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I was mightily pleased by Nicholson Baker's piece "The Charms of Wikipedia," which appeared recently at/in the New York Review of Books. It's nominally a review of Wikipedia: The Missing Manual, by John Broughton, but really it's a opportunity for Baker to deliver a big love letter to Wikipedia. Turns out he not only approves of Wikipedia (which surprised me, given his legendary hatred of digital card catalogs and digital newspaper archives), but has also been a Wikipedia contributor. Hm! In true Baker style, the thing that lures him in is a desire to save articles that are marked for deletion. It's apparent, from reading Baker's books, that he loves even the most minute details of human existence, and it's really (charmingly) in keeping with his personality that he can't bear the thought of losing the entry on someone like Vladimir Narbut, "a minor Russian Acmeist poet whose second book, Halleluia, was confiscated by the police." I've done my share of Wikipedia editing, too, although the thing that often draws me in is born less of love than it is of revulsion: I stumble upon some page that is so mind-bogglingly awful that it stimulates a near-compulsory desire to fix it. This happened most recently regarding the page on (of all things) Nudity in film, which, as you might imagine, had become the repository for some rather unsavory kipple throughout its existence. (My work on it is not complete: see, for instance, the stuff about "a brief shot up Jessica Rabbit's dress" down at the bottom of the page for a representative example of the stuff I've been carving away from it.) I'm no expert on nudity in film or anything, but I more-or-less know how to organize and fix bad writing, which makes Wikipedia an occasionally-irresistable pasttime for me.
Thursday, March 13, 2008
living the life
You know you're really an academic when you willingly get up before dawn, on a Saturday, to go participate on an 8:30 panel on "The Internet, Publishing, and the Future of Literature." Actually I am sure it will be a lot of fun. More later.
Saturday, October 13, 2007
proprioception
Over at her LJ, Angela writes "I don't really get what I am supposed to do with Facebook. What is the appeal?" Lord knows I have asked myself this question enough times, not about Facebook per se but about various other social-networking type sites... long-time readers of this blog may recall that I once did a freaking six-part series on this topic way back in 2004 (one, two, two, three, four , five, six). The gist of some of those old posts, in a nutshell, is a complaint that many of these sites bill themselves as being services through which you can meet new people, and yet they systematically deny users the tools necessary to sort the dataset in ways that would help a user to actually meet new people. Facebook, which has some of the most inviolable privacy controls in the social networking world, strikes me as one of the ones that's hardest for everyday people to use in this regard (although I can see that this might be different if your network were especially close-knit; it is significant that Facebook was developed for use on college campuses (specifically Harvard) and has been open to the general public for less than a year). But in any case, in the intervening years, I've come to think of the very label of "social networking sites" to be something of a misnomer. In my own experience, it seems that people are using them more as "social modeling sites." By which I mean that people use them mostly to keep in touch with friends that they already have. People hit the sites, sign up, add their friends, and then (often) stop looking around any further than that. My own experience is an admittedly limited pool, but researcher danah boyd, crunching data gathered by the PEW Internet & American Life Project, finds that the numbers bear this out: "91% of teens are using social network sites to stay in touch with friends they see in person while only 49% are using them to meet people (ever)." A lot of these sites struggle because people (adults?) can't be bothered to go in and update their profiles on a daily basis, which limits their value as a way of keeping tabs those people. (Have you logged into Friendster or Orkut lately?) One of the things that's genius about Facebook is that it's so friendly towards third-party plug-ins, which, if you play your cards right, can allow your profile to update steadily without ever even logging into Facebook. My own page has widgets from Netflix, del.icio.us, and Last.fm, all of which auto-update as I go about my daily business of watching movies, scavenging links, and listening to music. If I could find Flickr and LibraryThing plug-ins that I liked, my profile would update with photos and books, too... Granted, checking out what I'm listening to, linking to, or photographing is a poor substitute for (say) face-to-face interaction, a phone call, or a letter, but I think that to view them in an either-or schema like that is missing the point: all that Facebook minutia just serves as an extra layer of information that a friend can have access to. Wired journo Clive Thompson, in a enthusiastic piece on Twitter and Dodgeball, describes the minutia that flows through these services as "granular updates," and claims that these updates ultimately yield a "subliminal sense of orientation." I think we could think of Facebook in the same fashion. Once upon a time I might not have been convinced that being constantly in micro-touch with people would have been at all appealing, but given that constant overages have forced me to switch to a phone plan that allows me to send unlimited text messages, I think it's safe to say that those days are safely in the past. Update: after discovering the Scrabble plug-in, Angela no longer wonders what Facebook is for. :) Labels: internet, networks, relationships, technology
