Through the Wire's topics - tribe.net

My Reading Notes

2005-10-25T23:23:52Z

These reading notes were taken while researching source material and conceptual frameworks of potential use to social interaction design, an approach I'm developing for use in the development and design of social software, interaction tools, communication technologies and their applications.

http://www.gravity7.com/AdrianChan_ReadingNotes_ActivityTheory.pdf
Reading Notes: Activity theory, PDF, 3 pages.

http://www.gravity7.com/AdrianChan_ReadingNotes_HackerEthic.pdf
Reading Notes: Hacker Ethic PDF, 2 pages.

http://www.gravity7.com/AdrianChan_ReadingNotes_SocialSystems.pdf
Reading Notes: Social Systems PDF, 5 pages.

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Blogger in the Bathroom...

2005-10-17T21:17:40Z

Graffiti or conversation? Messaging or interaction? Which is blogging? Is it a form of writing or a form of talk?

We're tempted and perhaps even required, by insufficiency of alternatives, to understand our new technologies and their forms of use by analogy to familiar activities. Technologies of communication, of course, are hence often compared to various kinds of realtime and co-present interactions, be it private conversation, (chit)chat, an announcement, what have you. The point is not what form of interaction do we think its technically mediated form takes; it's that we lose something in translation if we refer only to familiar face-to-face comparisons.
Technology transforms, and we need to tease out the manner in which it transforms. The transformative operation that a technology performs (I'm not a determinist; in fact I think that culture anticipates its technologies before bringing them to discovery/market, to wit, the stirrup and the gun, neither of which were instruments of war in many cultures that had access to them) may be simple or complex. Most of the time that transformation is along a perceptual axis.
The magnifying glass amplifies along the visual axis (Marshall McLuhan wrote that all technologies amplify along one axis while bracketing along others, thus tunneling or focusing our experience by extending awareness just along the visual, the acoustic, etc.), the phone amplifies along the auditory, and so on. Those are the first order operations; second order operations are where things get more interesting. And to keep things to blogging, where I think we need to address a major oversight in our use of analogies...
McLuhan was famous for his (somewhat unorganized) perception of the social dimensions of technologies. Technologies, for him, conducted a two basic operations: each new technology referred to a previous technology as its content (tv referred to radio; film referred to theater), and extended our perceptual faculty beyond its normal physical power and reach. Note that the "content" of a new technology is not simply an earlier version. Viewed by McLuhan, or viewed sociologically, cinema is not a advancement of photography (which it is, of course, technically and historically speaking); it's an advancement of theater. It was either Laurie Anderson or Brenda Laurel who remarked that "we go to the movies, not to the projectors." Theater, as a form of expression that involved scripts, actors, roles, a stage, a non-participatory audience was extended as film. It's no accident that the two use the same building. (Necessary aside Foucault would add here that it's no accident the prison and the school use the same building!)
So, is blogging conversation? Though it looks more like graffiti in the bathroom (a mess of faceless messages half of which have been edited by somebody else, all written to be read, but happily free of consequence and accountability and thus tending to be heavily self promotional—in other words, names of bands)? No.
Conversation is bounded in space and time and to its participants, and blogging, clearly is not. Blogging's one remarkable feature, in fact, is in its dislocation of speaker/hearer, or speaker/audience (true of graffiti also, so, point graffiti). Conversations are a focused and directed interacton/participation. Utterances are addressed to the company present, and a great deal of the interaction, both in content of what is said and in its meta-language, as well as in physical participation, is directed towards sustaining the engagement of all participants and thus caring for the group dynamic... Conversation involves facework about the face, in other words (the first words of conversation say it all: How are you?).
I would venture to say that blogging is not a form of facework. Also, that it's not bounded in time and space in the way that conversation is. I think it's more accurate to call it a form of talk, and then go from there in our efforts to be more specific. First, though, and picking up on the McLuhan trail again, to the modes in which the blog is a transformation. And I say this about all communication technology:

technologies of communication and interaction perform a temporal operation

This sneaks up on us because we tend to be visually inclined (as a culture) and spatially and object oriented. We like to see things and their relations in space (McLuhan claimed that Americans were visual culture; Russians, an oral/acoustic culture, and that our mode of spying on them was thus to conduct U2 spying overflights, their mode was to plant bugs and listen in...). Time is much harder to plot, but it's there, and it's the primary mode in which interaction technologies tear the interaction from its ground and foundation.
Technologies of communication, like blogging, IM (which is near-synchrony), email, message boards, what have you, "connect" people in spite of physical distance, and separate them in time. In two times, in fact: first, absolute (real, objective) time; second, subjective time (duration, lived time).
The first dislocation puts us out of step with one another, and is the reason that asynchronous communication technologies tend to have problems distributing or focusing participants' attention to one another. We need to be face to face and thus in real time to pay attention to each other as people. Asynchronous technologies enable us to "talk" to each other, but not to attend to each other (in meta-linguistic terms; whether or not "attention" is a currency of blogging, of posting and commenting, is a psychological matter and one we can address separately, but I think the answer is smal attention but not ontological, or big attention, if you get where I'm going with that). This is one reason that chat rooms are filled with so many capital letters and punctuation marks: those are attention getting devices, facial or physical gestures, if you will, transposed to writing.
The second dislocation removes us from common time, and is, philosophically speaking, more profound. Sociologically speaking, it's more frightening. We might be adapting to asynchronous interactions, to the practice of messaging, emailing, posting, etc, as a form of talk, and having little problem with it as a first order technology. But on the second order, where asynchrony and physical separation still the rhythms of shared, inter-personal time, I'd venture to say that we're having a tougher time.
In fact our entire culture may be out of time, may be losing "good time" and "quality time" to the multi-tracked, discontinuous, and interruptive time that is the time of asynchronous communication. We pride ourselves on being connnected, and we get connected, presumably, to maintain our connections. We get in touch to be in touch. But connections facilitated by technologies don't produce connection. Technology's transformation is lost in the terminology. Analogy, which is a comparitive operation, doesn't capture a dislocation-amplification-extension (which is what technology does).

My point—and I apologize for the length of this one, but it took a while to cover the technical and the social separately here— was that in understanding social practices in which technologies like blogging have become embedded we need to better grasp the manner in which a technology-in-practice amplifies and extends, how its operation intinsic to new second order social and cultural practices, and most importantly (because we see it so poorly), how it works with time.

posted in Through the Wire - 2 replies

Blogging as public and private

2005-10-16T16:33:47Z

The sociologist's main concern is understanding the manner in which the individual stretches transcends his/her physical presence with relationships that stretch across time and space. "Big" sociology goes after the structures and systems that comprise "society," the institutions in which common values are sedimented and through which they are codified and maintained, the various forms and positions of power by which certain interests and groups articulate their preferences, and so on. I'm captivated by the smaller sociological concerns, those that describe the interface of technology and individual, where the rubber of cultural practices meets the road by which we stretch out and navigate our interpersonal relationships.
Big sociology used to distinguish between the public and private spheres—the former being the zone of social integration, the latter, a space in which the individual had freedom of movement (and thought). But that distinction belied a spatial and physical bias of thinking that we can no longer maintain. Communication technologies today permit us to be present to one another without physical co-presence; they place demands on our time and attention that exceed the physical boundaries of a situated individual presence. Presence negotiation now requires that we finesse our handling of interactions and relations with and through mediation by technologies. Put in terms of primary sociological interests, technologies have become deeply embedded in the very means by which we stretch our relations across time and space.
Take blogging, for example. Among the numerous things already said about blogging, mostly by bloggers, a few misconceptions stand out.
Misconceptions:
--Blogging is writing
--Blogging is publishing
--Blogging is public

Corrections:
--Blogging is talk, what Erving Goffman called "an open state of talk," and more closely resembles forms of speech than writing (though it takes the form, of course, of text). (Note, for Goffman, a monologue is a kind of talk; talk does not have to be conversation.)
--Blogging is a form of messaging, and though blogging technologies are online publishing technologies, we shouldn't confuse the product with its means of production. As a form of messaging, blogging involves a loose and ambiguous mode of addressing (as in, a speaker addresses his statements to a listener). Audiences in other words are not as anonymous as they are for the published text, for the medium does permit commenting, quoting, and other kinds of "interaction" with the text or author.
--Blogging instantiates a hybrid public/private "space" (as much as I dislike the term) in that the blogger may compose his or her piece as if it were a private journal, or alternatively, have a specific audience (of one or many) in mind. The blog form does not presuppose an anonymous readership simply because it involves a communication/interaction tool/technology.

