fandango – never good to go

First off, fuck Fandango for not working on my Sidekick. But given that failure, i figured i’d try 1-800-FANDANGO. It’s all voice commands. So the first time, i screw up the voice system by answering the driver’s question instead of Fandango’s question and it got so confused that i hung up to start over. Second time, i told it i wanted to see “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” instead of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory the IMAX Experience” and it wouldn’t let me back out to correct it and it got very irritated with me for wanting times that weren’t available for the regular theatre. Fine. On try three, after answering something like 14 questions through voice (or through my keypad when possible), i reached the “would you like to confirm?” part. I said yes. It told me it could not understand me. I told it yes more emphatically with as much enunciation as i could muster. It told me it did not understand me. I screamed yes into the phone and it told me it couldn’t understand me and that i should try back later. AND THEN IT HUNG UP.

First, yes is the answer to a binary question. Why can i not enter the answer into my keypad? Second, let’s be honest, voice recognition software sucks ass. At least Sprint lets me scream agent before i make a voodoo doll out of Claire. And while not everyone is on the texting bandwagon, why not at least allow that option? I can bank money that i could SMS my request much more efficiently than articulate it to some broken Eliza. Or at least let me key my responses when you can’t understand me. Nothing makes me want to use your service less than to have you hang up on me.

Fandango drives me absolutely insane because it’s one of those applications that should _just work_. Black box style. Especially if you’re a monopoly on the Metreon. What i really want is to be able to attach my mobile number to my Fandango account, which has my credit card stored. I want to be able to send a text to request movie time information. And then i want to be able to order my movie tickets by SMS and receive a confirmation on my phone, charged to my account. Is that so hard?

(PS: with tickets purchased by a friend, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory on the IMAX was utterly disturbing. In that “i kinda feel gross but i kinda like it” kinda way.) I just wish i could figure out who Willy Wonka reminds me of. Someone from my Media Lab days.

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social networks and drug networks

Rule #1 for studying social culture: pay attention to the sex and drugs.

When it was reported that Orkut is being used as a drug networking tool in Brazil, my immediate response was duh.

I have interviewed subjects who distributed cocaine in Baltimore via Friendster. (To my knowledge, they were never caught which makes it different than the situation with Orkut.) Other subjects have told me ways to find drugs on Tribe.net and MySpace. Obviously, i am not willing to disclose how or who. But this is definitely not unique to Orkut nor to social networking in general. For example, in college, people used to buy drugs on eBay.

Give people the ability to distribute information and they will distribute drugs. Tis just as obvious as if you give people access to attractive people, they will date. So, i find it very entertaining that people get up in arms about this.

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issues in quotation and citation

I know that i should love human subjects boards, but i have to admit that they are my least favorite aspect of doing research. My biggest complaint is that they do not understand the dynamics of doing research online. Thus, i’ve spent far too much time discussing what it means to be an ethical researcher of online material. One issue that always emerges concerns citations. As a researcher, you are required to respect the confidentiality of your subjects always. Yet, when you are quoting online material, you can easily throw the quote into Google and find the original source, revealing the person behind the quote (or at least their handle).

While this topic is frequently discussed in conversations about ethical research, it is clearly not a lesson that everyone has learned. In The New Nanny Diaries Are Online, the author thinks that she is being discrete, referencing her nanny anonymously. By throwing the quotes into Google, you can find the nanny’s blog. This is particularly interesting because it gives the nanny a chance to respond in her own words.

This is an interesting dynamic and one that i’m curious about in the context of research. What would it mean if subjects of research could respond to the analysis of their practices? Historically, anthropologists did not make their analyses available to subjects because it was assumed that the subjects could not understand the analysis. Personally, i’ve always been of the mindset that publications should be explicitly made available to all subjects. Yet, i have taken the elitist position that i know more and while i should listen to disagreements, i should still publish what i wrote if i still believe it after the disagreements. What would it mean to bring the subject more actively into the conversation, letting them out themselves as they see fit? What if the subjects want to be referenced explicitly so that they _can_ refute my claims?

(Based on Alex Halavais)

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some transparency

In an effort to be transparent, i feel the need to note that i resigned from Google today. I very much love Google and Blogger but i reached the point where my talents and their needs no longer aligned in productive ways. I can’t say i won’t be back, but for now, it doesn’t make sense. That said, i will really miss everyone there.

I have also decided to accept a temporary consulting gig with the Yahoo Research Labs Berkeley to work alongside my friend and co-teacher Marc Davis.

Before anyone gets all conspiracy on me, this decision is not in spite of Google. I still love Google, but i feel as though i am better off consulting for a research lab right now and the direction of Yahoo’s is 100% in line with my interests (and hell, most of my department is there). It also makes more sense for me to take project-based consulting gigs than to broadly advise within a company.

For better or worse, i’ve never been good at loving a company and hating its competitors. I strongly believe that there are strengths and weaknesses to both companies and that their products make sense for different populations. I prefer the meta-structural perspective to the cult perspective. So i can’t say that i suddenly hate Google and love Yahoo – i respect them both and i see them as very different.

So, even though i’m sad to be leaving Google, i am excited to work on entirely new problems and think about entirely different populations’ needs.

I am also excited to see a tech company that makes sociable products create a research division meant to understand social issues. For good reason, more and more companies are hiring anthropologists and sociologists. Because there is very little known about social/tech, these internal social scientists can help address problems specific to the company; when it comes to social technologies, developing an innovative algorithm means nothing if you don’t get the social issues right. I wish more tech companies would realize that they need social research more than technology research these days.

