I’m very proud to help a variety of people access Ani Difranco lyrics through my website, but an email today made me realize that my help extends to surprising places:
We went to an Ani gig last night, and because one of us is deaf, the kind folks at RBR gave us a setlist and printed out the lyrics. Rather than getting the words from one of their own sources, Ani’s tour manager went to your site and downloaded them from there.
There’s something magical about seeing one’s thoughts in the media. Namely, the awe that is generated when one barely recognizes oneself. I spoke with a columnist from the NYTimes about Friendster and in the printing/editing process, my name ended up being unrecognizable. Not only did it acquire capital letters accidentally, it also morphed into either Danah Boyle or Danah Doyle at various points in the paragraph. I can’t help think i’ve become a digital doily. Boing boing. Splat.
Well, given that i have a blog, perhaps i should dispel the myths that i accidentally generated in the Times. Of course, one day when i have more time, i will actually structure a full story around Friendster, so long as folks continue to contribute their thoughts.
First, i have to smile about my quote that includes the word nuanced… ah, danah speak. The ironic thing is that i cannot make the connection between that and the 60,000 number. Aside from the fact that my 4 degree network is almost 100K in size (which is absurd), the subtle nuances that i would like to see in Friendster concern the structuring the different relationships that we manage. When asked who my friends are, i’m likely to provide lists from a variety of different contexts in my life – lovers, family, professors, colleagues, etc. Of course, in the context of dating, i am not interested in actually dating many of their “friends.” This constitutes a major problem when you have a social networking system that is limited in scope.
60,000 people are not unwieldly, just meaningless. This has mostly to do with how many degrees you are willing to introduce through. For example, i’m glad to introduce friends to friends (and they’re comfortable contacting one another without going through me, although i find that i tend to get a “is this person OK?” message). But when there are two people in between, it’s hard to negotiate. For example, if Alice wants to meet Cathy and Alice is my friend and Cathy is Bob’s friend, it becomes odd. Do i say to Bob, tell me about your friend Cathy and i’ll tell you about Alice and perhaps we can see if they have something in common? Dating networking works best when someone can vouch for both unknown folks. The more degrees, the less meaningful the connections mean. That said, it’s fascinating at how much breadth is covered in 4 degrees.
Oh, and for the record, the defunct Six Degrees is the first site that i know of for non-business digital networks. Of course, it was before its time and died a terrible death due to poor ideas surrounding money and spamming.
::sigh:: I think that my biggest sadness is that there is a lot of interesting concepts that should be addressed in a discussion of Friendster and i have yet to see anyone in the press take them on. For example, 1) what is it about humanity that makes this meme so popular; 2) what are the social reprecussions of such a system; 3) what are the underlying structural flaws that limit the system’s growth? Hopefully as articles emerge, folks will delve into what i think is interesting about Friendster.
I’m very much looking forward to a conference this weekend in San Francisco, called PlaNetwork: Networking a Sustainable Future. I’m a big fan of any network research that is created to be socially beneficial. And i was even more fascinated when i saw a paper entitled The Augmented Social Network: Building Identity and Trust Into the Next-Generation Internet that will be presented there.
This paper argues for many of the thoughts that i have addressed (in my thesis most notably). In particular, they address an intelligent way to do identity management in a socially conscious way; they address the value of social networks when personally managed; and most importantly, they frame all of their arguments in the idea that you don’t change social norms, you build technology to help people be social in the way that they see fit. It’s a fabulous paper and i cannot wait to discuss it further this weekend.
Despite my distaste of clubs, i had to break down to see my favorite DJ and i had a nice little mindshift, where i just wasn’t going to let anyone get in the way of me having fun and bouncing crazily. With this mindset, i went all the way up front and actively demanded dancing space and disregarded any stupidity from the people around me (like the guy who thought to grind me from behind who i elbowed with joy in a flaling dance move). In the process, one guy smiled at me and started dancing goofily. After a bit, i kindly told him that i wasn’t interested but that i was having fun dancing and that i hope that he wasn’t hurt by this. He was disappointed but tried to keep dancing anyhow. Apparently, he wrote to Missed Connections on Craigslist and i have to admit that his note makes me smile:
Desert Storm fatigues at Infected Mushroom
You really are a kickass dancer! I keep thinking today the classiness with which you handled my advance. That was very cool. Everyone should be that cool. Hope you had a great evening…
Positive feedback for a needed shift in consciousness.
