I’ve always known that many of the women who post personals ads aren’t real, but i never realized how many of them were adverts for porn sites. Basically, it seems as though porn sites create personals ads for average women and then when men respond, they respond with something like “check out pictures of me on my personal site” which is a link to a porn site.

When talking with a friend who used to work at a personals site, i learned that when they removed all of these “fake” people, their numbers dropped dramatically. It seems as though the loss of fake characters meant the loss of large numbers of decent looking attractive women, which made the site less appealing because there were seemed to be fewer options, even though the same number of real options existed.

Another point for deception being useful psychologically.

A lot of people think that reporting social statistics is a good idea. I mean, c’mon – we all want to know how many friends we have, how many people we know, who we talk to the most often, etc. This is fascinating, right? Yet, twist the conversation in a different direction… do we want those around us to know who we talk to the most? Probably not.

Cobot in LambdaMOO: A Social Statistics Agent is a great paper (by folks at AT&T) that addressed this issue head on. It’s an old paper, but one that’s really important for anyone thinking about the social implications of providing statistical data publicly. Basically, Cobot spent a bunch of time in the MOO, collecting information about people’s social behavior and then spewing it back out at them. Problem was that it also told you how important you were to others, which while utterly fascinating to most people caused significant divisions in a way that did not build community, but divided it.

Today, Linden Lab officially unveiled Second Life, a rapidly growing and constantly changing 3D online society, shaped entirely by its residents. In Second Life, Linden Lab has pioneered real-time 3D streaming technologies and advanced compression capabilities to create a persistent, contiguous landscape where residents can discover a world of exploration, socializing, creativity, self-expression, and fun unlike any other.

Word on the street is that this is next-gen MUDs/MOOs… Of course, it’s also interesting to pay attention to what is coming down the line from There.com

Female Avatars Face Gender Bias Online:

US economist, Edward Castronova, has discovered that female avatars, from worlds such as EverQuest, trade online at an average 10 per cent discount to their price were they male-designated.

…

“(A)bility seems more important than sex in determining the value of a body. Nonetheless, among comparable avatars, females do sell at a significant price discount.

“The discount may stem from a number of causes, including discrimination in Earth society, the maleness of the EverQuest player base, or differences in well-being related to male and female courtship roles. We do know, however, that these differences cannot be caused by sex-based differences in the abilities of the body, since in the fantasy world of Norrath, there are none.”

The social scientist Ray Oldenburg talks about how humans need a third place, besides work and home, to meet with friends, have a beer, discuss the events of the day, and enjoy some human interaction. Coffee shops, bars, hair salons, beer gardens, pool halls, clubs, and other hangouts are as vital as factories, schools and apartments [“The Great Good Place”, 1989]. But capitalist society has been eroding those third places, and society is left impoverished…

This article argues that online communities have become third places for people, particularly programmers and others who spend a huge percentage of time online. It’s an interesting article, but i still believe that most people use digital interactions to aid in RL ones.

I’ve been trying to figure out why technology without deep consideration of social behavior drives me batty. There is no doubt that some of the best technologies emerged from tech geeks wanting to make really cool and interesting things. Of course, spending 3 years in a place that focused on inventing the next generation of cool things made me wanna curl up in a ball and die. Distruptive technologies come out of a special type of bubble… one that doesn’t realize that it’s unique or different, filled with people who are truly in love with the idea and not focused on whether it will make money or whether it will do anything or not even realizing it as a “product” so much as a “toy.”

The problem is that the technology field has matured. Most ideas that are currently being discussed are simple technologies that expect fundamental changes in social behavior. Even the software ideas that people are talking about are new renditions of old systems. Blogs aren’t new, but they’ve been repackaged. Social networking tools aren’t new… None of the social software that’s being discussed is revolutionary. It’s simply trying to solve people’s needs, their interests. Yet, what’s the value in doing so without a deep and directed consideration of the impact? Software development has reached a new stage. Tools that affect social behavior can be easily used to marginalize populations; they can be just as easily distructive as helpful. We no longer live in a society where only the most intrigued play with computer or online. Impact is widespread and thus, so can abuse be. Even old technologies, developed with good intentions have come back to haunt people in odd ways. Things have definitely changed, and not completely for the better.

