Hot or Not folks just launched a neat little YASNS site: Yafro. My favorite is that they have this bit at the bottom called “Friend Trends” that lets you see all of the new F-o-Fs, testimonials, etc.
first, admitting suckage
second, admitting that i made up the word suckage, except that it seems to be common vernacular. Or at least results in 19,200 Google finds. As if that defines common… well….
*ANYHOW* So, i’ve been a bad blogger. Ack. (But i’m not a blogger…. more on that in a moment.) I’ve been dreadfully busy, overworked, stretched thin and otherwise feeling like my brain has been split into a million pieces, isn’t operating efficiently, critically or otherwise providing useful thoughts. Lately, i’ve been “blogging” in my notebook because i can’t deal with the issues of presenting things publicly. (More on that in a moment too…)
Anyhow, i’ve decided that it’s time to pour my rambles into my blog. But this means that i’m going to be a bad citizen and confuse your RSS feeds. Because i’m going to put things up in the date range that they belong in. But, you can feel free to ignore them. Most of them are danah rambles anyhow.
visualizations, INWYK
OOhh. It’s Not What You Know is the first site to integrate a visualization tool into your network. When you login, click on “Network” and you can see your version. Mine:
Institute for the Future
Today, i spoke on a panel at the Institute for the Future’s gathering of its sponsors. It was odd to be there because it had a flavor of Media Lab sponsor events, only i was an invited speaker not a slave doing demos who had been up for weeks on end. The Institute is a great resource for thought on technology – where it’s headed, what people are doing with it, why… Basically, it’s a collection of really really smart people who get to think through tough problems. [Needless to say, it sounds like an ideal job for a researcher.]
The whole event was around the ideas of cybernomads… how is mobility changing the way we operate?
For the panel, i had the great opportunity to ask questions of Schuyler Earle. He’s been working on this project called noCat Wireless which is a community of people in Sebastapol working on gaining wireless. It’s fascinating because we always talk about technology letting us remove geography from the equation, but this project allows us to connect to people in a given region. It’s also built a “community” through a traditional form… diverse collections of people gathering for a shared need.
The other fun thing about the panel was that i actually had the opportunity to speak with Howard Rheingold (who was on my panel). I very much enjoy Howard’s synthesis of ideas so having the opportunity to get face time was just fantastic.
Anyhow, it was great to spend the last two days thinking about the future, critiquing conceptual models. I felt like i was back at Intel. I forgot how much fun that was.
understanding an audience
In questioning if i was a blogger, i started wondering about conceptions of audience in blogging.
Somewhere i once read that there are two types of bloggers. The first produces material in a journalist-esque fashion. They see their audience as public and are always a bit surprised when those close to them read their stuff. The second produces material in a journal fashion. They see their audience as private and are always a bit startled when the world reads them.
I’m definitely in both camps, or neither. My audience is primarily me. Even my best friend doesn’t read my blog. In fact, most of the people that i truly think of as only friends (and not also colleagues) never read my blog. I’m always absolutely surprised to go to a party and be told about my blog. I’m also surprised to hear from strangers about my blog.
What is an audience? So, while i say that my audience is me, that’s not really true. Most of the tone of this blog is veiled. It’s pretty non-controversial. It’s fairly boring. I don’t write about my adventures, my sinful engagements or my emotional trials. Sure, folks make guesses about me as a person based on my content, but that’s often misleading. For example, the reasons that i pay attention to drug and sex and teenager culture have quite rich explanations, but it’s easy to make assumptions. I allow that slippage though because i don’t want to appear so wholesome. Thus, the i know that the constructed identity is biased and i often encourage that bias
Audience is *so* essential. There is no way to present information without understanding who is reading it, what their biases/experiences are, and how you are being read. We write in a void, unlcear of how people are reading us. We write to the ether, yet i take for granted so many assumptions about my audience. I assume that i’m speaking to educated, conscientious people with like minds… i assume i’m preaching to the choir (but all readers of misbehaving will know that i’m learning this lesson the hard way).
In order to blog, we need to either define our audiences on our site (locally controlled context creation), be totally low self-monitors, or be really consciously uncontroversial. Usually, i tend towards the latter. I’m a complete high self-monitor and security through obscurity isn’t working… somehow, i stopped being obscure.
I worry about this aspect of blogging. Will bloggers just be the low self-monitors and those of us who don’t put our vulnerabilities forward? What’s the impact of putting your vulnerabilities forward. Have others gotten hurt?
Hmm…
am i a blogger?
I got to meet an amazing woman last night. Dina Mehta is someone that i met through the blogging world. Her ideas are so crisp and her politics are so righteous. I’ve had so much fun reading her ideas, so i was delighted to be able to make it. I met her amidst a group of other bloggers. And i will admit that i was bouncing full of energy and disrupted the flow of conversation, but it was so fascinating to hear all of the ideas about blogging.
But it made me think… am i blogger? I never identified as such actually. I mean, i’ve been writing rambles online since 1996, inspired by my dear friend jcn. In 1997, my Zen teacher required that i write down my reflections of the day for me. I did so digitally because he was living in a different city. I wrote journals for friends (under htaccess), started a live journal and eventually switched to MovableType. As i’ve gotten “older” and “wiser” my public rambles have become less emotional… or actually, they just make me feel less vulnerable than the emotional rambles i shared with friends.