Anyhow, as always, i won’t discuss internal affairs on this blog, but i believe in reflexivity and i believe that it is responsible to be transparent about who puts food on my table so that my biases are known.

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Privacy is a Privilege

Hey, all of you privacy fanatics, take a look around. Ever stop to wonder why most of you are straight, white and male? It’s kinda obvious if you stop to think about it. Repeat after me: privacy is a privilege. Not a right. Look at the first four letters of those two words: “priv-“. Duh. They come from the same root.

When i saw this comment on one of my posts, i wanted to scream: “Everyone has an absolute right to privacy and marketers have an absolute right to (attempt to) generate revenue with those who step out of their privacy and into the public domain.”

Historically, private space came about with the onset of public space. There is no right to privacy historically or now. Private space is also not guaranteed to be a safe space. Look at issues around domestic abuse. There’s a reason that the law got involved in domestic issues – a woman is not a man’s property in either public or private space and society has a duty to protect her regardless.

Guess what? Just as we have a duty in society to protect people in private space, we have a duty to protect them in public space. We don’t allow people to violate each other when they walk out into the street simply because they chose to step out there. Why should we let institutions do so? What gives marketers some special privilege to determine how people can be psychologically manipulated in society?

The topic at hand has to do with youth. What youth have private space? Sure, your children might have their own bedroom with a lockable door and their own computer. How common do you really think this is? Youth are traditionally a population devoid of any privacy freedoms whatsoever. They have no private space. They move into the public arena to be relieved from the ways in which their parents or school authorities can dictate their mobility and communication. This is not an invitation to manipulation by marketers.

I’m tired of engaging in arguments about privacy with anyone who has not read Habermas’ Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Please read it and after finishing, read Warner’s Publics and Counterpublics. Dammit, if privacy is important to you, read these and then let’s talk. But don’t tell me about the right to privacy until you understand the historical trajectory of privacy and think about how marginalized populations. It’s not so utopian cut and dry; privacy is a privilege that many people in this world would die to have.

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why podcasts need DJs (kudos to Fake Science)

When i went to see War of the Worlds, i spent most of the film trying to crawl into my mothers’ lap because i *hate* scary movies. As i tried to calm myself in the theatre, my conscious mind told my reactive mind that it’s just the music and if it weren’t for the scary music, you’d just think that watching Tom Cruise was as fun as watching fratboys. Try watching the opening scene of Apocalypse Now without the audio – it’s an entirely different movie. Music matters and movie folks know it.

Film is not the only place where music is put to use to help tell a story. For example, NPR uses sound for many of its pieces. As much as the music between the segments on NPR can annoy me (because they have dreadful taste), they also help the transition and place the listener into the mood to hear the story. There’s an art to putting together an audio production and it’s not the same as just talking talking talking.

When i realized that a DJ friend of mine put together a podcast, i was curious enough to actually revisit my ban on podcasts. I was floored. Fake Science’s The Lab Report weaves interviews and music. They pay attention to the entire sound of the podcast, focusing on transition and creating breaks in the speaking by reviewing different music. !Plus! they have brilliant music taste so each transition includes some heavenly dub, downtempo or ambient music.

In listening to their podcast, i realized that podcasts really need DJs, or at least people who really understand the flow of sound. There is an art to sound design. While we all learn how to write in school (and some of us enjoy it more than others), we’re dreadfully ill-equipped to produce persistent, asynchronous audio without conversational feedback. Far fewer of us know how to turn audio (or video) into an art that really communicates what we’re trying to convey. And listening to someone’s awkward speech is worse than reading someone’s arbitrarily vomited words.

While Fake Science definitely is focused on the topic of music, i would strongly encouraged everyone interested in podcasting to really think about how they’re transitioning their thoughts. Talk to a DJ or sound designer, add some sound bits in an intelligent manner. I don’t really care about the music industry but i can listen to an hour of Fake Science, unlike most podcasts. And the reason is simple – they make the transitions palatable, they pay attention to how the entire podcast sounds.

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AIM Fight

One of my favorite articles is Cobot in LambdaMOO: A Social Statistics Agent. After people complained that the robot was learning about the community but not giving back, it was programmed to answer questions about the statistics it gathered. Things spun out of control because people found out that they were less cool than their friends. Competition ensued. It’s a classic case of why statistical information about social hierarchy is not always so good for community or relationships.

I thought of Cobot when i saw AIM Fight, a service that lets you put your AIM account in against your opponent’s to find out who has a higher score (a.k.a. popularity rating). So what are you going to do about your coolness score?

(Tx Joe)

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MySpace -> News Corp.

I’ve been waiting for a mega-media company to buy MySpace and sure enough, it happened. News Corp bought Intermix Media (the half-parent of MySpace). Unlike the other YASNS, the value of MySpace comes from the data on media trends that is the core of what people share on that service. You have millions of American youth identifying with media and expressing their cultural values on the site. Marketers who want to understand the constantly shifting youth trends are often looking for a perch from which to be the ideal voyeur. And with MySpace, they found it. Here, youth are sharing media left right and center and forgetting that they are doing so under the watchful eye of Big Media who are certain to use this to manipulate them. Because youth believe that MySpace is a social tool for them, they are not conscious of how much data they’re giving to marketers about their habits.

Really, it’s a brilliant move for News Corp. (assuming they can stay out of the courts and that the RIAA is nice to them). I’m just not so certain how good it is for youth culture.

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