Now that we’re beyond the tech boom, i find myself continuously harping on folks to step back and really reconsider what might happen when they construct their technology, particularly if it is socially directed. Kudos to those who were able to innovate and distribute amazing tools through pure passion. I just don’t think that successful innovation in that culture is justification for not really deeply considering the implications of what is created in this one. I want to be surrounded by those who realize that they have the power to construct society and want to do so in a socially minded way.

Of course, the problem is that i can’t fully articulate why i feel this way, but i’m trying to disentangle that gutteral knot that i suspect has some validity to it (in the fabric of my reality).

[This is partially inspired by Marc’s perspective on the world.]

Fotolog, the popular site for posting pictures went to a pay model, causing great outrage amongst many members, who showed their disagreement with protest photos. Underlying all of this is a discussion of high and low art.

When i was working for Macromedia, we went down to Disneyland to meet with one of Generator’s beta clients – Disney Online. The families of some of my colleagues came along, for the vacation aspect. One of them had this darling little girl who found my tongue bar utterly fascinating and she kept staring at my mouth. I hadn’t been around many children for years so i had forgotten how cool tongue bars look to children and i started horseplaying with her. Unfortunately, she got so excited that she started sticking out her tongue and pointing to it to her mother who was not so amused. Somehow, i got coerced into washing my mouth out with soap (literally) along with her daughter to prove a point that sticking your tongue out in public was bad. ::sigh::

Five years later, i’m hanging out with the creator of Macromind (which became Macromedia) and his little girl who is equally entertained by my tongue bar. Of course, Marc had a lot more fun with this!

Life is odd. I’m going to be a booth babe. Does this mean that my feminism is going down the drain? Of course not. But i know i’m getting old because i don’t care if the feminazis will discontinue my membership because i think that being a smart hott geeky booth babe sounds like an adventurous thrill.

The Go Game is going to JavaOne. Using fun little techy tools, conference attendees will get to run around San Francisco trying to solve problems while getting to engage with plants who are running around trying to make the task easier or more difficult. Of course, i’m voting that they get to enact the Tumbling Duke Applet.

I mentioned the Augmented Social Network white paper before, but after having attended the discussion, i’m in utter awe at the commonalities that emerged with no awareness of one another. Nancy Van House, one of the SIMS professors, attended the talk and poignantly noted that work along these lines is being done in a variety of fields using different languages and not properly connected. (Of course, this reminds me that an ongoing role for a researcher is to bridge all of the research going on in one’s area.)

The ASN folks are completely engaged with the ideas of persistent identity from a conscientious people-centric approach, noting issues of trust, context, brokered relations, reputation, etc. Although i’ve had to defend why context matters over and over again, these guys saw this as obvious. They also *get* the issues of persistent identity and are not just looking at collapsing contexts to fulfill corporate desires. In effect, their philosophies clearly resemble that expressed in my thesis. One of the coolest things in the paper is Cynthia Typaldos’ diagram of “12 principles of civilization” as a structure to analyze systems.

[Of course, while i love what they’re doing, there are folks who think it’s too pie-in-the-sky and not enough implementation. Ah, Marc… Of course, i still believe that theory is necessary before creation.]

Even while my thesis mirrors their work (while grounding it in social science research and providing implementation examples), i have a feeling that i need to get involved with these folks ASAP (and i think they’ll get a kick out of the to-be-finished-soon paper on visualization tools for identity storytelling).

::bounce:: There’s nothing better than getting your work validated in odd ways! Oh, and PlaNetwork has been fabulous.. finally putting actual faces and personalities to digital people (like Reid Hoffman from LinkedIn, who breaks my assumptions of a business person by being exceptionally friendly). The collapse of people here is phenomenal… of course, it’s also exceptionally exhausting to meet so many fun and interesting people who are willing to engage on issues of technology, environmentalism, politics, sociology, etc. I still want a utopian world where all of the interesting people are constantly engaged and physically together. Of course, the New Yorkers and the San Franciscans could never agree on location.