The sociologist could derive any number of conclusions from this, but the ones that captivate me again pertain to our relationship negotiations. To what extent do we hide "private" messages within our "public" blogs? To what extent do we feel involved in conversation when blogging (looking for our piece to be picked up, or for its comments, direct or not, on other bloggers, to be acknowledged)? What does it mean that we engage in these modes of indirect interaction? What temporal markers might characterize the blog form—from how long we expect to wait for comments or continuation, to the effect of the blog's persistence in time on the bracketing of conversation (a blogger's utterances long outlive the blogger's act of uttering them). And so on....

posted in Through the Wire - 2 replies

tag camp

2005-09-30T17:26:51Z

Hi,

From the webpage itself:
"TagCamp complements BarCamp (that complemented FooCamp)." http://tagcamp.org/

posted in Through the Wire - 1 reply

Resources and sites of interest

2005-05-27T20:43:33Z

hey all,

Some folks have asked that I make some of my thoughts more accesssible than they are currently, which is to say, that I pdf them instead of html them...

I've put a couple here:

http://homepage.mac.com/mihalis66/

go to my public idisk, then Comm Studies.

--There's a pdf of my early questions on technologies of communication, 2003 and not revised.

--and a pdf of an abstract to my book project on "proximities" (also unrevised).

--blogs are here:
http://www.gravity7.com/blog/media/
http://www.gravity7.com/blog/film/

I encourage you to post other things of note! (and i wish there were a "resources" shelf for tribes so that we could build permanent collections.)

posted in Through the Wire - 0 replies

software as genre

2005-05-18T07:36:37Z

Here is a thought: software tools are similar to literary genres:
- software is inifitely meleable just as literature
- to have a meaning for people a program needs to be based on some existing other software or phisical device, as a source of analogies and metaphores
- this leads to the creation of software 'genres': email reader, instant messaging, web forum, wiki etc (I've chosen communication tools just to talk about something familiar to all members here), there is very little distinction between those genres other then some convention

posted in Through the Wire - 2 replies

Shameless self promotion

2005-05-16T22:38:02Z

(Adrian: feel free to delete this post if you think it's _too_ shamless)

I just started a blog a few days ago: http://www.hellonline.com/blog/ so drop by for a visit sometime.

posted in Through the Wire - 3 replies

Personal Search and Tagging

2005-05-16T17:29:32Z

Sound off on tagging here. I've pasted excerpts from a recent article on Flickr, Metafilter, del.icio.us, etc.

It seems the question will be whether or not emergent relationships/categories will be more useful than static ones. What's lost in the precision and definition might be gained from the social. That said, social value add is often as much about trend/awareness/attention thresholds as it is about anything intrinsic to the information.

"....Though many Web sites have long embedded search keywords, or metadata, tagging has a social component that gives it its power.
...

Warns Danny Sullivan, editor of the online newsletter Search Engine Watch: "The noise and deliberate manipulation will probably just bring the system into a crashing halt....."
http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/internet/05/03/social.tagging.ap/index.html

posted in Through the Wire - 15 replies

Theories and Theorists

2005-05-08T13:43:42Z

I'm back in the game, finally, of theorizing around social software. Who here would be up for some nitty gritty discussions?

Topical suggestions:

Goffman and interactionism
Giddens and risk
Network Relations theories (social networking)
Technologies (rss, sites, tools, etc)

Anybody have the time?

posted in Through the Wire - 10 replies

back...

