I was telling my roommate about the various feedback i’ve gotten from folks in my different fields concerning the NYTimes article. I’ve heard sociologists say that i’m not a sociologist and geeks tell me that i’m not a geek. This isn’t news… i’ve been hearing it for a while. He reminded me of the quote that got me feeling like an imposter: “A sociologist among geeks and a geek among sociologists.”

::laugh:: It is true. The geeks see me as a social scientist and the social scientists see me as a geek. And of course this is the space i inhabit since i’ve never known how to stand solidly in an identity continuum, if only to prove that it is a continuum and that i can stand in the middle. Of course, i always feel like i’m ducking punches in the middle.

Life is quite odd sometimes… it’s amazing what pushes folks’ buttons. I think that i’m moving towards an absurdist view of life faster than i should.

Today’s worthless word of the day is “codswallop: nonsense, drivel; rubbish.” This made me look up wallop (the name of the MS project) and learn that it means “to hit with force; to thrash soundly; to beat by a wide margin; to move with reckless or disorganized haste.”

Sometimes, words just humor me… if you wallop with a cod, you get reckless rubbish that hits with a force. Hmmm…

Of course, i still like the fact that YAFRO stands for Yet Another Friendster Rip Off. Not nearly as eyebrow raising, and utterly to the point.

I’ve been in school all of my life. School has *always* had finals right before the holiday of the big fat white man in red adorned by the green guys in tights. The shrinking of the days is always aimed at finals. And as much as i pretend to prepare for that period of the year, i’m never prepared. And thus panic sets in. Panic hit today. The next 10 days will be hell.

Liz has a great article today on why graphic design is *not* essentially harmless.

All too often, technological/graphical designers have come to believe that they are working towards the *best* interface, as though there is a universal good. They fail to remember that design is culturally and politically situated. [If this is a foreign idea to you, check out some of the materials from Nancy Van House’s course – social construction of technology, configuring the user, bias…]

Love to Adbusters.

Here’s a great feature-style article on Friendster that shares anecdotes similar to what i’ve seen.

Note the Buzzlife community memorializing one of its own through Friendster. (When you can search on Friendster again, check out Sean Wisniewski’s profile.)

Continue reading →

Today, i was reminded of a parable that means so much to me. I remember the roots as being Hindu, but Google seems to have a million versions of it, so i’m not sure of the details. (What on earth do you do when Google is internally inconsistent? ::giggle::)

“The world rests on the shoulders of an elephant.” “What does the elephant stand upon?” “The elephant stands upon the back of a turtle.” “And what does the turtle stand upon?” “Oh, after that, it is turtles all the way down.”

Infinite recursion, closed nonorientable surfaces. Everything is interpreted… interpretations built on interpretations. No beginning, no end. No eternal truth, only process. The perfect mantra for all of my techno-“soci/anthrop”ology discussions lately. Chew on turtles for a day and the world looks much more whimsical.

Ellen Isaacs has an essay on work she did with folks at AT&T on IM in the workplace.

My initial thought is that it’s *great* that people are finally realizing that IM is more than just an organizational tool. My gut says that the earlier studies weren’t wrong, but that things have changed. IM use has changed over time and adults are starting to pick up on the fact that it’s better than email for many complex work discussions. (My CS colleagues & i knew this back in college as we did most of our projects over IM.)

One concern that i have over this study is this statement: “Only 13 percent of the conversations we monitored included any personal topics whatsoever, and only 6.4 percent were exclusively personal.”

I have no doubt that people do a lot of productive interactions over IM, but my gut says that 13% having any personal topics seems very low. Even in normal working conditions, it’s so common to start out an interaction with something like “how was your thanksgiving?” This is a social ritual that helps us relate to folks. It makes me wonder if these users knew they were being tracked and studied… or if they knew that their employers were reading their IMs.

Somehow, i failed to blog that Esther Dyson has a great article on the YASNS sphere.

Can you count your friends? Better yet, can you organize them in a database? There’s a lot of buzz about a new breed of software tools that can help people manage their contacts — or, to make it sound more serious, leverage their social capital.

It’s an educated warning to developers, investors. She brings up brilliant challenges to the hype

Jill has a great entry on how Europeans don’t understand why Americans don’t text. The technology is there, so what’s the problem? [The comments on this one are fantastic!]

..rant..

It was annoying when Friendster was slow. I got over my sighs when Friendster went offline. I can even deal with Bulletin Board messages going down every once in a while. But, this has me outright angry:

Profile is unavailable

Your connection to this person is temporarily unavailable. Please try again in a few moments.

Every time i try to surf to someone; every time i try to bookmark someone; every time i try to figure out who a person is that sent me a message… Every time i get that. So, i have to sit there and reload, reload, reload until i get annoyed and quit. The problem is that i’m trying to write notes down on “configuring the user” wrt Friendster and i need to be able to get to the primary text for analysis. Thus, i’m bloody pissed.

It’s one thing to have slow servers… it’s another thing to make a technical nightmare out of something that was working. I don’t think that i’ve ever so actively watched as a piece of software degrades so consistently over time. Classic software engineering problem. Throwing more coders, more money and more hardware at something dreadfully broken and already patched doesn’t work. Even Macromedia knew went to re-write Director. And it wasn’t even this broken! ::steam::

Tell me, Nielson, is this impacting the return user numbers as much as i’m hearing it is? I know no one who is willing to surf through this many barriers.

../rant..