However interesting a social network Facebook is, it's unfortunately run by people who, in my opinion, have no respect for privacy and view their users as prey to suck private information from.
It's not that the data you give them becomes public - that happens on plenty of sites - it's that they pretend that you have some control over who sees that data.
Because of Facebook's habit of making my data available to larger and larger groups of people without my consent, I turned off my Facebook account a few months ago.
The "I think" part of this post is that I still occasionally get emails from people sending to my Facebook account, even though I thought I filled in the "delete everything you ever knew about me" form. It's frustrating to deal with a company that has so little respect for my wishes that they refuse to delete my account.
28 August 2010
08 June 2009
Facebook: a merged-blog reader
Now that I've been using Facebook for a few months, I think I finally know what it really is: a set of collected blogs. Being Facebook Friends consists of making a reciprocal committment to view each others' blogs - nothing more. Your Facebook home page is a merging of all the blogs you've committed to view. There is a certain amount of privacy gained by declaring that your blog is viewable only by people who you know, but because of the breadth of the Facebook definition of Friend, I don't believe that privacy is useful (see My Parents Joined Facebook).
Knowing this, Facebook could be nicely replaced by a full blogging site, or a network of cooperating blogs, that enabled display of multiple blogs simultaneously - no big technical feat.
Knowing this, Facebook could be nicely replaced by a full blogging site, or a network of cooperating blogs, that enabled display of multiple blogs simultaneously - no big technical feat.
28 February 2009
Where are the innovative futurists?
I just finished reading a few pieces on Microsoft's Craig Mundie and, while I have respect for anyone daring enough to call themselves a seer, I'm disappointed in the "if only we could synthesize reality" scenarios that so many futurists promote.
The fact is, life (which is all about relationships) isn't about realism - literalism - it's about abstraction: how to manipulate the physical world in order to communicate abstract thoughts and feelings among people and across time.
Doh! I just now realized that it's absurd to look to engineers (like Mundie) to define the future - Engineering is about reducing existing ideas to practice - it's the artists that create the visions and the languages that drive the future. Thinking about that, I looked up "futurist" and found that "futurism" was an art movement in the early 1900's (what kind of an education did I get, that missed that?) . So when somebody describes themselves as a "futurist", they are harkening back to an artistic movement dedicated to speed, modernism, violence, and misogyny.
The fact is, life (which is all about relationships) isn't about realism - literalism - it's about abstraction: how to manipulate the physical world in order to communicate abstract thoughts and feelings among people and across time.
Doh! I just now realized that it's absurd to look to engineers (like Mundie) to define the future - Engineering is about reducing existing ideas to practice - it's the artists that create the visions and the languages that drive the future. Thinking about that, I looked up "futurist" and found that "futurism" was an art movement in the early 1900's (what kind of an education did I get, that missed that?) . So when somebody describes themselves as a "futurist", they are harkening back to an artistic movement dedicated to speed, modernism, violence, and misogyny.
17 January 2009
Possible Social Networks
Thinking about Facebook, I've scribbled a short list of things I could see doing with it, if it could separate identities:
Home and Hearth - keeping in touch with close family members and very close friends: people who are welcome to enter our house any time they like, whether or not we're there.
A custom-built small town - Everybody I know in life. Sort of a small-scale blog or forum.
Wright's Taliesin - a community of colleagues, sharing a creative life around a broad topic (for example, computing and community)
Workshop - an amateur community, learning by doing. For example, a poetry critique group or a singing group.
Algonquin club - being witty with witty people.
Doctor's hours - being available when a fire happens at work, whenever it happens.
I can't imagine mashing all these groups into one undifferentiated lump of 'Friends'.
Home and Hearth - keeping in touch with close family members and very close friends: people who are welcome to enter our house any time they like, whether or not we're there.
A custom-built small town - Everybody I know in life. Sort of a small-scale blog or forum.
Wright's Taliesin - a community of colleagues, sharing a creative life around a broad topic (for example, computing and community)
Workshop - an amateur community, learning by doing. For example, a poetry critique group or a singing group.
Algonquin club - being witty with witty people.
Doctor's hours - being available when a fire happens at work, whenever it happens.
I can't imagine mashing all these groups into one undifferentiated lump of 'Friends'.
Facebook creeps me out
I've made the plunge and signed up for Facebook, and added a few friends from home and work. Now that I've used the app for a few days, I find I'm kinda creeped out by it: its concepts of relationship are soooooooo naive.
For example: On Facebook, I have one, big bowl of "Friends"; in reality, I have an immediate family, an extended family, close friends, distant friends, colleagues in industry, co-workers, people at shops I frequent...the list goes on and on. There are family members I'm very close with, family members I keep in some touch with, family members I see at holidays, family members I don't speak with, etc. - and that's just Family (ok, admittedly, family is a often a complicated thing).
Perhaps I compartmentalize more than is healthy, but I like to keep my work somewhat separated from my non-work career (to fulfill work confidentiality), and my work significantly separated from my family and friends (because my company is ultimately beholden to the stockholders; not to me). Similarly my set of friends and family members aren't one big blob of people.
I think it comes back to identity: Facebook treats each person as if they have a single, uniform identity/role, yet people have multiple, overlapping roles and identities in life. Taken to the extreme, why should I share with my dry cleaner the same details about my life as I share my wife? - it's absurd.
For example: On Facebook, I have one, big bowl of "Friends"; in reality, I have an immediate family, an extended family, close friends, distant friends, colleagues in industry, co-workers, people at shops I frequent...the list goes on and on. There are family members I'm very close with, family members I keep in some touch with, family members I see at holidays, family members I don't speak with, etc. - and that's just Family (ok, admittedly, family is a often a complicated thing).