2005-03-23T20:37:46Z

hey all,
after a long hiatus from tribing (and other e things), i just couldnt help myself. is there anybody else here would like to resume conversations about exactly this kind of stuff? how're y'all doing?

adrian

posted in Through the Wire - 0 replies

dan rather and big media

2004-10-06T14:42:29Z

Certainly, I write this with a libertarian's bias...but I'm curious what your thoughts are...certainly, this story would not have blown up without the convergence of the Internet and news media.

http://disaffiliates.blogspot.com/2004/09/dan-rather-is-early-casualty-in-war.html

Dan Rather is an early casualty in the war over truth in reporting

There is a war under way for truth in reporting and a defiant Dan Rather is about to become one of the first foot soldiers fighting for Big Media to go down. It is quickly becoming common knowledge that Dan Rather and CBS’s 60 Minutes rushed to judgment regarding the authenticity of Texas National Guard documents potentially damaging to President Bush’s reelection campaign. Rather has unapologetically defended the report, seemingly oblivious to the magnitude of his error and the damage it is going to cause CBS. The fact that Americans are more and more concerned about the authenticity and implications of the 60 Minutes report than the content of the documents is evidence that accuracy in reporting is the big story of this election session.

Ten years ago, the 60 Minutes story most likely would have caused its political damage without challenge. Those with legitimate questions over the authenticity of the documents did not have the ability to reach a wide enough mass of people to matter. Information travels so quickly today that, thanks to Matt Drudge, millions of Americans were hours ahead of the major news networks on this story, all wondering loudly through their own outlets (blogs, websites, et al) why no one was reporting this breakthrough.

The battle lines of this very public battle are drawn and the number of casualties is striking and rapidly on the rise. On the offensive are citizens who desire truth in reporting, many of whom are only recently realizing that the media they grew up respecting may not be worthy of their trust. Entrenched and on the defensive are the Dan Rathers of the world – the media elite.

Books exploring bias in the media have repeatedly reached the tops of the charts over the past few years. Websites devoted to debunking misinformation and exposing bias are spouting up every day. The clear majority of Americans no longer trust Big Media to report the truth. Now that there are thousands upon thousands of alternative sources to read and interpret the news, Big Media’s days are numbered.

The fall from grace has been in the works for years, but is accelerating as more people come to understand the power of the Internet for news gathering and fact checking. The NY Times started crumbling under the weight of the Jayson Blair scandal and internal squabbles over the future direction of the grey lady have been embarrassingly public. USA Today has suffered material damage through the exploits of Steven Glass, while hints of deeper troubles within the nation’s most popular newspaper were exposed. The once revered Boston Globe has taken a beating for its similar penchant for publishing falsities. 60 Minutes will never again garner the audience it once enjoyed. Dan Rather is offending millions who will never believe him again. Certainly, lies and distortions have existed since people started reporting the news; but now there is a way to expose cheaters and counter-balance the damage.

In the information age, where news and data flows to tens, thousands, or potentially millions of discerning citizens at the click of a mouse, getting away with a lie is infinitely more challenging than it ever was. Cheats, liars, and media monopolies beware!

posted in Through the Wire - 4 replies

Students grade teachers online, and some are riled

2004-09-29T04:13:48Z

http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2004-09-28-students-grade-teachers_x.htm

Students grade teachers online, and some are riled
By Randy Dotinga, The Christian Science Monitor
When Eric Piotrowski wonders what his high school English students think of him, he simply logs on to RateMyTeachers.com, where millions of anonymous teacher critiques await anyone with an unrestricted Internet connection.

At the site, a smiley-faced icon with sunglasses sits next to Mr. Piotrowski's name, indicating he's especially popular. Eighteen students gave Piotrowski an average rating of 4.1 out of 5, with one saying he's "one of the coolest teachers I've ever had." Piotrowski couldn't be more flattered — or more supportive of online ratings.

"Too many teachers insulate themselves from the people around them," says Piotrowski, who teaches at Sun Prairie High School in a suburb of Madison, Wis. The Web site "is fundamentally a good way for us to keep tabs on what the people we work with have to say."

Others aren't so sure. The rapid growth of RateMyTeachers.com — which boasts ratings for 887,000 public and private schoolteachers in four countries — is provoking a backlash. The site's creators estimate that hundreds of school districts have cut off Internet access to RateMyTeachers.com. And teachers, many of them stung by blunt or crass comments on the site, are crying foul. They don't think children should be able to anonymously rate their teachers, even though older students have long had that freedom on many college campuses.

"How can you claim that your service offers more than a way for kids to 'bash' teachers?" asks "Pete," a physical education teacher who anonymously posted a complaint letter to an education Web site. The site is "unprofessional," writes the teacher, who says he doesn't care whether students think his classes are dull — "bored people ... are boring people" — but is offended by "derogatory comments about my physical appearance."

