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[Similar stories shared under ‘excommunicated’ on the “Friendster Sucks” Tribe at Tribe.net]

Oh, goodie! Earlier this month, “Weblogs, Inc.” created a blog on “Software and Technology for Group Interaction” (a.k.a. social software). They appear to be keeping completely up-to-date on the business elements behind this phenomenon (and folks seem to be checking their facts).

[This is *great* news for me and for any of the readers of this blog, as i prefer to deal with the more research-y issues anyhow. Check there for all industry gossip, press bits and whatnot and i’ll focus far more on the challenges in this space, particularly around the “social” part of the phrase.]

[From Many-to-Many]

At FooCamp, i realized that many people have been misreading my pleas for contextualization of identity presentation. I have regularly argued that people facet their identity and present different aspects given the context. Although i’ve argued against the multiple personality approach that emerged in the 1980s’ cyberculture research, my statements keep getting re-read as promoting multiple personas.

The easiest way to talk about how people facet their identity is by talking about dualisms. Unfortunately, this segmentation creates confusion. It also creates the assumption that people are always hiding one aspect of their identity from groups of people. Additionally, this approach seems to indicate that only a small fraction of the population reads context into their identity presentation.

In fact, we all read context into our presentation of self. The vocabulary choices you make are dependent on the audience you are speaking with. You speak to your child differently than you speak to your lover; you use different vocabulary when talking to someone with shared expertise than you do to someone whose doesn’t know the terms common in your field. Depending on shared history, you provide a different level of background information. Depending on perceived shared interests, you magnify your favorite interests differently. We constantly alter what we are presenting depending on to whom and in what context. This is not about deception; this is about contextualization.

When i speak of faceting one’s identity, i am not speaking of the ability to explicitly segment a manageable number of identity components; i’m talking about the ability to constantly adjust what is being presented, to whom, and in what context. Without this ability, people rely on the least common denominator. (This is why the majority of personal webpages out there read like a resume – the aspect of one’s identity that one is most readily comfortable sharing with everyone.)

From a suicide note: “I’m going to walk to the bridge. If one person smiles at me on the way, I will not jump.” The guy jumped.

There’s something utterly intriguing about leaving one’s fate to the probability of society outperforming its stereotype.

It’s been a long time since i had the opportunity to hang out with a large collection of geeks. I used to love the ridiculous shit that emerged in hacker culture. This weekend, i went and played at FooCamp – Tim O’Reilly’s collection of geeks. It was such silly fun (think water-bottle rockets).

Basically, it was an opportunity for geeks to gather and share thoughts and ideas. There was a fire on Friday nite where we stood drinking and talking, playing with good geek toys (like the Seque and this cute little robot). On Saturday, groups of folk met to discuss different topics of interest. Of course, i went to the discussion on social software. I can’t say anything was (re)solved, but it was really fascinating for me to hear the geek perspective on social issues. ::sigh:: Such a disconnect between average folks and geeks, which is utterly frustrating.

One great thing came out of that meeting – i got to meet Scott McCloud. My dear friend Henry adores Scott so i was quite delighted to get to sit down and talk with him for a few hours. He is such a lovable guy and reminds me of Henry in that he’s brilliant, but quiet, geeky, but fascinated by social culture.

Unfortunately, i had to leave after only a day (to go to Ubicomp), but i’m still quite delighted that i got to spend a day amidst the geek culture that framed my collegiate years.

My primary cell phone is having a conniption fit and may not be playing during my tour-de-conferences. If you are planning on catching up with me at FooCamp / Ubicomp / AoIR, please drop me an email so that i can give you my temporary number.

Also, if you’re going to be at those places and i didn’t know it, please let me know! I’d love to meet up with folks since i’ve been so bogged down with school lately!

A note on a friend of mine’s blog got me thinking. She wrote, “i am in new york now, where people are about Doing, rather than Being, as seems to be the case in san francisco.”

I know that she’s right. This is a constant battle for me because i came to SF to do and yet most of my friends are practicing being. Of course, perhaps that’s precisely why i like SF. I feel a constant state to rebel against whatever is the norm in a given location. If people are being in SF, no wonder i’m hyper-doing. Hell, my vegetarianism has gone completely out of the door in SF; i’ve stopped doing yoga; i have little tolerance for the new agey shit (even though i kinda adored it in Boston). I wonder how conservative i’ll get here…

At least i know that i’ll never get conservative enough to appreciate the circus that just abrupted here yesterday. And if one more person makes an Ahhhnold joke, i’ll kill them. (Hmm… i shouldn’t really not develop violent instincts in SF… that would be bad.)

We hired my replacement at V-Day. It’s official. I’m officially leaving. Wow.

My replacement is a wonderful woman full of spunk (a.k.a. young and optimistic like me) and i’m excited that she’ll be taking the baton. In our group discussion over who to hire, my colleagues told me that they loved this woman because she has that same youthful (a.k.a. insane, intense, spastic) energy that i have. It was a little weird to think that someone valued my craziness and wanted to see it replicated in the organization. Hmmm…

Btw: if you’ve been trying to get in touch with me via cell phone, you should know that my cell died. 🙁 I’m trying to solve this problem in the next couple of days, but if you need to get in touch with me, email me and i’ll tell you what phone number i’m at at a given point. Oh, and if you have a Sprint phone that i can borrow for a bit, please let me know!

At Brown, we were required to submit a proposal of what we would do as part of our concentration. My roommate and dear friend wanted to submit his proposal in Postscript, a coded representation of what he planned to study… explanation through example.

This comic is for him: