Every year during undergraduate, i would race to University Hall to pick up a copy of the latest course catalogue as soon as it was released. My best friend and i would sit in couch covered coffee shops over tea/juice and circle classes that looked interesting. The classes were ordered by departments with cross-references made. Each class had a full description under the title and professor. There was this glorious rush of all the things that we could learn and we obsessed over that book. The beginning of each semester was filled with the enthusiasm of rushing around on campus seeing if the classes lived up to their description.

Inevitably, some of the classes would be cancelled, change times or otherwise not match the promise of their description. Because of this and the cost of publishing those catalogues, most schools went digital.

There is nothing nearly as delectable about surfing terribly organized webpages looking for classes by title/professor only, having to click twice to find a description that is never there, a syllabus that is never submitted on a website that is often unavailable for this or that reason. Not only has searching for classes lost its joy, it’s outright irritating. I automatically skip over surfing the disciplines that don’t seem at all related – things like French or geography or art. And thus, as i learned last semester, i miss critical classes that would have been beyond interesting. But to find them in the sea of titles would never work. It takes 1 scroll-down bar, and at least 1 click to get to each discipline. You have to scroll down to grad-level classes (or click to next pages). And then click on every class whose inane title might actually be relevant. That’s a hell of a lot of clicks for nothing. After looking at 50 or so classes, i’ve given up.

But i found a new method! Of course, it will drive all of the pro-digital folks crazy because it’s just as flawed as the original tree-killing one. Now, instead of dealing with the hellish page, i go to the bookstore the day before classes. I take a notepad and walk through each aisle of textbooks. I don’t pay any attention to what discipline i’m in – i just look for things whose titles look interesting or whose authors i know i should read. Ooh – 3 Bourdieus, must be good, write down class number. I came out of the bookstore with 10 potential classes and then looked those up on the hellish website. They were in departments i never would’ve guessed (and some that i would’ve). I cut out all the classes that took place before 11AM or have 3 meeting times cause i know better. At this stage, it’s seminars all the way. And voila, i have class choices.

The funny thing is that this route is in theory far more unpredictable. There are inevitably classes with readers instead of books or where the professor forgot to order the books. But i found more interesting classes this way in 30 minutes in the bookstore than i did with probably 1 hour spent in online frustration. And i feel as though i have a general understanding of the topology of classes.

Now, this doesn’t mean that online course catalogues can’t work, but they need to be improved. Desperately. First off, it should be hyper simple for professors to upload their course books. In fact, they should upload it to the same system that orders it and puts it online. The course readers people should also connect all items there to the class because you know they have to document it somewhere since they call for copyright on all of those items. Given complete data, I should be able to search for authors that I want to read, not just professor’s names. I should have a little interactive system that shows what classes I’ve taken and shows me the topology of classes available, including a recommendation system. I should be able to surf the classes by similar content, across disciplines. I should be able to see the whole landscape, not just the terrible hierarchy of departments and numbers and navigate without a bazillion clicks. And dammit, i want a PDF that i can download and print out incomplete. Let me kill my own tree so that i can have the joy of sitting in cozy couches with a friend and cider, surfing all of the possible things i could take. Make the digital do more than my paper version ever could, but let me have my paper joy too.

Luna

Originally uploaded by zephoria.

I just spent the week in LA with Mimi, working out readings for this semester and plotting in general. As such, i got to spend lots of time with her kids who are utterly awesome. Luna was obsessed with my fuzzy items and jingly bracelets and decided to dress up as little danah, resulting in a picture that i just had to share.

It is so not cool that both LiveJournal AND Last.FM are down simultaneously, particularly when i need them both. Then again, that’s probably because they’re linked somehow. Hrmfpt.

On February 5, ExploreSpirit (the org that put on the Altered States and the Spiritual Awakening conference) is putting on Resonance, a conference that “will examine music from this emerging paradigm of the sacred, exploring the connection between music and spirituality from a variety of perspectives, weaving them together into a larger whole, and providing a glimpse of a new landscape of sound and spirit.”

This might be of interest to those of you who appreciate the intersection between music and spirituality. It sure interests me.

[posted to OM]

People who have relationships with each other often have shared interests, values and tastes. As collections of relationships evolve, cultures form with collective interests, values and tastes (that may not resemble any or all of the individual members’). There are shared cultural practices and activities embedded in these cultures.

There are two ways of looking at this – through the foci or through the group. There appear to be communities that follow particular interests, say a music genre. But also – and this is important – there is a higher probability that your friends share the same interests as you than a random sampling of people. In other words, if you really like David Bowie, your friends are more likely to like David Bowie that a random collection of the same number of people. Of course, this does not mean that they all like David Bowie or that any of them like him as much as you do. Likewise, this doesn’t mean that the biggest David Bowie fan is your friend (although you’re more likely to have something in common with this person than a random stranger).

Cultures often form within social network clusters because members of the group tend to share things in common. Additionally, when people like each other, they are interested in trying out each other’s passion. Try dating someone who *loves* David Bowie – you’ll find yourself listening to him too.

Now, think about all social networking tools. They have all proliferated based on social network clusters – friend groups with dense network overlap. A lot of these groups have brought their groups’ culture with them and it is these cultures that people often recognize. In the early days of Friendster, this is why people thought Friendster was all gay men, all Burners, all whatever. The indie rock kids have invaded MySpace, the Burners took over Tribe.net, Brazilian culture has dominated Orkut. Depending on the cultures that an individual participates in, one service or another feels far more appealing.

Anyone interested in creating sociable applications needs to understand that this dynamic is natural and the product of very excited individual(s) spreading a product to their friendgroup. Why a group really values a particular software should be a problem to solve, not an act to suppress. Attempts to disrupt culture often disrupts a lot more than the narrow culturally defined group – this is the problem with social networks… attitudes flow through the networks just as much as information.

Culture emerges in most social technologies that bring people together. Like it or not, the company who has created the tools is faced with the responsibility of supporting that culture, particularly with hosted tools/communities. This can be very tricky when a company fosters a culture that they did not expect or want (a.k.a. it’s not a population that can be squeezed for money). What to do becomes an ethical question.

The irony is that most social technology companies want the whole world to use their service. The world includes a vast array of different cultures and communities, not all of which are compatible with each other. So when the cultures have to interact because of the tool, it is fundamentally impossible to actually have all cultures involved if there are conflicting ones. Take the homophobes and the queers – they really don’t go well together. If you choose to support the queers by making your tool queer-friendly, you will piss off the homophobes. And no matter what, those two groups really don’t want to have to interact with each other on the site.

Therein lies an interesting problem for builders of social tools – how to support culture, what to do when you have issue with the culture that emerged and how to deal with the fact that you can’t get everyone to use a social tool if the interface will reveal the values of the other one or if members from conflicting groups will have to interact.