Leave it to the Onion to bring together Friendster and issues around race classification for diversity validation.

OMG.

This kills me. If only i hadn’t heard this rhetoric before…

My so-called blog is a brilliant NYTimes article that came out while my blog was down. It’s a fantastic journalist treatment on how youth are using blogs (mostly of the LJ sort) to negotiate social relationships. Even better, it supports everything that i’ve been hearing from those studying youth culture about their relationship with different channels of communication.

Continue reading →

I’ve been meaning to put together a web page for my research project: Articulated Social Networks. Normally, i put together a page that collects all of my materials. Lately, things have been uber scattered so i’ve begun to consolidate. (Yes, this is in prep for actually writing a real ethnographic document.)

Every time i make a webpage, i start out motivated to make it elegantly designed. And i actually get color theory – know when to mess with the hues and when to mess with the saturations. But try as i might, i always end up just wanting to put up a LOT of color and it quickly becomes as hideously eclectic as my bedroom (although always with a lot less pink… 5 years of V-Day and i can’t really do pink websites any more).

A dear friend of mine has a little boy. I remember when he was small, he refused to put on any outfit with less than 5 colors in it. He didn’t want matching socks.

Perhaps i should not be allowed to choose colors in either my digital or physical domain because i tend to choose ALL.

There are times in my life when i feel like i’m flowing with life, in tune, aware. Moments of synchronicity appear everywhere. Two situations emerged in the last 24 hours that just hit me.

…

First, i was wandering through Amoeba Records buying downtempo. I decided i needed to get out of the downtempo section because i am not allowed to purchase more CDs than i can carry. Wandering around, waiting for my friends, i asked the information person if early releases of Ani’s new album. No luck. No worries.

Tonight, i arrived home to a package from Scot Fisher (the head of Righteous Babe). Inside was a copy of the album and a handwritten note suggesting that i might appreciate this. I was totally taken aback with deep appreciation and love. I’ve been hosting the lyrics site for so many years kind of tangentially to RBR. To be acknowledged just felt so heartwarming.

….

Last night, i was addressing all of these pent up emotions and Eve kept coming into my head. She used to tell me that crying was a wonderful release and it’s good for me. I miss her dreadfully and realized it had been a long time since we talked. But i channelled her and let out my tension, as hard as that is for me. Tears of joy, tears of release. And into the world, i sent my love towards Eve.

This morning, she called me. It had been months. She told me that she did all of these interviews with trans women and had written an amazing piece for the V-Day Los Angeles all-trans cast production. I cried. I honored her. I shared my love, my appreciation.

If you haven’t ever seen “The Vagina Monologues” you must. Go to a V-Day near you. It’s V-Season.

And if you’re in Sundance on Saturday, go see the new V-Day film: Until the Violence Stops.

As i sit here in awe of the synchronicity, i am so very thankful for all of the opportunities and situations that continue to emerge in my life. So very thankful.

As everyone i know is panicking because of the job market and heading back to school, our f%#king governor is _yet again_ hiking the tuition (by 40%), reducing services and making it harder for California citizens to get an education. Of course, i will acknowledge that he’s quite constrained because 3/4 of the State’s budget is allocated by Propositions. One thing i learned living in California is how ridiculous it is to do budgeting by voting.

Take a scenario that i witnessed at Brown. A survey went out. How many of you think that cable TV should be freely accessible in dorms? Well, most people shrugged their shoulders. Even if they didn’t watch TV, why not, right? Of course, implementing this meant that money got cut for computing services. No one told us what would be lost based on our decisions.

::grumble::grumble:: At least Piled Higher and Deeper made me smile about the situation:

So, i decided to mess with my blog a bit. I’m trying to merge connected selves & this blog and i’m making a bit of a mess out of it. My apologies for screwing up any RSS feeds. And a HUGE apology because i’m going to break practically every link and trackback out there. 🙁 Sorry hoor!

Ars Electronica has a new category this year: Digital Communities. The idea is to hilight and support the fantastic creations made in the non-commercial sector around digital communities. If you’re a digital community creator, consider submitting your project!

Also, to anyone who happens to stumble upon this, i’m just curious which digital community projects you think should be considered for this Prix.

I received a peculiar email message this morning from “Friendster Customer Service.” The message was polite and informing me that there is no “Friendster virus” and that the Bulletin Board Rumors were a hoax. They thanked me for my concern.

At first, i thought it was spam and went to delete it. And then i realized that it appeared sincere. They were thanking me for my concern even though i never wrote Friendster about said hoax. I looked at the headers and it looks like it really did come from Friendster. My next guess was that Friendster thought to mail out all of its users with the note.

There’s a problem. The message that i received, which appears real, doesn’t go to any of the email addresses that i use for Friendster. It goes to my primary address – the email address i use to communicate with friends, colleagues and whatnot. I never wrote customer service at Friendster even though i’ve used this address to communicate with various people who work at Friendster. But never about a hoax.

I’m a bit baffled. I have a feeling that Friendster is not very likely to explain why they are writing me at my personal address to thank me for my concern for a hoax that i didn’t report. Thus, i thought i’d see if anyone else received a similar message.

How very strange.

Update: Customer service responded. Although i’m still a bit weirded out. A few months back, i sent a message to someone who works at Friendster. I accidentally left off one of the letters in the email address so it didn’t go through to the person intended and got added into the Customer Service bin; it didn’t bounce; it didn’t get forwarded on. Apparently, Customer Service made a mistake this morning. Not sure who else got that message, but the reason that they had that address was because of that not bounced message. This is still disconcerting to me.

While Marko’s reflection on Clay’s writing prompted me to go off on a tangent about privilege, Joi jumps in to ask are blogs just? and Clay offers a return. The foundational components of this question requires teasing out whether things are fair and/or just and what impact that has on the relevant social groups.

While Joi really unpacks the notion of justice, Clay retorts by pointing out that he’s really focused on fairness. In his argument, though, he notes the economic (lack of) cost involved in blogs. This is what prompted my tangent, but perhaps i should return here. When something costs time and time is a precious commodity, is it truly fair (or equalizing)? Clay also argues that there is no vetting (“subject to expert appraisal or correct”) process. Perhaps not officially, but public blogging is one of (counter)critique and, thus, there is a feeling of a power hierarchy that makes people feel the need to be properly appraised in order to participate. Finally, Clay notes that the threshold for having a blog is only slightly higher than the threshold for getting online. I wish that this was true. This is where issues of social pressure, time, literacy, confidence, etc. come into play. Consumption and production are fundamentally different and there are different forms of pressure when engaging with either. There is no way that one can possibly say that the threshold for consumption is equivalent to the threshold for production.

As a moral question, fairness is inherently intertwined with power and privilege. Thus, this statement by Clay worries me:

To a number of people (including Joi?) evidence of injustice, even in fair systems, calls for some sort of remedy. I can’t imagine a system that would right the obvious but hard to quantify injustice of the weblog world that wouldn’t also destroy its dynamism.

Does this mean that privilege should beget privilege because it makes for cool, dynamic technology? I, for one, would love to hear Clay/Joi discuss the relevance of power and privilege in this discussion.

(For those who are reading this in RSS land, make sure to read the comments on Joi’s blog. Apprently this philosophical discussion is a bit too heady for some and thus the comments are a riot.)