Marko critiques Clay in Is the Blogging World Fair? which, in turn, made me think critically about the questions of equality in blogging. Mind you, i’ve only recently started going meta on blogging and bloggers (blame Joi for making my mind swirl on blogs).

I love hearing that blogging is a great equalizer… from straight white men.

Privilege is a funny thing. Often it opens up opportunities that we don’t even realize. Take time, for example. Who has the time to sit online and read, write and discuss all day? A working mother? A migrant worker? Time is money. Very few people have both time and money and most people spend most of their time trying to make ends meet or trying to calm their nerves from the stress induced by the former. Having time to “waste” is privilege.

Next, take voice. Who is taught that they have the right to vocalize any thought about the world to the rest of the world? A proper lady does not spoke unless spoken to. Who has the privilege to critique those in power?

Take a look at the public self-referential blogging culture. We’ve often noted that there are few women. Yet, what percentage are people of color or queer? More notably, what percentage are of working class? And btw: the goal isn’t to be able to successfully name one… but when i look around the blogging world, i will think that it is an equalizer the day that people are represented at least proportionately to their representation in the rest of the world. Until then, i’m committed to my belief that there are factors embedded in the blogging culture that only draw specific types of people. And that those factors edge along notions of privilege. Until we decipher how our technologies promote privilege, we cannot create equalizing technologies.

When i tried to frame my hesitation over Skype, i was sent through the wringer both online and offline. I felt like a heretic. As such, Dave Weinberger’s frustration today made me grin.

Even IM tends to drive me batty and i turn it off when i need to work. (Of course, somehow, i feel as though i’m allowed to blog while i’m writing a paper even if i’m not allowed to be interactive.) Voice takes things to the next level. I have no qualms ignoring IMs while i’m working or telling people that i’m working and can’t talk. I don’t give out my IM to the world at large; i don’t allow IMs from people i don’t know; and i rarely have time/hand power to just chat on IM. Voice is a whole new level of not-OK.

Just because VOIP solves certain economic problems (particularly for members of a diaspora) does not mean that it alters my conniption fits about my relationship with voice interactions. I *hate* the phone and i HATE being interupted while working even more. Of course, there are exceptions and i usually answer my cell for friends, even if only to say that i can’t really talk right now. But the idea of getting random calls from strangers is about the most horrifying thing that i can imagine. Eek! I definitely feel for Dave…

There’s a discussion going on at We Quit Drinking over whether or not one can view AA as a religion. Personally, i draw parallels between the two regardless of whether or not i would label AA as a religion.

First, i take severe issue with Webster’s definition of religion (used in the debate):

1. Belief in and reverence for a supernatural power or powers regarded as creator and governor of the universe.
2.A personal or institutionalized system grounded in such belief and worship.
3.The life or condition of a person in a religious order.
4.A set of beliefs, values, and practices based on the teachings of a spiritual leader.
5.A cause, principle, or activity pursued with zeal or conscientious devotion.

This proposed definition sits at the heart of the discussion, which is a bit problematic. First, it is *very* easy to read Western hierarchical organized religion into this definition. It is hard for me to tell if that is the intention of the definer or if that is simply my own Wester predilection. My own religious beliefs are very much not Zoroastrian in foundation (i.e. not Jewish/Islamic/Christian). Thus, i have to look particularly close at this definition to find myself; it is not the first read that one might do. In fact, it is precisely that Western version that most of the discussion focuses on. Only in Western religions are religions exclusive and define ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ or ‘one true way.’ I view myself as religious but i don’t identify with any of those classifications.

I’ve never found a definition of religion that feels comfortable to me. That said, Bob Jesse of the Council on Spiritual Practices offered me the best perspective i’ve ever heard, noting that religions have three tiers of participation: scriptures, traditions/rituals, primary religious experiences. Community forms out of religions because of shared scriptures, traditions/rituals and goals to experience primary religious experiences. Anyhow, i could go on about this but i’d like to return to Alcoholics Anonymous for a moment.