Amidst this, “blogging” happened. I didn’t identify as a blogger because my habits didn’t change. I still rambled; friends still made fun of me and i still used the site primarily to lookup my own thoughts. But then something changed. This summer, i became a participant in some community of sorts. My voice was suddenly being read by strangers. My ideas were being critiqued. People were commenting about concepts not just being supportive. It was weird. I didn’t know how to take it.
Through this, i kept attending conferences. People would ask me if i was a blogger. Well, i blog… But it dawned on me that to “be a blogger” meant something entirely different. It’s a state of mind. People walk around and see knowledge floating in the world that they must blog… a compulsion. Well, i have a lot of compulsions, but to archive my observations is not one of them. In fact, it’s a constant struggle of mine. I actually do this because i *should* not because it’s easy. I mean, i always loved Anais Nin, but i could never understand how she wrote so much!
In fact, every time people mention that they read my blog to me, i feel guilty… I mean, i feel like it’s a neglected child. It’s so far from representative of all of the thoughts that go through my mind, all of the critiques that i spew, all of the ideas that i have. I’m embarrassed by the design which is about as adhoc as it gets (thank goodness for RSS feeds).
To “be a blogger” means to identify with this “community of bloggers.” People who are pushing the edge, changing the way people interact with information. I didn’t start blogging to do that, but people keep attributing my work as such. I read so many blogs, although i’m a dreadful commenter. All the same, they are the best ethnographic study. But am i just an observer. Somehow, i seem to have become a participant… perhaps i have “become a blogger” accidentally.
is Friendster a dud?
OK, this is the *best* biline ever:
So, i admit… i like this article. Finally, someone in the press is teasing apart the fundamental structural problems of Friendster (not just the Fakester problem or the Jonathan Abrams sucks problem or being all positive). In particular, they take aim at two of my favorite issues:
1) The assumption that your friends are transitive links for dating. [There is no doubt that people are often more compatible with people that are friends of friends. But the inverse logic is not always true. Just because they are a friend of a friend doesn’t mean you have any interest in dating them.] They bring up the issues with friends being counterproductive because they don’t always know what’s best… i.e. your friends shouldn’t try to help by setting up dates – this is always a disaster (this is age old wisdom that seems to have been forgotten in Friendster).
2) Friendster assumes equality. A friend is a friend is a friend, right? Ha! Particularly when there’s an issue of “public face.”
Is this a sign of more negative press to come? Is the honeymoon with Friendster over? (It certainly is for many of the users i’ve been tracking…)
designing social software
[From Many-to-Many]
I had the awesome privilege of attending the Intimate (Ubiquitous) Computing workshop at Ubicomp this year. The attendees grappled with issues of intimacy, the relationship between people and the impact of technology on intimacy. These issues are so relevant to social software, but so rarely addressed. For example, what is the impact of social software on intimacy? How does it affect our mechanisms of relating to people?
It’s so easy as social software developers to think about people’s hypothetical needs and design towards them, without really processing what impact we’ve had. Yet, the structures we create fundamentally affect how people interact, both offline and online. How are we changing people’s ability to engage offline because of their digital presence? How are we changing our understandings of the public sphere?
Ubicomp made me reflect on how easily we slip into a technocentric point of view. It’s so easy to assume that there is a perfect set of technologies, that they will solve all of the world’s problems and that they will produce nothing but good.
My take-away from the whole thing was to remember that we must think about the domains that we impact. We as social software developers/designers have the opportunity to dramatically impact social behavior. But we must approach this cautiously because if we fail to consider our impact, we could cause more harm than good.
[Remember: guns don’t kill people; people kill people. But they *use* guns and those guns were designed by people, and designed to kill.]
usability as a science
Tonight, i listened to a well-known software designer articulate his view of usability, ubiquitous computing and interface design. He spoke of usability as a burgeoning science. From his worldview, it would one day be possible to truly test what was the best way to do something. This conversation reeked of technological determinism* – one correct way… universalist notions of science… eek!
Now, i take issue with usability tests in general. When you run a usability test, you assume that 1) people will use it in the intended way; 2) people’s use won’t change over time; 3) people’s in-lab use will be identical to their social use at home. All of these are fundamentally WRONG. Thus, i just don’t believe in usability testing for social software because the goal is not to see if some feature works better than another, but to see if they “get” it.
Oh, my other favorite quote from the discussion concerned cell phones and their hideous user interfaces (which are worse in Japan from his perspective). “In Japan, it’s a social mystery that people buy these tools.” The connotation was that the social factor was superfluous and without value. ::shaking head::
* Technological determinism has been on my mind lately because it’s been a topic on one of my classes. My professor stated that no one would admit to being a technological determinist nowadays. I argued back stating that most of the technological determinists that i know know so little about social critiques of technology that they wouldn’t know that term so as to label themselves accordingly. I told her not to worry – there are plenty of people who still believe this problematic philosophy.
There’s a Sucker Born in Every Medial Prefrontal Cortex
There’s a Sucker Born in Every Medial Prefrontal Cortex is a terrifying NYTimes article that discusses the convergence of branding / product addiction and neurological science.
These are the kinds of articles that remind me to be wary of academic science being sponsored by industry and cranky that psychologists and other trained professionals use their knowledge to help corporate control of people.