The naysayers don't appear to have any significant effect on the popularity of the Web site. Last week, the site received its 6-millionth teacher rating, up from just 1 million barely more than a year ago, says cofounder Michael Hussey, a 20-something computer whiz from Maine.

With his partners, Mr. Hussey created RateMyTeachers.com in 2001, partly as a way to give students a chance to compliment their favorite teachers. "It's a site I wanted for myself when I was in high school," he says. "I really liked most of my teachers, but I wasn't necessarily going up and telling them why I liked them because I didn't want to be labeled as a suck-up."

Hussey says he also wanted to give students a forum for critical evaluations. "There was a small handful of teachers who I felt were really more or less wasting my time. But I had nowhere to go for constructive criticism without fear of grade retribution."

On RateMyTeachers.com, students pay nothing to look at ratings or rate their teachers. The site, which Hussey says is profitable, makes money from advertising and, as of earlier this month, from paid memberships for parents.

The site has a small paid staff, according to Hussey, and relies on hundreds of student volunteers who monitor postings for accuracy and taste in the US, Canada and now Britain and Ireland. Anyone can click a tiny red flag next to a comment to automatically remove it from the site pending review by a staff member.

Most of the ratings "are pretty accurate," says Kyle Peavley, a ninth-grader at Edgewood High School in Trenton, Ohio, who monitors ratings of teachers at his school. In some cases, students may rip into teachers who gave them detentions, he says, "but most of the comments are not bad at all."

Kyle thinks the ratings help both students and teachers. "I can decide which teacher to choose by their ratings and the comments," he says. As for teachers, "it gives them a chance to improve, and they get to see what feedback they're getting from students. They get to know how well they're teaching."

The site can indeed be a tool for teachers, says Dan Baldwin, who teaches English at Brooklyn Technical High School in New York City, which has nearly 14,000 ratings, more than any other school. But Mr. Baldwin, who has a 4.3 rating from 208 students, has noticed that only teachers with positive ratings like RateMyTeachers.com. "I would like to think it would be an occasion for teachers to do some soul-searching and change or improvement, but I don't know that happens."

It's hard to imagine how it could, considering RateMyTeachers.com's reliance on anonymity, says Peter Gow, academic dean of Beaver Country Day School in Chestnut Hill, Mass., who complains of both "undeserved character assassination" and "undeserved beatification" on the site.

"I've often thought what fun it would be to create several virtual selves and rate myself with extravagant praise. And the thing is, there really isn't anything to prevent my doing just that," says Mr. Gow, who has just one rating — a perfect 5.0 — on the site.

But Baldwin points out that teachers themselves are in the business of rating students. "Turnabout," he says, "is fair play."

Copyright 2004, The Christian Science Monitor

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Coordinated reading and shared bookmarks

2004-09-09T07:50:27Z

The first obvious benefit of sharing links in a community is the discovery of new good sources by browsing other people lists. The system can assist in this discovery by suggesting interesting pieces.

But it is not the only imaginable advantage. Onother one would be 'coordinated reading' where you divide a list of shared bookmaks into parts, each participant reads his part and then reports (by for example marking the bookmark) when he found something that would be interesting for others, or even by just one participant - then he would mark it in a way visible by only this particular participant (that's SocialRouting!).

I believe there are others benefits to be discovered.

Copied from http://zby.aster.net.pl/kwiki/index.cgi?SharedBookmarks on my wiki.

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Rhythm and Blues

2004-09-08T21:30:09Z

It's been so long since I've posted to this, my own tribe, that the only thing i could possibly throw out there is this: what's the life-sustaining rhythm and pace for an online discussion/tribe?

Once dead, they can be resuscitated, but that tends to be a task left to a new crop of members. At what point to sys admin people start to sweat that their community's getting too thin? How often have you opted not to post to a tribe because it's been so dead that you figure there's no point in leaving even a crumb for fear of attracting the wrong attention? (e.g. newbies, not to sound as that makes me sound...)

cheers,

a

posted in Through the Wire - 9 replies

Dissent

2004-08-07T01:50:33Z

the fall of many-to-many communication online, or whatever you may call it.

six months or so ago i had an assignment in a class on negotiation strategies that had to be completed with "strangers" online. A basic level of trust seemed apparent, as the three other participants were from three other schools around the country, with the same basic instructions, to play out one of four different roles, expand the pie, and max your share. use email, chat, IM, forum, as you wish...