AA is a fantastic organization that helps many people. In many ways, i feel as though its effectiveness comes from its clear parallels to religious organizations. There are a set of scriptures, traditions/rituals that bind people together and a goal of reaching a primary state of ecstasy from sobriety. Just like civic and religious groups, AA brings people together from all walks of life, allowing for an education in tolerance.

It’s funny because i know the debate on We Quit Drinking fundamentally surrounds how people feel about the term religion. It’s a hefty word with a lot of connotations that make people run screaming. Also, people automatically conjure Western religion when they think religion which can be truly limiting. At one point, one of the debaters noted that AA is not about worshipping a higher power. Yet, in many ways, AA is precisely about that. Only, the higher power is not a white bearded man in the sky. The higher power is found within you. Rather than drowning out that power, AA is about finding the strength internally to worship yourself, those around you and the ground you walk on. It’s about finding your own unique path and following it one day at a time.

Annalee has a new article out in Security Force about security, privacy and social network. It’s a nice blend of the technological and social concerns that emerge in social networks software.

I have to admit that i’m a sucker for ridiculous and quirky articles. Thus, it brought a complete smile to my face to wake up to a Salon article entitled Osama bin Laden: Caught by Friendster! Here’s a few quotes:

But Friendster, the popular online social networking tool, proves to be OBL’s undoing. Through a series of unlikely relationships — which folks like Michael Moore have long been whining about but which were not quite clear until Friendster graphically demonstrated them — George W. Bush turns out to be connected to bin Laden.

See, Bush knows this guy (an acquaintance, not a friend) from his DKE days, and this guy’s wife has a sister who knows this dude with great hair who once, when he was young and very drunk, spent the night with this woman who is a huge fan of the MTV show “Cribs.”

Small world! Bin Laden’s second wife also loves “Cribs”! FBI investigators, who now routinely use Friendster in their searches for terrorists, piece together these connections and hit the jackpot — Osama bin Laden’s profile complete with an e-mail address, OBLbKickin@aol.com. Investigators initiate a virtual romance with the terrorist leader, and he invites what he believes to be his virtual paramour up to the cave for drinks. Sadly, none of OBL’s 49 Friendster friends — although many give him glowing testimonials on the Internet — spring to his defense in the real world.

If Friendster’s network map wasn’t broken, i’d offer up links to Osama, Michael Moore, Bush, etc. But, not surprisingly, you can’t actually access their Profiles. Thus, if it’s working again, just do a user search for these characters – great Profiles!

Yay to David Weinberger for another good breakdown on why social networking software is socially peculiar (through logic).

He’s reacting specifically to Jeremy Zawodny’s commentary that includes a great little quote that resonates well with my thoughts on the matter:

If you really think that Friendster, Tribe, LinkedIn, or any of those other sites are going to survive doing what they’re doing today, you’re really smoking something. However, if you think that also means the technology isn’t worthwhile–that the notion of modeling social networks in software is a pointless exercise, well then you’re really smoking something good. You couldn’t be more wrong.

Of course, my favorite quote out of his commentary is his call for action:

Start thinking about how adding a social networking component to existing systems could improve them.

Jeremy’s blog entry also sparked Ev to offer one of his favorite truisisms:

We judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their actions.

This is a great quote given the approach that social software is taking. Here we are, asking others to make explicit and actionable their social behavior. Yet, we do not understand this ourselves; we only understand our intentions wrt social behavior. Furthermore, as the models we build do not exactly mimic the real world, we expect others to follow the same social mores and understand our intentions in performance. For example, no one is consistent about what they present on their blogs, Friendsters, wikis. Everyone has what they think are the appropriate norms and thus they read others actions based on these perceived norms. No wonder we’re all quite confused.

I love traveling with my best friend because everything involves: 1) plotting; 2) adventures. So, we decided to road trip into Mexico. Of course, neither of us knew anything about Mexico. We stopped at AAA to acquire maps and acquire Mexican car insurance (apparently necessary) and then wandered past Tijuana down to Ensenada. Folks at AAA told us that it would be a good 4 hours drive. Of course, i forgot that the 80 on the side of the road was km/h and proceeded to drive 95 mp/h, happy to be in a country where speed limits were reasonable. Thus, it took us 1.5 hours to get there… It was still cold (not remotely beachable) so we decided to grab some yummy food and aim for the Eastern side of Baja.

