Last week, David Weinberg blogged about Friendster by hand. In order to explain why Friendster makes no sense, he describes a Friendster scenario that is laughable when translated to real life.

His post made me think of a paper that i wrote a few years back called Sexing the Internet. It is really common for us to introduce ourselves to people in real life through a series of rituals. At the core, you’re asking “what do we have in common?” but to do so, you ask where the person is from, who they might know that you might have in common, what the person does, etc. You are trying to find common ground. This type of behavior is easily translated to the digital world and even a query so simple as A/S/L is about more than the questions “age? sex? location?” At the core, you’re asking if you have enough culturally common ground to speak and hopefully the answer will provide you with fuel for a pick-up line as exciting as “Oh, i lived in Boston once!”

The thing is that the ritual of finding common ground is not so much about the answer as much as it is about the pattern of asking/responding. When we create profiles, we privilege the answer. This makes the response all the more awkward. Suddenly, “Oh, i lived in Boston once!” translates from trying to find common ground to “i’ve stared at your profile and i think you’re hot but we have absolutely nothing in common and i have nothing interesting to say so i’m going to react to your location and hope that you’re so desperate that you’ll respond positively to my sketchy pick-up line that’s even more offensive because i appear to be stalking you.”

Reacting to a profile is just 10x more socially odd than small talk. And unfortunately, the profile itself takes away one’s ability to engage with the standard “what do we have in common” questions. Thus, the lurker gets that far and then they have to find something meaningful to say without the ice breaker. Given this, it’s such a miracle that profile-based dating ever works.

Of couse, that’s the trick, right? It only works when both people are actively looking or when one person brings something brilliant to the table that goes far beyond small talk.

I’m re-reading “As We May Think” with a careful eye in preparation for exams and this time, a quote stuck with me that i think is really important given some conversations i’ve been having lately:

His excursions may be more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important.

On one hand, this assumes that perfect memory is always valuable. Perhaps “the privilege of forgetting” allows us to not face the nitemares or other elements of our imperfect lives that limit our ability to move forward and live. I think of the people that i know who cannot forget the negative. What would it be like to always have it on hand? Would you always play it in a masochistic kind of way? Perhaps forgetting certain things is the only way to evolve.

I will never forget the monks who came to visit me when i was younger. They spent a week building a beautiful work of sand art only to destroy it upon completion. Sometimes, life is about the ephemeral process, not any precise moment or end result.

The NYTimes says that i have 278 Friendster friends. The thing about this number is that i actually know all of them and only 3 of them have i never spent extensive time with in RL (research friends who i have had deep interactions with online, but not offline). Most of these people share significant bonds with me and i’ve been pretty vigilent about sticking to the “desired” Friendster behavior in this way. (Basically, i have no desire to be killed since i need this account for research.)

I actually maintain multiple accounts. One of them, with my real name, is not linked to anyone. I created it in case old friends wanted to find me. Ironically, all of the requests to that account have been subjects, people who have answered my survey or others that i don’t know at all. Since the NYTimes article came out, i’ve received over a dozen Friendster requests from people who i don’t know at all (in addition to the emails of people asking me to be their friend and the 1 request via my used Friendster account).

Frankly, given this, i’m amazed that anyone can think that Friendster is an accurate portrayal of social networks. To many of these people, i’m just another name in the paper, one that’s known to have a large network. Thus, they link to me. I’m the perfect candidate to expand people’s networks, right? So strange.

My friend C is madly in love with this boy D. C lives in NY; D lives in Santa Cruz. When Thanksgiving was being organized, C couldn’t come out but everyone invited D anyhow, wanting to get to know him better. It was great – he’s a sweetheart and *perfect* for C. The two of them have this great relationship where they connect on so many levels and the treat the world like a playground. It’s so awe-inspiring.

C decided that she must see him so she arranged something perfect. Another friend of ours put together a set of missions for D to complete, running around San Francisco on a treasure hunt to find clues that would finally lead him to a home where C would be waiting, having flown in immediately following her turkey dinner.

I spent the turkey evening with D, hanging out and talking and it was sooo refreshing. His love for C just overflows from within him. But things in the mission plans got a bit screwed up. His mission was supposed to be found in one place, but it was mistakenly placed elsewhere. Thus, he didn’t know the details of his mission. I was supposed to drop him off at a friend’s house last night but that friend passed out so i took him home to my couch (and my book collection, which he dove into immediately). I woke up at 1, knowing that the mission was supposed to start then. I started preparing to take him back to the original location, hoping to find clues for how the mission would start. But behind the scenes, one friend had taken to mission instructions to the house where D was supposed to sleep last nite. That friend hurried them over to my place.

