Luna

Originally uploaded by zephoria.

I just spent the week in LA with Mimi, working out readings for this semester and plotting in general. As such, i got to spend lots of time with her kids who are utterly awesome. Luna was obsessed with my fuzzy items and jingly bracelets and decided to dress up as little danah, resulting in a picture that i just had to share.

It is so not cool that both LiveJournal AND Last.FM are down simultaneously, particularly when i need them both. Then again, that’s probably because they’re linked somehow. Hrmfpt.

On February 5, ExploreSpirit (the org that put on the Altered States and the Spiritual Awakening conference) is putting on Resonance, a conference that “will examine music from this emerging paradigm of the sacred, exploring the connection between music and spirituality from a variety of perspectives, weaving them together into a larger whole, and providing a glimpse of a new landscape of sound and spirit.”

This might be of interest to those of you who appreciate the intersection between music and spirituality. It sure interests me.

[posted to OM]

People who have relationships with each other often have shared interests, values and tastes. As collections of relationships evolve, cultures form with collective interests, values and tastes (that may not resemble any or all of the individual members’). There are shared cultural practices and activities embedded in these cultures.

There are two ways of looking at this – through the foci or through the group. There appear to be communities that follow particular interests, say a music genre. But also – and this is important – there is a higher probability that your friends share the same interests as you than a random sampling of people. In other words, if you really like David Bowie, your friends are more likely to like David Bowie that a random collection of the same number of people. Of course, this does not mean that they all like David Bowie or that any of them like him as much as you do. Likewise, this doesn’t mean that the biggest David Bowie fan is your friend (although you’re more likely to have something in common with this person than a random stranger).

Cultures often form within social network clusters because members of the group tend to share things in common. Additionally, when people like each other, they are interested in trying out each other’s passion. Try dating someone who *loves* David Bowie – you’ll find yourself listening to him too.

Now, think about all social networking tools. They have all proliferated based on social network clusters – friend groups with dense network overlap. A lot of these groups have brought their groups’ culture with them and it is these cultures that people often recognize. In the early days of Friendster, this is why people thought Friendster was all gay men, all Burners, all whatever. The indie rock kids have invaded MySpace, the Burners took over Tribe.net, Brazilian culture has dominated Orkut. Depending on the cultures that an individual participates in, one service or another feels far more appealing.

Anyone interested in creating sociable applications needs to understand that this dynamic is natural and the product of very excited individual(s) spreading a product to their friendgroup. Why a group really values a particular software should be a problem to solve, not an act to suppress. Attempts to disrupt culture often disrupts a lot more than the narrow culturally defined group – this is the problem with social networks… attitudes flow through the networks just as much as information.

Culture emerges in most social technologies that bring people together. Like it or not, the company who has created the tools is faced with the responsibility of supporting that culture, particularly with hosted tools/communities. This can be very tricky when a company fosters a culture that they did not expect or want (a.k.a. it’s not a population that can be squeezed for money). What to do becomes an ethical question.

The irony is that most social technology companies want the whole world to use their service. The world includes a vast array of different cultures and communities, not all of which are compatible with each other. So when the cultures have to interact because of the tool, it is fundamentally impossible to actually have all cultures involved if there are conflicting ones. Take the homophobes and the queers – they really don’t go well together. If you choose to support the queers by making your tool queer-friendly, you will piss off the homophobes. And no matter what, those two groups really don’t want to have to interact with each other on the site.

Therein lies an interesting problem for builders of social tools – how to support culture, what to do when you have issue with the culture that emerged and how to deal with the fact that you can’t get everyone to use a social tool if the interface will reveal the values of the other one or if members from conflicting groups will have to interact.

brad says so. mena says so.

I really appreciate their explanations. Although some thought otherwise, i do very much respect both companies and all people involved. It was also nice to see some of my issues addressed head on. I do believe that everyone has good intentions and really wants to see a merger be beneficial for everyone. Of course, i’m still concerned. I’m concerned because i think that the greatest effect will be on those who aren’t reading this or any of the other announcements. But only time will tell and i will definitely be watching with great interest.

On a lighter note, i’m *very* humored by Mena’s reference to her days of wearing black.

I watched six hours of tsunami news the first night, dousing myself in CNN reports. I was rubber necking, only i’m not sure if i was trying to see the tsunami wreck or the CNN wreck. I was in complete awe by the coverage, utterly angry in fact. Although there were loads of interviews with survivors, not a single survivor’s voice shown on CNN was brown. In other words, all we saw were the rich white American tourists. Reports babbled on about what would happen if America was hit with a tsunami, complete with little simulations. As the death toll rose, a special report was given from Alaska where the US last experienced a tsunami. Comparisons were made about the magnitude, the harm, the horror. Less than a dozen people were killed in that one. Reports were given about how to protect yourself from a tsunami if it were to hit New York. Dear fucking god we are a selfish nation.

So, our country was guilted into supplying more money for the relief and Bush gets on TV to defensively resist accusations that we are a stingy nation. Of course we are a stingy nation – we always have been. ::sigh::

Then i woke to the following email in a thread on a mailing list:

what i’m looking for is an organization who will take my volunteer efforts in SE asia. i’ll fly out there, no problem. i’ll perform hard labour for 2 weeks straight. but i can’t afford to get my own lodging and food. no one wants my help. anyone know of any organization that would?

