how people interact with one another. Whenever they try to model these relationships, their goal is not simply to build a graph, but to construct a visual representation that will allow them to better understand people, society and culture. The end goal is not the graph and the graph is not meant for the people being studied.

Conversely, consider what all of the social networking sites have attempted to do. The goal in constructing the relationship structures is certainly not for a researcher to make sense of society and culture, but for those represented to be empowered by the articulation and representation of their relationships. Rather than a researcher attempting to understand and model what s/he susses out about others’ relationships, the represented are doing the modeling. Furthermore, their models are being used by others and this affects the ways in which they model their relationships.

Rather than actually analyzing the practical effects of the differences in these approaches, i’d like to encourage the readers to really reflect on the divergent goals. We often speak about the need for activities once networks are built, but we don’t consider the underlying goals. In many ways, i feel as though the goals are what affects the activities, not vice versa.

The goals of sociological networks are very clear, but what are the goals of people-generated networks for public consumption? What are the goals of the designers vs. the goals of the people producing these representations? Is one motivation to empower people to find new ways to relate? Is the goal to have a more efficient way of spreading memes? Is the goal to make people reflect on their relationships? What are the goals?

youth: exotification and hysteria

In a cover story on urban youth in India called Aliens! (ref Stowe Boyd and Dina Mehta), Business World begins the article with “If men are from Mars and women from Venus, is the species known as ‘youth’ from the moon orbiting the distant Pluto?” This kind of framing inevitably worries me because it signifies that the writer is going to speak about youth as a fascinating ‘other’ where adults exotify youth. Throughout the article, they refer to different age groups as different species while trying to classify different groups of youth using models that would make sense to adults. ::cringe::

Deeper inside the magazine is an article entitled IMHO*, IM Rulz. I begin the article concerned. For the most part, the article discusses practices, but there are embedded assumptions that really get my goat. Here’s the one that upset me the most:

IM is a kind of metaphor for the mindset of the new millennium youth. It fulfils a deep-seated need for constant stimulation. And keeps pace with their shorter attention spans.

In July, i spoke about how designers are building technology off of the assumption that everyone has ADD. We often joke about the fact that the MTV generation has no attention span, but i have never seen anything that empirically validates this. Without concrete data, i’m absolutely convinced that this is just an adult projection onto youth. There is no doubt that the prescription of ritalin and adderall are way up but there are tons of reports on misdiagnosis of ADD. Interestingly, more kids are diagnosed in the wealthier districts of the States. Why? Well, frankly, almost everyone i know sees an improvement in their attention span when they’re on these meds and pressure parents who are determined that their kids get into the best schools and calm down and otherwise act proper are bound to see this as a perfect remedy. That does not mean that these kids have less attention than any previous generation.

What we do know is that there is far more media available to consume today. With thousands of TV stations and the Internet, there’s almost infinite choice. Guess what? With more choice, people are needlessly asking themselves “is there something better?” Channel surfing is not a new phenomenon. Given choice, people are worried that they might be missing something.

And what is this deep-seated need for constant stimulation that they are referring to? And why is this particular to youth?

Aside from my irritation at their projection of ADD onto youth, i think that their causal relationships are all screwy. Youth exist in an always-on culture. With mobile phones and computers at their finger tips, they are able to maintain relationships constantly, unbarred by physical geographical constraints. Always-on culture is not the product of a deep-seeded need for constant stimulation. Alternatively, the perception of this need for stimulation probably results from the opportunity of having an always-on culture.

Identity formation amongst youth is deeply rooted in being able to connect and relate to others of the same age. Remember the paper cup phones that kids would string between neighboring houses to talk late at night? Remember teenagers and land lines? IM is no different. It’s just a new opportunity to keep in contact with one’s friend group, not the production of some mental deformity.

My gut reaction says hysteria around IM culture has to do with hysteria over what adults don’t understand about youth because of generational differences with regard to access to media. Thus, i groan.

on being a talking head

I just finished giving a talk at Sosial og Digital. It is 10AM in Norway and 3AM in Chicago. I spent the last hour talking into the ether about Friendster with virtually no visual and absolutely no audio feedback. It was a very very very peculiar thing. Here’s a segment of my pre-amble for everyone’s amusement:

There’s something very odd about this situation. It’s 2AM in Chicago. I’m sitting in a musty hotel room by myself, talking into a camera that is being projected into a different time zone. It is dark outside and even with all the lights turned on, it is still dim here. The ethernet cable is screwed into the table so that i won’t steal it. As a result, i’m sitting at a wooden desk which faces a very large mirror.

If i look above the camera, i’m staring at myself in the mirror. If i look below the camera, i’m staring at the captured version of myself on the iSight. No matter where i look, i’m staring at myself talking into the ether. I’m trying very hard to resist the temptation to make faces at myself because growing up, that’s what my brother and i did whenever we saw ourselves on surveillance cameras and in mirrors.

I cannot really see you. I have no idea about the temperature of your room, the smell of the morning coffee, the sense of shared presence that you’re currently relishing, the looks on your face as i speak too fast. I understand that if i look down at my notes, my eyes move away from you and this must be very disconcerting since i assume that my face is ridiculously large in front of you. In order to get feedback from you, i have to wait for information from iChat, which results in me appearing to turn away just as you talk to me. It is a very peculiar situation that we’re engaged in.

Of course, as a blogger, one might assume that this is a comfortable position. After all, i write long treatises and throw them into the wind, never aware of the reactions of my readers, never even aware of who my readers are. [interlude about Walter Ong and embodiment]

The difference has to do with my conception of my audience conception. For me, the plausible deniability invoked in blogging is strong. I can convince myself that i write for me and me alone ::wink:: and convince myself to be shocked when i receive feedback. I can check my stats, but those are just numbers – nameless, faceless people. Yet, here i am, speaking to nameless, faceless people, only i’m required by this situation to convince myself that you do really exist, even if i cannot see you. In this situation, i have the expectation that i am a face to you and you’re just an assumption to me. It really brings life to the idea that i’m just a talking head.

Of course, the first question i got was to prove that i’m not just a Fakester talking to them from next door. I love it!

Flash Forums and ForumReader

If you don’t believe that visualizations can be used to navigate large bodies of data, you MUST check out the work done at IBM called Flash Forums and ForumReader (Kushal Dave, Martin Wattenberg, Michael Muller). Kushal presented the work at CSCW and it without a doubt the most compelling work i saw here this year. Their ForumReader is ideal for addressing forums with massive audience participation and a need to navigate crazy amounts of data with varying levels of quality (think Slashdot). FANTASTIC work!

apologies

I’ve gotten quite a few messages from folks concerned that i stopped blogging. I didn’t. I’m just traveling and not able to blog this week. Apologies! Coming back soon!