When i gave D his mission, he looked at me and was like “Are you all in on this?” I laughed and told him that all of our friends adore him and we wanted him to be part of the family and this was his initiation. It’s funny how much we’ll all do to support their love and passion. Off he went, seeking his mission… by now, he’s found his love waiting for him. How perfect!

So, i just checked email today (oh dear me). There were so many fun notes from friends and from folks that i don’t yet know – silly congrats, intriguing questions, business proposals, etc. It’ll take me forever to sort out my email, but it was still such a nice little moment to be thankful for. Of course, i can’t help but emotionally react to the one cruel email:

Subject: sociologist?

Dear ‘Ms.’ Boyd,

I would certainly agree that you are a geek among sociologists, so-called, or maybe just simply a geek. And a Yupster of course. Have you ever read any real sociologists, of which Max Weber is arguably the paradigm? Ever study Nietzsche, where all serious modern discourse begins, if not ends? (There is Heidegger, of course.)

A rebel from Lancaster PA might explain a lot. You and the people you allegedly study should “get a life,” it would seem.

(Try some Joan Osborne rather than Ani Defranco — all of you spaceshots spell your names wrong, it would seem, or have ones that should be dumped at least: Shulamith Firestone?)

Ed W. – PhD., Chicago; Dok. Rer. Nat., Freiburg im Breisgau [that’s in Bavaria, btw]

First, there’s no doubt that i raise my eyebrows about being called a sociologist. Sure, many of the tools that i currently use for studying Friendster come from sociology (and i’ve even drawn from all 3 aforementioned philosophers in various arguments i’ve made). Still, i think that my advantage in the academic sphere is that i draw from such a variety of methods and theories and come up with new ways to bridge them all together. That said, i never take issue with people labeling me as a sociologist (or an anthropologist or even a computer scientist) even though that doesn’t quite describe what i do. Still, people need a category.

But aside from that point, i just don’t understand what motivates someone to read a profile and write a scathing note to the person profiled in an attempt to discredit her. What satisfaction does this man derive from the knowledge that this note got through? What is so offensive about such a profile? Is it not valid enough because it is not written in discourse speak or littered with references to academics that most of the audience would not recognize? In my many conversations wtih Michael, i constantly referenced different academics, explaining what their foundational contributions were, but i totally understood that he had no reason to publish them. But it’s clear that this man took the time to reference what i present digitally in order to write this note.

It reminds me of what a friend of mine once told me… he said that you finish your PhD when you hate your advisor, you hate your topic, you hate your life, you hate everything. Apparently, this man never stopped hating. So weird.

The NYTimes briefly references how i relate properties of an environment to notions of architecture and i thought i’d expound on this since folks have asked. First, these ideas are based on language used by Lawrence Lessig when discussing four points of regulation in “Code”: market, law, social norms, and architectures.

So much of how we structure our social interactions is dependent on our understanding of an architecture. In the physical world, this element is constant. There are certain properties of the physical reality that allow us to assume certain social norms. Without technology, i assume my conversation is ephemeral. I can visually and audibly determine who overhears me. That said, generations of fiction have been created out of the problems with this assumption… what if the walls are listening? what if someone is in a secret passage way and can see you? what if?. But in a truly dialectic form, those questions only emerge because the majority of time, you understand who can see/hear you.

Everything changes online. The architectures of the digital world are constantly shifting and being redeveloped. Technological determinists tell us to get over it: everything is public. But the digital public is so conceptually different than the physical public. People don’t yet know how to operate in a space where everything is persistent, searchable, etc. More importantly, we’re engaging with people *now* and can’t even imagine what new architectures will form 10 years from now that will repurpose our current presentation into the future in a way that is quite different than we expect… even in the “public web.”

This is why Friendster intrigues me. Friendster is an example of that shifting architecture. The majority of users on Friendster don’t have blogs (or journals) and aren’t really present on the web. They are the Internet users who thrive on searching the web and using email. Thus, they are naively negotiating what it means to put up public data. They are forced to face some of the questions about how shifting architectures impact their presentation of self.

At the same time, Friendster also shows how you cannot take sociological and anthropological theories generated in the physical world and expect them to work online. 1950s sociologist did not imagine that the foundation of their work, the underlying architectures, would shift. They assumed this to be constant and thus most of their work needs to be re-conceptualized with architecture as a variable.

And this, this is why i’m having fun.