First, this man’s intentions are really good – he really wants to help, but his help is constructed in a typically American way. He’s willing to give up time – one precious American commodity – but not money. But let’s think about this. He wants to go to a devastated region that is devoid of food, shelter and water. He wants to put in hard labor to help a starving, dehydrated, homeless population and he’s demanding these amenities!?!?!? You have got to be kidding me. Now, i am guessing that most of the villagers in these regions are putting in hard labor to repair their communities. And they’re doing it without food water or housing. What kind of selfish, clueless request is this? But of course, in America, we want to help with any commodity other than money. We don’t like giving money. That’s fucking ridiculous when almost every NGO and NPO needs money more than anything. They need to buy things in the local regions, help the people there. This is not just true for the tsunami relief situation, but in general.

Consider the clothing drives that are currently going on in the States. You want to ship off your $30 white branded T-Shirt. This was most likely created in an Asian country for maybe ? ten cents ?, sold to a manufacturer for maybe a quarter. You want to package this up, spend a bazillion dollars on shipping and send it back to Asia!?!? If you sent $10, at least 40 of your beloved T-Shirts could be bought. More importantly, the organizing NGOs could buy the most economical T-Shirts, support the local region’s economy and make certain that people got what they needed.

So when you think of donating blood or donating clothing, what are you really saying? You’re saying you’re too damn cheap to donate money. Money is what is needed, money is how these organizations can make certain to buy the maximum amount of needed materials and distribute them in the best way possible. Considering that time equals money, if you’ve read this far, you’ve probably spent $.50 assuming minimum wage only. Consider how much time you spend reading blogs or about the tsunami – donate that time multiplied by your hourly wage. Or, given that it’s New Year’s Eve, why not donate the amount of money that you spent today on champagne, food and party tickets.

We are a stingy nation.

The workshops at CHI this year are fantastic. The conference appears to be expanding its notion of what constitutions interactions between technology and people/society (away from the 1-1 computer/human paradigm that was often emphasized).

I’m debating between applying to:
– W1. Engaging The City: Public Interfaces As Civic Intermediary
– W18. Designing Technology for Community Appropriation

[It should be noted that there are lots of other workshops that might be applicable to various readers of this blog so do check it out if you’re so inclined. The deadline for workshop applications is January 3 which is a complete bitch.]

I went to court to support a friend. I’ve been to court before, but only for easy things like changing my name, dealing with parking tickets, etc. In this case, there were two sides with adamantly opposing views about the world. And i was on one side.

The entire event was high drama, but not in that made-for-TV style. It was far more painful than that. For starters, everyone mumbled, stumbled, etc. It wasn’t scripted. People didn’t know how to project their voices and the inane repetitive questions were clearly for a forgetting mind, not to drive the witnesses bonkers. While the federal lawyer signaled to the witness using baseball codes (1-2-3 on his chest), few other body motions were scripted and the sides played out their cultural training. As an ethnographer, it was brutally painful to watch the body performance of each side show their values more deeply than anything that came out of their mouths.

The judge gave me that warm and fuzzy feeling. He clearly sympathized with Barlow, but he was also dealing with conflicted feelings about the recent laws that have come down – his sarcastic tone signaled that he felt very burdened by what was happening, but his judicial manner also made it clear that he felt it was his responsibility to follow the letter of the law, even those to which he was opposed.

The attorneys were caricatures of themselves. The federal attorneys had a hard-edged, no-smile Yale/Harvard rigidity that was stunningly performed. Kafka would have been proud. Milgram at its best. Barlow’s attorney was most distinctly an ACLU type with long hair, funky glasses, curved shoulders and a revolutionary demeanor that signaled that he believed in the cause. The Cause. It was about The Cause. And The Cause was to be fought out in jargon in front of the press by two sides with opposing views. Was God on both their sides? But believing in The Cause was not enough… it was clearly a battle of performances.

The judge was clearly rattled by the situation at hand. He walked in, talked about having received phone calls from CNN, got the papers about the case two hours prior and was like what the hell is going on in my courtroom today. He was clearly not prepared to be dealing with The Cause.

The federal folks were good, really really good. Their snotty-nosed attitude made the much more laid-back judge resent them, but they played the rules to perfection, fought it out like they had been taught on debate team. It was a hard thing to watch, but they were good really good. The defense attorney annoyed the judge – not through arrogance but though a clear lack of sculpted performance. The judge pitied the defense attorney, but he still grated on him.

One question comes to mind: are the master’s tools needed to tear down the master’s house? Or is the fantasy of a destroyed house purely impossible? Because clearly, the moral highground is not the appropriate approach. This is a battle that values performance, wit, speed and memory… and performance is more key than anything.

For my performance studies class, i wrote a paper on blogging that i have morphed into a submission for the Media Ecology Conference. It is a draft paper, but i figured it would be fruitful to put it up here for anyone who wishes to tear it apart.

Be warned that this is definitely an academic paper meant for an academic audience and may contain scary academic words. There’s a lot that i’m missing here, but i still think that this paper has some value and i would love feedback from anyone who wishes to spend the time reading it.

Last night, False Profit celebrated Hanukkah in hysterical form. Maer read us two sermons: one from Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership and one from Jews for Jesus. I highly recommend reading Brasco – The Liberty Bear Coloring Book. OMG.