Friday, September 07, 2007
Over at Clive Thompson's interesting blog Collision Detection, there's a post on the findings of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, which finds that two-thirds of Americans feel they could stop using Internet search engines entirely without much change to their lives. I like Thompson's reply: "During the workday, I use search engines several times an hour -- and for several extended periods during the day I'll be doing queries several times a minute. If I were to average it out, I'd say I probably do a search every 15 minutes while I'm at work at my desk. Obviously, I skew pretty far off to the side of the bell-shaped curve here because I'm a) a journalist, b) a technology journalist, c) a blogger, and d) someone who regards the Internet, functionally, as a part of my consciousness. Search engines aren't merely the way I find information: They're part of my basic thought processes." Hear hear. (The number of Google searches I do while writing an average Imaginary Year entry would probably surprise people, and I'm currently working on a set of projects that use Google even more fundamentally, sort of in the style of flarf, only minus the comedy.) The comments thread on Thompson's post is full of people praising Google and talking about the usual signs of Google overuse (using it as a spell-checker, etc.), but I also found this comment on "the changing nature of the Web" to also be insightful: "An unindexed mass of pages made centralized search engines a necessity. These evolved into even more centralized portals. Now we're seeing these portals lose ground to decentralized blog networks [...] The Web is becoming increasingly more social and decentralized in nature. I use Google pretty often, but classic internet search is just one of many, many access points at my disposal now." Labels: internet, technology
Friday, February 11, 2005
David Weinberger on why he hates Friendster. The most interesting bit, for me, is this one:
"Look, I want to say to the Friendsters of the world, we already invented a social network for friends and strangers. It's called the Internet. Why are you privatizing it? Why do we need a proprietary sub-network to do what the Internet has already done in an open way?" Excellent questions, although one answer might be that the proprietary sub-networks have a gentler learning curve—these proprietary networks are appealing (I think) to people who aren't particularly web-savvy. Just follow the link in your invitation and fill in the blanks and within three minutes you can be enjoying some of the pleasures of connectivity. It's a closed, limited network, yeah, one that walls out most of the bewildering wilds of the Web, but if the success of AOL has taught us anything, it's that what some people want out of the Web is a managed (or manageable) experience.
This does beg the question of whether the more-managed (closed) parts of the Web might be hurting the less-managed (open) parts. The Web is not a finite resource like geography: each managed "area" does not take the "place" of an unmanaged "area." But attention is a finite resource, maybe the key one in talking about the Web, and when a service like AOL steers its users around and around in its own little content ghetto it siphons that resource away from the rest of the Web. Some of the better social networking websites (Flickr, Orkut, Tribe) are less guilty of this, since they allow you to include a link to your webpage in your profile, appends a little arrow that points "out"...
Related: Caterina's continued enthusiasm for social networks.
Sunday, April 04, 2004
A while ago, in one of my social software critiques, I wrote:
"What would actually be useful is to be able to rate my friends in terms of the intensity of the bond between us. There are eight people currently listed as my friends in Orkut. I am, indeed, fond of them all. But two of them I've never met. Two more I've only met on one occasion. One is a casual acquaintance who I haven't had contact with since he moved away from Chicago six months (or so) ago. Two are people who I enjoy some degree of intimacy with, people who I could call on the phone just to say "how are you?," people who I have had dinner with (once or twice) within the past year. And one is a guy who's been my friend for fifteen years. This information has obvious relevance to anyone who's trying to make a meaningful use of my network, but to Orkut (or Friendster or Tribe) all of the bonds are of equal intensity, creating a picture of me and my network of friends which is weirdly distorted to the point where it is practically a fiction." What's needed in order to solve this problem is a workable taxonomy of types of relationships, and I had given some preliminary thought of some basic categories that such a taxonomy would contain. But now I've learned that Ian Davis and Eric Vitiello have cooked one up already: Relationship (which appears to have been designed as an attempt to formalize some sort of metadata protocol?).