Graffiti is one of those things that evolves over time in a city. When you see a graffiti wall, you know that there are layers of paint below it that express that city’s ever-changing reality.

My friend Cassidy Curtis has been in awe of this phenomenon for ages and he put together a fantastic website entitled “Graffiti Archaeology” to allow us to navigate a city wall over time. He’s been photographing walls and collecting images over time to compile these composites. Plus, now that it’s hit the web, different artists are starting to donate graffiti images to him. [If you have graffiti archives, definitely send them his way!]

I really like this project because it takes advantage of the digital medium’s ability to see temporal data in any order. Thus, you can see how the different graffiti elements have impacted new drawings, have been repurposed, or have been obliterated.

by Ethan Watters, author of Urban Tribes
(posted here with permission)

Years ago, when we were young and new to the city, we called them “orphan Thanksgiving dinners.” We were beginning our careers, scraping by as artists or working as waiters and we often couldn’t afford the expense or time to make it back to family for the holiday. At the beginning of November those who knew they would be stranded in town spread the word and one by one friends of friends would make themselves known. When Thanksgiving Day rolled around the card tables placed end to end could not hold us all and many would be forced to couches and the edges of beds to balance paper plates on our knees.

The dinner was always potluck and there was always too much food. One year a table actually collapsed under the weight of the offerings. Many of us tried to recreate the tastes of our childhoods in our efficiency kitchens. We called home for family recipes, the more ironic the better. Someone would bring an elaborate Jell-O dish with Cool Whip and canned pineapple or a sweet potato casserole with mini-marshmallows. These dishes were partly spoofs on our middle class suburban upbringings but they were often eaten first because they reminded us of home.

After dinner a few friends would bring out their guitars or we’d read a play someone had been working on with each of us taking a part. We took rambling walks through the strangely calm city. There were more calls home to mothers for advice on how to remove wine or gravy stains from the couch. The celebration would stretch into the night. No one wanted to go back to his or her apartment alone.

It was years ago that we called those gatherings “orphan Thanksgiving dinners.” Something about them changed as my friends and I reached our late twenties and early thirties. The celebrations became more formal. The paper plates and coffee mugs were replaced with real, breakable dishes and matching wine glasses. Rituals formed over the years. Friends now wrote songs and rehearsed plays specifically to be performed at Thanksgiving. The after dinner walk had a specific route through the park.

Our tastes became sophisticated, as did our cooking skills and the once haphazard potlucks turned into multi-course feasts. There would be portabella mushrooms stuffed with Brie cheese and artichoke hearts and butternut squash risotto with shavings of black truffle. A few up-and-coming gourmands became serious about their sauces. The yearly pie contest became brutally competitive. (Although there were half a dozen blue ribbons from “Best Crust” to “Most Creative Use of Fruit.”) There was still too much to eat but one of us had bought a house with a dining room and a sturdy oak table that could seat us all and handle the weight of the food.

But those weren’t the changes that mattered. What mattered was this: We could now afford the time and travel expense to make it home to our kin but we chose not to. More precisely, the very idea of where home was had changed in our minds. What had begun as an affiliation of friends of friends – a stopgap measure to support us during our time living outside of family — had become the central social structure in our big city lives.

Looking back at my twenties, I can now picture us as explorers in a new social landscape where it was suddenly the norm for both men and women to spend ten or more years living single, far away from our families and hometowns. No one told us that we were going to delay marriage longer than any generation in American History and no one gave us a map for how to navigate that time. Faced with the social wilderness of the city we slowly forged communities among our friends. Years ago we gathered haphazardly because we could not make it home to family. This Thanksgiving, my friends and I will come together reverently with a desire to honor our group with this particular holiday. We give thanks for this self-made community and for the certainty that we are orphans no longer.

danah note: this essay made me smile. I will be spending my Thanksgiving with my SF crew cause i can’t afford to go back east. I wrote to my mom asking for her stuffing recipe, because we’re doing a potluck feast. This is my first Thanksgiving (and was my first birthday) not spent with the family. And i’m looking forward to the shared festivities and the blended rituals.

A friend of mine is highlighted in an article on Flash Mobs for his research in the area.

Dear unknown audience:

My apologies for my recent absenteeism on this blog. As the term is nearing the end, my attention has been slightly diverted to thinking about Vannevar Bush (vs. Emanuel Goldberg), SCOT, Erving Goffman, reputation, mobile/camera phones, CHI, meta-blogging, etc.

I promise that i will come back with interesting commentary on the social networks space shortly, but if you are really bored and looking for danah babble, feel free to follow my non sequiturs at http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/