Of course it was going to be fun/interesting..but I started out pretty worried that it was going to be difficult to complete this in the time limit (2 hrs) with adequate satisfaction (perhaps my expectations are too high). But I prepared a good plan to help everyone get through the project smoothly, and was fully confident by the time our meeting began.

but it was one of the most chaotic, confusing, frustrating communication experiences I have ever had. I mean, who the hell WERE these people?!

is anyone with me on this sort of thing? i'm content to burst my own bubble only.

posted in Through the Wire - 1 reply

Trust

2004-06-08T00:46:06Z

What kinds of trust can we build in online communities? If it is true that trust is a product of vulnerability, and that it takes some kind of risk exposure to produce trust, then how rich can our trust be here? And if one key ingredient to trust is a commitment to remain in a relationship (I can sacrifice your trust and suffer nothing if I'm willing to lose your relationship), then how do we overcome the obvious fact that online, there's neither judge nor jury... (nor police nor prison)...

posted in Through the Wire - 21 replies

"Your Company Sucks"

2004-06-02T14:47:10Z

Here is the press release I told you about in the "Trust" thread. It went out on the wire today....what do you think of the implications of such a marketing strategy, implemented across many industries?

“Your company sucks!”
CustomInk.com publishes uncensored customer satisfaction reviews to create a sales bonanza

FALLS CHURCH, VA – “Your company sucks,” says a disgruntled customer. Would you share that info with your current sales prospects? Washington DC-based CustomInk.com would. Two years ago, the company decided to start publishing all of their customers’ evaluations on their web site, completely unreviewed and unedited, in real-time, available for the buying public. The trust such marketing engenders is one reason this fast-growing company is now the internet’s most popular “custom apparel” website according to web-ranking service, Alexa.

Because of the overwhelming number of positive unedited reviews confidently displayed on the site, first-time customers are more likely to pull the trigger and make a purchase. Since launching the feature, which is prominently displayed on the right side of the site’s home page, CustomInk’s sales have quadrupled.

In March 2000, on the eve of the dot-com collapse, former Harvard classmates Marc Katz and Dave Christensen launched CustomInk.com, a website that empowers anyone to design and order custom t-shirts online, as well as hats, bags, drinkware, and more. The duo agreed from day one that customer satisfaction would be the company’s top commitment. Little did they know that they would be able to use their strong customer satisfaction record as a unique and effective marketing tool.

The uncensored flow of information across the internet allows any individual with a bad customer experience to quickly throw up a website or weblog and rant to a potentially large audience, possibly damaging a business’s reputation. Rather than let third parties dictate their perceived level of customer satisfaction, CustomInk.com decided to put their reputation on the line, literally.

“We made the decision to show people everything our customers have to say – even when it’s bad. How else will they trust us? And it’s worked out great because our team is terrific and works so hard to amaze customers, so 99% of the reviews are extremely positive anyway. I also think that knowing the reviews are there for all to see is a powerful motivator for all of us. Besides that, it can be fun; once a customer wrote ‘If CustomInk were a girl, I’d marry it!’”

Katz and his team of 55 employees now sell over a million t-shirts a year, with business more than doubling year-over-year since its creation. 99% of customers report in their uncensored evaluations that they would order from CustomInk again.

# # #

Posted: 06/02/04

CustomInk LLC is a privately held web service company that enables people to design and order custom-decorated products, such as printed T-shirts and embroidered caps for their groups/events, including businesses, student groups, sport leagues, family reunions, and more. A customer-focused, entrepreneurial, and forward-thinking company, Custom Ink was founded in August 2000 and currently employs 55+ employees.

According to Amazon.com’s web ranking service, Alexa, CustomInk.com is the internet’s most popular “custom apparel” website.
http://www.alexa.com/browse/categories?catid=27863

Contact:
Michael Hussey
703.891.2267
mhussey@customink.com

posted in Through the Wire - 0 replies

Depending on Technology

2004-05-04T20:44:01Z

Hey all,

I've been remiss as moderator in starting up new discussions, moving things along, etc. I thought i'd hang back at first.