Clay Shirky critiques Relationship (he actually describes it as "self-critiquing"), and he does so mainly by pointing out some of the predictable difficulties of establishing any sort of taxonomy (grey areas, etc.). Still: to my mind even the flawed Relationship taxonomy is better than the current model used by most social software, where all human bonds are equivalent.
Shirky's final point in rejecting the taxonomy is as follows: "the madness of the age is to assume that people can spell out, in explicit detail, the messiest aspects of their lives, and that they will eagerly do so, in order to provide better inputs to cool new software."
Thoughtful, but I think he might be wrong. I think the assumption that people would (if they could) is actually an increasingly safe assumption. The madness may be not the assumption that people will do it, but the fact that people will do it.
Wednesday, March 17, 2004
My old pal Brian S. sends along one link to this social software weblog and one to an article on Club Nexus, an online social network at Stanford. (The article is co-authored by Orkut Buyukokkten, the Orkut that gives Orkut its name, and Club Nexus appears to have inspired at least a few of the Big O's quirkier features, including the sexy/trusty/cool thing that I hated on last week.)
The bulk of the article is dedicated to a variety of statistical observations made from sorting and sifting the data-sets of user information in various ways. For instance, correlations can be observed between the way users describe their personalities (via personality-descriptors selected from a menu) and what those same users describe as their interests. (Appendix A, which begins on page 14, entertainingly records these correlations.)
This is an interesting use of the technology, although it's worth noting that this view of the "big picture" is only available to the system administrators, those who have the access and the tools necessary to organize the big picture into meaningful data.
Question: is there a social networking website that offers total information openness, by which I mean a site that allows all of its users to access, navigate, and sort all of its accumulated information? Because it's worth thinking about not only the value that these sorts of systems provide for their users, but also the value that they provide for their administrators. I would bet that the information that these sorts of systems may yield will turn out to be worth actual money, and as a result it's worth trying to develop a sense of exactly how much of a gap exists between what the administrators can learn from the system and what the users can learn from the system. Reading this article gave me the feeling that we may all be merrily participating in the world's largest market research scheme, and for the first time it made me think that there might be a political point to feeding noise into these systems.
Tuesday, February 10, 2004
Follow-up to this post: Brian Eno has contacted Matt Jones. I admit that I'm impressed, although they haven't actually had the sit-down chat yet, and until they do I'm not convinced that the project has been successful. (My interest in the project is strictly to see how well a data-exchanging network can provide an experiential pleasure: one that is not exclusively data-oriented. Having Brian Eno post a comment on your blog is undoubtedly pleasurable, but it's a data pleasure, only one order of magnitude above the sorts of pleasures that the Web already excels at delivering. (If one is prone to thinking of all experience as being data, processed by the mind, then one could possibly argue that all experiential pleasures are also data pleasures, but I'll argue for the distinction, given that the data involved in an experience like an actual sit-down face-to-face conversation is massively richer than the data involved in a blog exchange.))
Other tidbits: Crystal sends along a Memepool link to an interesting essaylet about the social networking technology used by French dove breeders of the 17th century, complete with karma mechanisms and fake profiles.
The "state of the state of social software" posts on this blog and elsewhere have mostly been occasioned by the launch of Orkut. I've been fooling around with Orkut for the course of the past week, and I've made some observations:
On the plus side, Orkut does one thing well: it provides me with the meaningful-blurb-under-the-photo that Friendster doesn't give me (This is the third of the three "things I want to do that Friendster won't let me do." Orkut doesn't allow me to do the first two, but at least they're managing one out of three.)
On the drawback side, Orkut has what strikes me as a truly useless friend-ranking mechanism, where you can rate friends as "sexy," "very sexy," or "super sexy." (Also cool / very cool / super cool and trustworthy / very trustworthy / super trustworthy.)
First off, this mechanism bizarrely makes ranking someone as merely "sexy" into kind of an insult... my guess is that this will lead to the kind of inflation known to characterize EBay's feedback reports, where people are unusually free with the perfect scores, because anything less seems critical. (Orkut attempts to minimize this problem by making the rankings anonymous, but, still, I find it difficult to visualize myself giving my friends anything less than the highest rankings.) If everyone in the system ends up being 90% cool (even typing out such a stupid phrase makes me gnash my teeth) then the listing that indicates a person's "coolness level" is meaningless, noise in the signal.