Apparently, it is wise to read the guide book BEFORE going to Mexico (we read the whole thing while waiting in line to get back into the States). If we had read the guidebook, we would have learned that cops are not on the highway after 8PM but that there are plenty of bandits. So, we’re driving, listening to “This American Life” on iPod when we see fires in the middle of the dark road. We slow down and find that there are movements of people in front of us. So, we stop and i let down the window to be face-to-face with a machine gun carrying man in black with a black mask with only his eyes showing. Eek. So, we jet off. Fast. From this point on, we’re terrified of everyone on the road. As we’re approaching the other side of Baja, we slow down because of a road block, see a guy on the road and i speed through FAST. As we’re speeding through and the guy is waving at us, we realized he’s wearing army fatigues. Five minutes later, we get stopped again and this time, it’s fully clear that it’s a check point so we stop and in broken English explain that we’re going to San Felipe.

We land at San Felipe and wander the town. It’s very clearly a town dedicated to frat boy spring break travelers. We are one of 3 people in the hotel and very few tourists are out and about. The only thing that’s alive and open to grab a drink is the Rockadile, a tacky spring break club playing dreadful progressive trance, hip hop and gay house… from 5 years ago. No one is dancing and after a drink, we get the nerve to dance around. I’m feeling like a fool, not knowing how to dance to such slow dreadful beats. Still, we manage to bounce around until some other traveler from Ohio comes out and makes just as much of a fool with us. We chat with the tourist and the funny bartenders and then wander back to our hotel to watch the Lion Pride special on the Animal Kingdom.

Fell asleep, woke to a gorgeous sunrise over the beach, fell back asleep and woke to a sleepy town without a church but with lots of kids trying to sell us trinkets. We grabbed food, went shopping and wandered through the beach (still cold) and cactii before heading back through the desert of Baja, playing in Mexicali and wandering back to San Diego.

A short jaunt with a lot of dreadful attempts at broken Spanish, but silly nonetheless. I love random adventures.

Every New Year’s Day, i try to come up with a resolution that will help increase sanity in some way or another. Thus, today, i reflected on the past year.

Last year, i resolved to address particular problems in my personal life. As much as it has been a struggle, i feel much stronger this year in that domain, having made some truly wise decisions to gain control and value my sanity first and foremost.

Yet, while i took hold of some things, my professional life spiraled more than i would like to admit. So much goodness has emerged (thank you to all involved in helping with that), but i have my mother’s tendency to forget the necessity of the word ‘no’ and thus have gotten in quite a bit over my head. I have been stretched so thin that i feel brittle and snappy. I know that it is not a good cycle to go 24/7 continuously for months and then crash and burn at holidays, yet i do it ritually. Thus, the meta issue is that i need to construct boundaries.

In thinking today, i realized another thing about sanity checks. I love engaging with my friends. I love engaging with my work. Yet, both are truly mind exhausting and i’m feeling that immensely. I realized that, since i moved to San Francisco, i’ve drastically decreased “entertain me” time. This must changed.

“Entertain me” time is the time that i spend being entertained by outside stimuli without having to engage back mentally. Movies, books, dancing were always staples of the “entertain me” time. When i was in Boston, i saw virtually a movie a week. Whenever we’d had enough of the Media Lab, we’d romp over to Kendall and see whatever was on next. I read pleasure books on the T, sat in the Commons people watching. Most notably, i went dancing 2x per week where less than 1 hour of each was devoted to socializing. (Since i’ve moved to SF, the majority of dance time is spent socializing, not dancing. Or socializing on the dance floor by interactive dancing, not trance dancing.) And darnit, i’ve stopped exercising and meditating, both of which were huge mental downtimes.

Perhaps i’m getting old, but i need more mental downtime than i’m getting. (And, no doubt, i need more physical body time.) Thus, i resolve to work on increasing my ability to strictly create boundaries on my time and increase my mental downtime through a combination of “entertain me” time and other meditative activities.