I had a thought (those worth mentioning are a rare occurrence) a while back that I want to run past everyone.

I was thinking that we think of technologies in terms of what they do. Want to know what it does, then turn it on.

But that in for communications technologies (phones, email, IM, you get the pic), a better test is to turn them off. When you notice their absence, you have found what they really do.

I guess what I'm saying is that for each technology there's a technical dimension and a social dimension. Social practices are difficult to observe from the inside; removing a technology may sometimes be the best way to learn about its social relevance and social function.

So......

One of the remarkable things about Internet-based technologies and other "thin" media (low human bandwidth), at least in my experience, is that their absence doesnt seem to matter a great deal. At least emotionally. I've never missed a phone, email, voice mail, etc while lounging on the beach.

But I have felt paranoid that I didnt know what was going on or that people couldnt reach me when my phone broke, or my email was down.

How have communication technologies worked their ways into your lives? What do you or would you miss most? What have you become dependent on? What services do you take for granted? How much could you live without?

posted in Through the Wire - 1 reply

The Rise of the Machines?

2004-04-15T05:13:35Z

Many of the people here are clearly interested in the human side of social software: exploring how human relationships change when they're mediated through some technological means. Another interesting side of it, though, is what the machines can tell us about ourselves and our relationships -- information that we might not actually be aware of.

There are a few obvious ways that one might explore this: rather than depending solely upon the explicit, stated relationships between people, what happens if the machines that are mediating those relationships track interactions or types of behavior? Alice frequently initiates discussion threads, as does Dennis, but Bob and Carol both tend to respond to threads started by others. Edward frequently responds to Alice's postings, as does Carol (and perhaps Edward and Carol are responding to posts in different "tribes" and therefore missing the implied relationship between them). Edward and Carol don't have a stated relationship to one another, but is it significant that they interact with the same person? Dunno, but possibly an interesting direction to explore.

On a slightly different track, since latent semantic analysis is a big deal in some other areas of technology where I spend time poking around, I ended up wondering whether some of these principles could be applied.

There are a few interesting papers out there on "discriminative clustering of text documents," for example. By analyzing the contents of text documents, machines can rather accurately group them (the groupings generally end up being very similar to the groupings applied by human editors).

Note: this has been applied primarily to academic and scientific papers (so the texts are generally internally consistent and homogeneous), which leaves a potentially gaping hole in the speculation to follow. But...let's say that the body of text that someone contributes to a site such as this one constitutes their "text;" the machines then group these texts, creating meta-tribes of people who write about the same sorts of things.

This is, of course, potentially problematic as the texts in this scenario may contain so much "noise" that effective grouping is impossible. In addition, this analysis won't be able to factor context in, opening up the possibility for pretty weird classifications.

Still, it's an interesting area. We hear a lot about what you lose in machine-mediated social relationships -- are there things that can be enhanced or added by those machines?

posted in Through the Wire - 21 replies

Communication and Connection through the Looking Glass

2004-04-09T21:26:35Z

Our names become "handles" to steer through labrynths little plastic mice our guides, words are weapons injurying all but killing no one, images are emotion for a deadpan typist whose "rofl" only exists in a stream. If we are entering a new dimension where is the depth that we are imagining?

posted in Through the Wire - 8 replies

Thin Ties, Weak Ties

2004-04-09T06:59:29Z

Gravetter's Weak Tie theory points out that in FOAF networks, it's not actually the first degree, but the second, that offers the greatest value. Because it's at the second degree that we establish new relations and benefit from some residual trust -- enough perhaps to either get laid, get employed, or perhaps get a promotional box of Tide in the mail just for saying "hello".

Are social software systems like this best for friendships -- or are they best for strangerships? For some new kind of social interaction: meeting not-entirely-strangers?

posted in Through the Wire - 2 replies

Whose Speech?

2004-04-08T21:05:00Z

Should members of a community have the right to edit, remove, or hide their posts after the fact? Does online speech (like this) belong to a semi public domain, having been posted to a discussion? Or does it belong to the speaker?

posted in Through the Wire - 4 replies