There's the germ of a good idea here, though: in order to provide meaningful data, social networking websites need to allow you to rank the people you're connected to. But rating them in terms of coolness or sexiness is absolutely the wrong way to go about this (not least because of the vagueness: what's the difference between "very trustworthy" and "super trustworthy" anyway?).
What would actually be useful is to be able to rate my friends in terms of the intensity of the bond between us. There are eight people currently listed as my friends in Orkut. I am, indeed, fond of them all. But two of them I've never met. Two more I've only met on one occasion. One is a casual acquaintance who I haven't had contact with since he moved away from Chicago six months (or so) ago. Two are people who I enjoy some degree of intimacy with, people who I could call on the phone just to say "how are you?," people who I have had dinner with (once or twice) within the past year. And one is a guy who's been my friend for fifteen years. This information has obvious relevance to anyone who's trying to make a meaningful use of my network, but to Orkut (or Friendster or Tribe) all of the bonds are of equal intensity, creating a picture of me and my network of friends which is weirdly distorted to the point where it is practically a fiction.
</grouchy>
Tuesday, February 03, 2004
Over at Black Belt Jones, Matt is attempting to use social networking technology to attain a specific goal: he wants to sit down and talk to Brian Eno within the next two months.
This experiment reminds me of the chapter in Hakim Bey's Temporary Autonomous Zone where he critiques the Web because it primarily provides its users with information, and fails to fulfill desires for anything other than more information. For Bey, information is useful only inasmuch as it enables the fulfillment of real-world desires (especially forbidden / illegal ones), and he views most of the information available through the Web as irrelevant to attaining these desires. Dating sites like Nerve, or social networking sites like Friendster, which hadn't emerged at the time of Bey's writing, present themselves as tools for the fulfillment of specific real-world desires (friendship, sex, lunch with Brian Eno), and, as such, they seem to be offering the right carrot, but the real question is how effective they are at delivering on this promise. So I'll be intrigued to see whether Matt Jones gets his wish.
Wednesday, January 28, 2004
Darren B writes in to ask "What is it people expect of networking websites that isn't being delivered?"
Let's take an example of a real-world situation that I'd like to be able to use this sort of site for.
Let's say a friend invites me to a party at her place. I don't know many of her friends, but I know she has a Friendster profile, so I think "maybe if I browse her friends via Friendster I'll be able to see who might be coming to this party, so that I can find someone who might share my interests, someone who I might be interested in talking to." So I go check out her profile. There are 50 friends listed there (commonly more). I click on the first one, oops, that's someone from Maine. I click on the second one, that person's from Somerville, MA. I click on the third one, that's a fakester profile for "Beer." Suddenly clicking through the other 47 is seeming less appealing.
At this juncture there are three things I'd like to do that Friendster won't let me do:
I think Friendster has lost sight of the fact that the information that's most useful to us when looking for friends or people to date is local information. Friendster should be continually sifting by geographic proximity as well as degrees-of-separation proximity. Not "here's a random person in your network" but "here's someone in your network who lives next door."
Internet networking makes it easy to connect to people all over the globe, but unless I'm looking for correspondents, knowing that I'm two degrees of separation from someone who shares my interests but lives in Wyoming does me very little good. What I want Friendster to tell me is that I'm two degrees of separation from someone who shares my interests and lives two subway stops away. And the really frustrating thing is that Friendster has that information, but its interface isn't smart enough to let me ask for it.
To be continued (when Friendster repairs its broken search feature).
Tuesday, January 27, 2004
I just joined Orkut, as I joined Tribe before that, and Friendster before that.
But I have to admit, I don't quite get the appeal of networking websites.
And it looks like Warren Ellis feels the same way: "[W]hat can you actually do aside from invite all your friends and piss about on a couple of small message boards? ... What happens after that? After you've gotten all your friends in—whom you send email to or IM regularly in any case, presumably. That's it. All done. Until, I guess, yet another social network system opens and you start all over again."
In fairness, I can see how they'd be interesting to study (see Danah Boyd's Apophenia, or, even more relevantly, the archives of her defunct Connected Selves blog). But, even with my interest in networking technology, my experience is similar to Ellis': I go to the sites, sign up, wander around for a bit browsing the profiles of strangers, and then wander away.
