[from the connected selves blog]
Wired ran an article today about Making Friendsters in High Places, including quotes by moi (and referencing the eBay phenomenon and Ross’ comparison of different tools).
I must say that i think it’s fascinating to hear people reference each other as Friendsters. “Oh, you’re danah’s Friendster.” This shows how it is not really a listing of your friends, but some other not-entirely-defined set of people that you sorta know in some context or another.
Time Out New York: “Online social network Friendster.com just may be the most annoyingly cliquey and trendy club since Moomba” (with quotes by moi)
My friends know me. My colleagues know me. And V-Day organizers know how to panic. I received well over a dozen pointers to this article about Hunting for Bambi, a game where men pay large amounts of money to hunt and shoot naked women with paintguns. The site hilights its shocking blend of sex and violence.
[To read some interesting commentary, check out Jen King’s blog entry on the topic.]
Six Degrees of Procrastination: Why is everyone you know on Friendster?
By Douglas Wolk (Slate @ MSN)
I’ve been blogging in some form or another since 1997. Early renditions of my blog were explicitly personal and shut away via .htaccess files for my friends to read. This rendition has been explicitly public and thus the content has a very different tone. For the most part, i only publish that which i think would still be socially acceptable 20 years from now. I rarely publish my opinions or my thoughts beyond the highest meta data. There are many instances when information is presented in a way that those who know me know how to read between the lines and know what actually happened. But even that is rare.
I don’t even mention friends’ names, unless i’m discussing their professional work. One place where this bothers me is in my listing of links. The list of blogs i read is much longer than what is listed on the sidebar. That list is comprised of the blogs that i read which are really meant for the public at large, instead of just for friends. Although many of my friends’ LJs or diaries or blogs are very public, i just don’t feel right linking to them off of my site. It’s a weird negotiation of what’s appropriate.
Of course, what humors me the most is that those growing up blogging and journaling will take this all for granted and think it to be natural, rather than my panicked uncertainty of what’s appropriate. How strange.
Anne Galloway [5 May 2003] – After receiving multiple pings from friends, Anne joined Friendster. She reveals her distaste for the competition that people have going concerning how many Friendsters they have. She also references the distinction between a Friendster friend and a real friend. Comments reference the problem that not all of one’s friends are on the Internet.
“Isn’t the purpose of Friendster to turn acquaintances into closer friends?” – Abe
Adam Greenfield [7 May 2003] – Adam hesitatated and then waited for critical mass to join; his hesitation stems to its purpose as a dating site.
“I firmly believe that one of these sites, duly modified, or a scratch-built successor or successors, will catalyze huge changes in the way we socialize, connect, associate and construct our lives. Huge. This is completely uncontroversial to me. What remains to be seen is if anyone can pull it off with flair and an appropriate amount of personality.”
Adam Greenfield [9 May 2003] – Following up on his earlier article, Adam reflects on the implications of these sites in relation to the theory on the topic. He also discusses how and why we compartmentalize our social networks and why we don’t necessarily want all of our friends connected to all of our other friends.
“One thing I keep coming back to is the artificial and unintentionally dishonest partiality of these attempts to graft the possibilities of digital networks onto the patterns of human ones.”
“Something tells me these services won’t reach their maximum potential until they can incorporate our less salutary feelings about association: the latent but powerful distinctions we make, the dislikes and fears we, however subtly, import into our presentation of self. These are precisely the shadows we may have “gone online” to escape in the first place, but they are a part of what we’ve always meant by “social,” they serve a function evolved over a very long span of time, and I believe we ignore them at some disservice to our ambitions.”
When i first got involved in V-Day in 1998, i was determined to make it as trans-friendly as possible. Violence against women hits the trans community so very hard. So many murders, so much violence. Before i was even staff at V-Day, i helped make the organization trans-friendly by clarifying what we meant when we say that all actresses must be women. We explicitly tell organizers that V-Day does not define someone’s gender identity and that they must include anyone who identifies as and lives their lives as women.
Over the years, i’ve watched as more and more transwomen have participated in V-Days in a variety of ways. I watched women come into their own through V-Day, find that female bond and really understand what it means to be a woman. And this year, Eve is going to take the trans issue even more seriously. Not only is she going to write a trans monologue, but V-Day is working directly with Calpernia Addams to create a trans-focused V-Day. Yippee!
Needless to say, there is a lot of commentary about Friendster on Live Journals. For the most part, it is banter about adding one another as friends. Of course, this brings into question whether or not LJ connections are friends. [In LJ, there are explicit references to “Friendster friends”]
Other interesting bits:
xaotica: used Friendster to connect with a desired journalist gig after a blind contact provided no leads. Also, “it’s a site a little similar to livejournal, minus the journal.”
truna: “friendster = high school yearbook and that’s why i love it ;-)”
yummystuff: chronicles her Friendster dates
brokenchinaldol: “you’ll notice every fifth testimonial seems to include something like ‘i don’t know why we don’t hang out more/i wish we saw each other more/we should keep in touch’. i vote someone makes realster.com, where people admit ‘i don’t call her anymore because all she does is complain about her boyfriend’, ‘we used to hang out in high school, until i develop a little thing called a conscience”, “maybe we should start having casual sex again’. this would certainly help singletons weed out the poor dating choices.”
Anyhow, there are pages and pages of Friendster quotes on LJ.
The conference is over. Organizers loved it. Participants loved it. Basically, it was an outright success.
While all of this was happening organizationally, the impact on me personally was far beyond what i ever envisioned. I didn’t attend very many talks (surprise) but i met people who totally shook up my world. In particular, i connected with two people who threw me for a loop. Through interacting, i found certain dormant characteristics of my personality reemerging, for better and worse. Their suppression had been a coping mechanism and to see them come out again was a total surprise. Here i was engaging with two people quite intensely and loving it, remembering how much i love connecting and how much i miss compassionate people who engage through their soul. Genuine positive energy.
I fell in love again this weekend. Not with someone else, but with myself… with people in general… and with life. Two good souls shook me up and made me see things from a different vantage point. I needed that rejuvination more than i even realized. Namaste.