The more i’ve gotten embedded in my academic work, the more i’ve been focused on a variety of things, not all of which fit under the “Social Network Tools” umbrella. Thus, i’ve begun blogging almost exclusively on my thoughts blog. That’s the more appropriate place for me to live by my favorite word… apophenia… making connections where none previously existed. From there, i’m going to draw parallels to various thoughts and go meta. This blog may reemerge later, but not right now.

The main reason that i love blogging is because it forces me to write down some random things without trying to formalize them, contextualize them or operate explicitly reflexive. The structure of academic writing requires so much framing that i get writing hang-ups. Given the lack of formality and the laziness with which i spat out random thoughts, i should not be surprised when i’m misread. All the same, it always takes me for a loop and i immediately go into introspective mode asking myself if i should be far more careful about what i blog. Of course, i know that this would mean far fewer (if any) blog entries about ideas. Still, i find myself gulping and needing to respond. Right now is one of those moments.

Amidst holiday festivities, i shot off a response to cory’s call. Apprently, it spiraled around other people and made them think. This morning, i got labeled a technological determinist. The big joke about technological determinism is that anyone who knows what the term means would never identify as such. In fact, it’s like the canonical insult amongst academics in this field.

In rereading my entry, i can see how my call can be read in that way, even though that is a precisely inaccurate reading of my views. This made me wonder how many other people misread my commentary to fit their structure of thought. Thus, i feel the need to clarify my position, if only for myself to be a bit more coherent.

First, for the academics, i certainly distance myself from technological determinism, although i also quibble with social constructivism. In many ways, i feel as though a pure social constructivist stance dismisses any role that technology creators have in shaping society based on their design decisions. In many ways, i feel as though this is because social constructivism is used as a retrospective framework, not a projective one. In other words, retrospectively, we can consider the vast array of relevant social groups and thus pull responsibility out of the picture. Yet, this is not a tool that many technologists know how to utilize going forward.

For those who aren’t aware of social constructivism, one aspect of the process is to consider all of the relevant social groups (users, creators, non-users, politicians, etc.) and how they played a role in the production and dissemination of a technology. The classic piece on this method is Bijker’s “King of the Road: The social construction of the Safety Bicycle.”

If you look at how technology is created, there is a consideration of one’s market, or target market. Technology is designed for a perceived audience. This is good! What is missing is an extensive consideration of all of the different players who may come to participate. In other words, we don’t consider how our non-target groups might engage with our creation. We simply hope that they engage with the same behavior as the target. Furthermore, we tend to target a behavior, not just a group (if academic, think configuring the user).

From where i stand, there are some amazing tools for social scientists to use to study technology, but rarely are they used to help create technology. This is foolish. Technology creators are not idiots. Their work is certainly affected by the social environment. Yet, their creations also do affect the social culture. It is a bi-directional, non-deterministic process. Unfortunately, i feel as though too many science studies folks just wait to see what will be created before studying it, rather than helping the creators think through the environment in which they are creating.

Thus, to clarify. My call to technologists is to actually flesh out the relevant social groups, not just the target markets. When people have contradictory use scenarios, you cannot simply hope that the one you want will play out. Nor should you try to constrain the allowed behavior to that one alone. You must consider both types of users, how they will affect one another and what the consequences might be. This is not an exact science because there are plenty of non-deterministic paths that the technology can take, but being awake to the different groups and their interplay is key. Furthermore, this approach makes the technologist far more aware of the emergence of new, unexpected behavior and more prepared to determine how to move forward now that new, unexpected relevant social groups come into play.

Hindsight is fantastic for understanding a technology’s path to stabilization. Unfortunately, though, technology creators do not have that retrospective privilege. Thus, it should not be surprising that deterministic philosophies emerge from this group. They want their technology to solve a problem and they see a direct link from technology to problem solution. Yet, the perspective from those studying technology retrospectively and those moving it forward would do the other quite well. Understanding how to be aware of relevant social groups as one moves forward is exceptionally valuable and will prevent the feelings of frustration as users “refuse to behave.” They aren’t refusing… they are just challenging the projected path of use.