I might feel differently if I were actively looking to date someone new (I'm not) or if I were trying to do business networking (?).
Have any of you had rewarding experiences with these sites? E-mail me at jeremy [at] invisible-city.com.
Related: Village Voice article which draws rather lazy analogies between Mark Lombardi's drawings, Friendster, and a species of invasive blackberry (Rubus armeniacus).
Monday, January 26, 2004
The Tucson issue of poetry webmagazine Can We Have Our Ball Back.
Disclaimer: I know ten of the people in this issue, and at least one of them I dated. Put that in your social network analysis visualization schema and smoke it.
Saturday, January 24, 2004
An article documenting examples of pictorial images in social network analysis.
Related: Connecting the Dots, a use of social network analysis to identify terrorist networks (documented in the Business 2.0 article "Six Degrees of Mohamed Atta," now available to subscribers only.)
And no discussion of attempts to map "covert networks" is complete without mention of Mark Lombardi's hand-drawn documentations of capitalist power and influence. Iran-Contra makes the friendship choices among fourth graders seem like, well, child's play in comparison.
Friday, January 23, 2004
The online magazine Tekka recently caught my interest. It covers topics that are near and dear to me: new media, software, narrative... In particular, I was interested in reading Bill Bly's article on "artifactual fiction":
'By "artifactual" I mean fiction made up not of simple narration but of objects, each of which has a story (it could be a document, but could as well be a photograph, a map, a song). The object may tell its story itself (as would happen with, say, a journal entry), or the object may have to be "read" -- analyzed, dissected, contemplated, then related to other artifacts in the vicinity -- before its significance can become clear, its story understood.' But I'm put off by the registration fee—$50 is pretty steep for a year's worth of access to an online magazine. "Writers have to eat," says the site, and I know that as much as anyone. I have no serious qualms about charging for content—even charging a lot for content—but if you're going to do it, you should at least do it right.
The prime reason I'm resistant to coughing up the $50 is because there's no good way to assess the quality of what I'm paying for. If Tekka were an actual, physical magazine, I could go to a bookstore and pick up an issue, sampling the content for a low-cost, one-time investment. If I liked it, and thought that I might be interested in reading it regularly, then I'd be much more likely to put out the money for a subscription (especially if it would result in a savings over the newsstand price). Tekka isn't a physical magazine, but there are simple ways that they could mimic this model. They could make some articles available to the casual browser. Say, one feature per issue. Or just the book reviews. Or just the back issues. (Instead, they offer the first couple hundred words of each article—but the real "meat" of an article—what I most need to assess in order to make an assessment of quality—is rarely, if ever, found in an article's introductory passages.)
Perhaps they could emulate the "newsstand factor" most faithfully by allowing people to purchase a pass to all the articles in one issue. There are going to be four issues of Tekka in 2003: I'd happily pay $12.50 to read the one with the "artifactual fiction" article in it.
If we step outside of the "subscription paradigm" and the "newsstand paradigm" and think clearly about the qualities of data online, we can find other solutions as well. I've never bought a paid subscription to anything online—but I've bought individual articles online on several occasions. My most recent purchase was from the Chicago Reader archive, which charges $1.95 to $3.95 for an article (depending on length), a non-prohibitive amount. Data in an archive is, by its very nature, fragmented, nonlinear, and hypertextual—you can sell it piece-by-piece just as easily as you can sell full access to it. (Perhaps the back-end programming is trickier, but a magazine about "creating beautiful software" should be able to find someone who can manage this problem.) Our engagement with information on the Web is often context-specific, noncommittal, promiscuous, and specialized—given these truths it just makes sense to make your articles available individually, at an easily-absorbable cost, rather than asking, up-front, for a full year of pricey committment.
I'd expect the people who are thinking critically and intelligently about new media to be the ones who understand that the most.
Thursday, August 28, 2003
I can tell that it's getting warm enough that my brain has begun to turn off. One symptom is that I have actually begun to look forward to seeing the following movies: Another symptom is that I've gotten sucked into browsing through Friendster profiles. If you're a Raccoon reader and a Friendster user, feel free to add me to your network. My e-mail is jeremy@invisible-city.com.
