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…]
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.)
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..
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.