As an undergraduate, one of my primary roles as an A/V person was to create a library of all of the videos that Andy had. Usually, it required watching them to figure out what they were. Most of them were utterly painful, but there was one that always blew my mind. It was on such an old tape (pre-NTSC VHS) format, although i don’t remember which one now. I remember thinking it was so fragile.

Plugged in and out comes this black and white demo of Doug Engelbart demoing the mouse for the first time, an interactive hyperlink, shared-screen collaboration and a variety of other things. 1968. It was a perfect demo – no flaws, not hiccups, clean as day and done on the first take, live. (If you’ve ever done a demo, you know that it’s impossible to live up to that standard.)

Engelbart is a pioneer in computer science, a complete visionary. He invented so much of what we take for granted today. And all of his inventions focused on people’s needs and designing for a civil society. His work is stunning.

And i had the amazing opportunity to hear him speak tonite. I sat there smiling with my eyes closed, listening to his voice which is unchanged in the 45 years since that demo was created. Flashbacks to crazy days in the overly ACed A/V room labeling and wandering through the library with utter awe and fascination.

I just saw Mobile Asses today and i can’t help but be stunned by the mix of shared cultural languages and frightening social implications.

Juxtaposition this site next to the case where abortion clinic patients were photographed and placed on the web. Of course, it’s legal, but is it the society that we want to live in? Second, the site uses a shared web cultural language/norms by mimicing Hot or Not‘s format.

In an interview, Esther Dyson talks about Cataphora, a system that profiles email behaviors:

Then there’s this great company, Cataphora, which works with emails and other documents to do a much better job of searching for and analyzing emails. Their market right now is primarily litigation and [legal] discovery. For example, if you’re looking for emails in a brokerage house, it’s pretty rare that you find something that says “XYZ Company is a piece of shit.’ Instead, there’s something that says “This is an important accommodation for a banking client,’ and you don’t know how to look for that. There is no keyword that would get you to that. So you want to look at patterns of communication, who has talked to whom, and did the chairman of the company talk to the analyst before the analyst raised his ratings? Who talked to whom, before so and so sold their stock? It’s not just the content-you want to look at communication patterns.

Cataphora lets you see how and when people are connected rather than what they said.. but that lets you know where to look for the content you want. It displays the communication patterns in a kind of flowchart that shows the progress of conversations over time, who talks to whom and so forth. So you can you say, “Look at all the emails between this guy and that guy on such and such a date.’ And you see who within the conversation suddenly stopped talking. As Elizabeth Charnock, Cataphora’s founder, says, “One guy who usually talks to everybody is suddenly cut out of the conversation. Maybe they’re planning a surprise birthday party, but usually it’s something else”.’

The question is whether or not the outsider can figure out the something else. For example, in my visualizations, sometimes folks broke up, sometimes people died, sometimes a project ended, etc. But the data owner always knew.

I’m very much looking forward to a conference this weekend in San Francisco, called PlaNetwork: Networking a Sustainable Future. I’m a big fan of any network research that is created to be socially beneficial. And i was even more fascinated when i saw a paper entitled The Augmented Social Network: Building Identity and Trust Into the Next-Generation Internet that will be presented there.

This paper argues for many of the thoughts that i have addressed (in my thesis most notably). In particular, they address an intelligent way to do identity management in a socially conscious way; they address the value of social networks when personally managed; and most importantly, they frame all of their arguments in the idea that you don’t change social norms, you build technology to help people be social in the way that they see fit. It’s a fabulous paper and i cannot wait to discuss it further this weekend.

Despite my distaste of clubs, i had to break down to see my favorite DJ and i had a nice little mindshift, where i just wasn’t going to let anyone get in the way of me having fun and bouncing crazily. With this mindset, i went all the way up front and actively demanded dancing space and disregarded any stupidity from the people around me (like the guy who thought to grind me from behind who i elbowed with joy in a flaling dance move). In the process, one guy smiled at me and started dancing goofily. After a bit, i kindly told him that i wasn’t interested but that i was having fun dancing and that i hope that he wasn’t hurt by this. He was disappointed but tried to keep dancing anyhow. Apparently, he wrote to Missed Connections on Craigslist and i have to admit that his note makes me smile:

Desert Storm fatigues at Infected Mushroom

You really are a kickass dancer! I keep thinking today the classiness with which you handled my advance. That was very cool. Everyone should be that cool. Hope you had a great evening…

Positive feedback for a needed shift in consciousness.

I ran into an old article from the NYTimes:

Patrick Coston has been keeping lists of everyone he knows since he was 16 — and he’s now 39. Several years ago he consolidated his paper lists into one online file, making public a tabulation of “People I’ve Known in My Lifetime” (patcoston.com/home/people.htm). “It’s a way of helping me remember the past,” he said by e-mail.

I can’t help but think about the relevance of this to the HICSS paper that Fernanda and i’ve been working on. We realized that the power of our email visualizations was in part due to their power to operate as an artifact for storytelling, to provide a prop for one’s memory. In effect, the visualization serves as a tabulation of email relations. I have to wonder what it would mean to be such a Connector that one would do this.

Of course, it also reminds me of friends of mine who take pictures every day as records and other systematic means of marking time, place and people. Of course, the irony of Patrick’s system is that the public archive is tapped into search engines and thus helpful to a wider range of folks.

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Trepia seems to have hit my social network, as i’ve received like 10 messages about it this week. It has also hit the press. I signed up in beta form but i’m very weary of it. For starters (as i’ve noted before), i’m never a fan of software that requires me to give age and sex information. I understand it in dating software (i.e. Friendster), but for general purpose meeting, why is this information required? So, i just tend not to log in. At least with Friendster, i can keep a certain distance from the strangers that write to me; in Trepia, i know that there in close proximity to me and i really don’t want folks to know that. Or at least, i want to be able to control it in a safe manner. Hmm.. i need to think more about what Trepia makes me uncomfortable.

In the last month, i’ve been privvy to a handful of email hiccups – individual messages that were sent out to a list accidentally, messages that were far too personal to be sent out as such and thus revealed some very disturbing aspects of the senders. It’s also been interesting to see who has apologized and who has not and what form that apology has taken.

These messages, intended for one context and presented in another are quite powerful. They reveal the character of the individual and the importance of perceived context for written communication. More importantly, they are a clear reminder of how easy it is to accidentally shift contexts online and the potential reprocussions of that socially and politically. Of course, the easy RTFM answer is a reminder that all emails should be written as though they are public. In reality, no one ever does this. It drives me batty to think that some technologists think that overriding social tendencies is the best approach.

I met with my new advisor today, which is sooo exciting. The best part about conversations with him is that he is truely interested in issues of sex, race, class, gender and sexuality. And he doesn’t think it odd to randomly go to a cafe and chat about ideas.

In talking, i started to wonder about the maintenance of social networks. I wonder if women are more likely to operate as bridges between diverse clusters. I wonder if this is true even online.

There’s nothing more charming that sitting in a rural moviehouse watching the brand new Pixar movie, Finding Nemo amidst crowds of kids, families, dates and other Americana. Of course, this quaint environment did not restrain my desire to sit and shout for my friends during the credits. As for Nemo itself… wow. I realized that i paid no attention to any of the CG, which is a good indication of how cleanly the film was done… one could simply get wrapped up in the wonderful story of familial love. I will always remember meeting Ed Catmull when i was 18 and him telling me that CG does not a movie make; the story is everything. He’s definitely proven his point.