When I was in New York recently I saw Friendster-related graffiti on the Bowery. I wish I'd taken a picture of it: it was a tag that said "Friendster Demons!" or something similar. Rabid fans using Friendster as tribal identification? Guerrila marketing? Anti-Internet religious fundamentalist? Your guess is as good as mine.
Village Voice article on Friendster's impact on real-world socializing, found through this interesting-looking "social software" blog.
Related: in this post (which points to the "relational aesthetics" stuff I blogged on Saturday), Test writes: "As our understanding of social uses of the internet matures from 'is anybody out there?' to 'so what are we going to *do* here?', so networked art is maturing from its initial investigation of the form-factors and politics of the network to an interest in how people are using networked media to connect, and participate in social exchange."
In terms of how network media can inspire exchange, you could do worse than to examine Art of the Mix, a site "dedicated to making mixed tapes and cds" which has the nice side effect of encouraging a gift economy among music geeks... Thanks to Dirk for the heads-up on that one.
Tuesday, June 24, 2003
The web seems a bit slow right now.
Not slow in the sense of connection speed, but slow in the sense of "not much going on." Some of my favorite weblogs, like Idiopathic or Subterranean Notes are on summer hiatus, and my own travels around lately have only been to the sites of literary journals and indie publishers, mainly looking for material of limited interest, like contact information and writer's guidelines.
But perhaps I have spoken too soon. The interesting ideas are flying over at BlackBeltJones and City of Sound (check out this stuff on Warchalking), and I've added two new weblogs to my regular-reads list, both from Norway: jill/txt and Thinking With My Fingers. (Links to these should soon be appearing soon in the "others" column to the left.)
These are gems, but I still feel like I could be reading more webmatter than I currently am. What's the best weblog that I'm not reading?
Friday, June 28, 2002
An Umberto Eco article on the role of intellectuals in the information age.
I admire Eco a great deal, and some of his work has been deeply influential in the way I think about the world. But I found this article to be oddly disappointing, revealing a distinct lack of understanding about the way that information technologies such as the Web function in practice.
"With the Web, everyone is in the situation of having to filter information that is so vast, and so unsustainable, that if it isn't filtered it cannot be absorbed. It is filtered unsystematically, so what is the primary metaphysical risk of this business? That we'll end up with a civilization in which every person has his own system of filters, in other words where every person creates his own encyclopaedia. Now a society with five billion concurrent encyclopaedias is a society in which there is no more communication. ... We could end up with competing encyclopaedias, some of them completely wild." A few points:
1) Evoking "five hundred billion encyclopedias" strikes me as a reductio ad absurdum argument, but I'll let that slide.
2) I'm not convinced that a world with some "wild" encyclopedias would be all that bad. Are the encyclopedias we have now truly so utterly free of ideological bias that they need no competition to keep them honest? For instance, a positive example of a "competing" text might be Exhibit A.
3) Most importantly, Eco's notion that working on your own particular set of filters precludes communication with others strikes me as ridiculous, and it completely overlooks the collaborative nature of the Web, which is exactly what has kept me working on the Web so consistently for these past four years. Collaboration, context and cross-reference are fundamental to the Web; they are literally built into the Web by virtue of hyperlink technology. Everyone who I've ever known to work on any kind of Web filter does so because they want to find other similar-minded people to communicate with: often these sorts of Web collaborations work spectacularly.
Someone actually uses the Web, and who thus seems closer to "getting" what it's all about is David Weinberger, of JOHO. From this recent entry in the JOHO weblog:
On the Web we join with others who share our passions, but we do so in our own unique voices. Sameness and difference, the ultimate contradiction. If the Web lets us resolve such a basic duality — which means embracing both sides fully and simultaneously — no wonder it matters so damn much.
Now, let me pull back from the dread disease: Ontological Overstatement. It's not as if we've never overcome this contradiction before. In fact, we resolve the duality every time we have a conversation with someone in the real world. The importance of the Web, in this regard, is that as a medium (because of its hyperlinked architecture) it enables the resolution of this duality on a scale we've never seen before. That seems a lot more true to me than Eco's recationary apocalypticism.
Labels: information, internet
Friday, May 03, 2002
Weblogs I've been looking at lately which haven't yet been added to the "others" column over there on the left include:
Saturday, April 06, 2002
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