I ran into an old article from the NYTimes:
Patrick Coston has been keeping lists of everyone he knows since he was 16 — and he’s now 39. Several years ago he consolidated his paper lists into one online file, making public a tabulation of “People I’ve Known in My Lifetime” (patcoston.com/home/people.htm). “It’s a way of helping me remember the past,” he said by e-mail.
I can’t help but think about the relevance of this to the HICSS paper that Fernanda and i’ve been working on. We realized that the power of our email visualizations was in part due to their power to operate as an artifact for storytelling, to provide a prop for one’s memory. In effect, the visualization serves as a tabulation of email relations. I have to wonder what it would mean to be such a Connector that one would do this.
Of course, it also reminds me of friends of mine who take pictures every day as records and other systematic means of marking time, place and people. Of course, the irony of Patrick’s system is that the public archive is tapped into search engines and thus helpful to a wider range of folks.
Trepia seems to have hit my social network, as i’ve received like 10 messages about it this week. It has also hit the press. I signed up in beta form but i’m very weary of it. For starters (as i’ve noted before), i’m never a fan of software that requires me to give age and sex information. I understand it in dating software (i.e. Friendster), but for general purpose meeting, why is this information required? So, i just tend not to log in. At least with Friendster, i can keep a certain distance from the strangers that write to me; in Trepia, i know that there in close proximity to me and i really don’t want folks to know that. Or at least, i want to be able to control it in a safe manner. Hmm.. i need to think more about what Trepia makes me uncomfortable.
Six Degrees of Sexual Frustration is a Village Voice article on Friendster. I have a feeling that we’ll be seeing a lot more of these and it makes me curious to know what the impact will be on growth. I’m also very curious about the article, because it makes Friendster appear to be more expansive than dating. While i know that’s how people use Friendster, i keep wondering how Jonathan Abrams feels about this (as he constantly gives me the impression that his only goal is to replace match.com). Does he realize the value of the diverse usages? Might he recognize that it’s valuable to pay attention to what people are doing and why?
In the last month, i’ve been privvy to a handful of email hiccups – individual messages that were sent out to a list accidentally, messages that were far too personal to be sent out as such and thus revealed some very disturbing aspects of the senders. It’s also been interesting to see who has apologized and who has not and what form that apology has taken.
These messages, intended for one context and presented in another are quite powerful. They reveal the character of the individual and the importance of perceived context for written communication. More importantly, they are a clear reminder of how easy it is to accidentally shift contexts online and the potential reprocussions of that socially and politically. Of course, the easy RTFM answer is a reminder that all emails should be written as though they are public. In reality, no one ever does this. It drives me batty to think that some technologists think that overriding social tendencies is the best approach.
In his blog, Eric posted a set of links about ‘New World vs. New Europe’ that made me scratch my non-existent goatee. In recent days, i’ve been having increasingly more conversations about gendered behavior concerning power management, or more precisely, about how marginalized individuals have different schemes for acquiring and maintaining power through subtle and subversive ways. The articles on Europe made me think about a previous article that i posted and about the differences in power between Europe and the US. But more fundamentally, in combination, they made think about how my thoughts on power management don’t just apply to individuals, but to systems. Europe, having been dwarfted in power by the US in recent years has to be much more subversive, subtle and organized in how it acquires power; brute force no longer works. Conversely, the US continues to just simply carry a big stick in world politics. Of course, this beckons the question: are such alternate forms of negotiation destined to be far more successful or will they always be marginalized by brute force?
I had multiple conversations today concerning power management. In all of these, we acknowledged that women tend to use more subtle mechanisms to derive and maintain power, while men tend to just bulldoze. Backing up from this, i believe that what is relevant is not simply sex, but privilege. The more privileged an individual is, the more that power can be taken for granted and the less creative one needs to be to acquire it. Subtlety is an art, a subversive mechanism for overthrowing the norm. Thus, the more intelligent marginalized individuals consistently use subtle means to reach the top. Of course, this plays directly into my thoughts on context. Context is necessary for engaging subtlety, but not for brute force.