Perhaps I compartmentalize more than is healthy, but I like to keep my work somewhat separated from my non-work career (to fulfill work confidentiality), and my work significantly separated from my family and friends (because my company is ultimately beholden to the stockholders; not to me). Similarly my set of friends and family members aren't one big blob of people.
I think it comes back to identity: Facebook treats each person as if they have a single, uniform identity/role, yet people have multiple, overlapping roles and identities in life. Taken to the extreme, why should I share with my dry cleaner the same details about my life as I share my wife? - it's absurd.
07 September 2008
Not Community; Identity
It crossed my mind that what I'm looking for in a mediated experience isn't exactly a sense of community; instead it's a sense of shared identity: that the people in the mediated experience are, in some sense, part of me; that we share a common identity.
The word community, on the other hand, has specific meanings in the physical world, but is a very vague term when applied to online experiences. Naively, I think of shared identity as one element of a community, and that a community implies support, intimacy, trust, recognizable individuals, continuity of relationships, etc. In contrast, I think (again Naively) of shared identity as simply defining an "us" vs. the world of "them".
This is a useful distinction, because I believe a sense of group identity can be established and communicated far more easily than a sense of community can.
The word community, on the other hand, has specific meanings in the physical world, but is a very vague term when applied to online experiences. Naively, I think of shared identity as one element of a community, and that a community implies support, intimacy, trust, recognizable individuals, continuity of relationships, etc. In contrast, I think (again Naively) of shared identity as simply defining an "us" vs. the world of "them".
This is a useful distinction, because I believe a sense of group identity can be established and communicated far more easily than a sense of community can.
The Loneliness of Shadows
An accidental experiment has given me the impression that seeing shadows - at least anonymous shadows - may not be a very reassuring an experience.
We were at the JFK airport the other day, and in the course of navigating the rabbit warren of security tunnels, we wound up in a waiting area where we could see the shadows of people passing by outside.
Far from being the reassuring experience I had expected, seeing the shadows enhanced the airport's feeling of isolation and loneliness.
Granted, this experience was within the context of the general jet lag, dehydration, and paranoia that typifies air travel, but I think the experience is still valid: the anonymous shadows (as you might see in the Flickering Lights idea in an earlier blog) didn't provide a warm, fuzzy feeling at all.
I feel a big part of the problem was that the shadows were anonymous - the people represented by the shadows were not recognizably part of my community. This leads to a design rule:
Design Rule: evidence of people in a mediated experience should be associatable with your community. This doesn't necessarily mean that the user should recognize who the people are, but it does mean that the user should recognize that the people are part of their community vs. the general population.
For example, if I were part of a baseball team and a few of the shadows passing by were wearing baseball caps and carrying our team duffle bags, the shadows might have been reassuring.
15 June 2008
The limits of Shared Space, and what crossing them means
As I was re-reading the Casablanca Project paper it crossed my mind that there may be something limiting about describing coordinated experiences as 'Shared Space'.
The issue I see is that Shared Space implies
The issue I see is that Shared Space implies
- a uniform physical architectural metaphor - that each participant's experience (or at least the mental model of it) is identical.
- a uniform order of events - that each participant's experience of events in the space is (ideally at least) identical.
- a coherent experience of time - that when an event occurs in the shared space, it occurs (again, ideally) at a single, Coordinated Universal Time (UTC or GMT) that can be identified by all participants.
- one user's concept of the space, not just the medium, may be very different from another's.
- the order of events may be relativistic.
- the relationship of time in the application may be non-linear, non-monotonic, and not connected to UTC.
13 June 2008
The Loneliness of Synchrony
Ok, so there are a pile of distance awareness apps out there, from Scott Brave, et. al.'s In Touch to Jackie Lee and Hyemin Chung's Lovers' Cups.
The trouble I see is that the synchronous nature of this awareness means that most of the time the other person isn't there. Instead of being a means of feeling connected, it's a means of reinforcing disconnectedness. Imagine having a light that would go on whenever a friend thought of you - I imagine it would be on disappointingly little, and you would go crazy staring at the light, waiting to catch the moment that it blinked on and off.
In contrast, consider a greeting card (the physical, paper thing). The sender needs only think of the recipient only for a short time, and the recipient can bask in that thought for a long time. The recipient says 'what a lovely thought' rather than 'why aren't you thinking of me literally every moment?'
The trouble I see is that the synchronous nature of this awareness means that most of the time the other person isn't there. Instead of being a means of feeling connected, it's a means of reinforcing disconnectedness. Imagine having a light that would go on whenever a friend thought of you - I imagine it would be on disappointingly little, and you would go crazy staring at the light, waiting to catch the moment that it blinked on and off.
In contrast, consider a greeting card (the physical, paper thing). The sender needs only think of the recipient only for a short time, and the recipient can bask in that thought for a long time. The recipient says 'what a lovely thought' rather than 'why aren't you thinking of me literally every moment?'
Shadows flickering by, via light bars
One idea: simulate the effect of seeing shadows flash past in a hallway, via a set of light-bars on a hallway wall. As people walk down the distant hallway, sensors in their light-bars detect their passing. Your local light bars flash off in sequence, to give the impression of a person passing by.
It's as if someone has joined the two hallways with a series of thin, vertical, translucent windows. Something like you might find at an airport.
The idea is that this is one way of creating a basic distant awareness: the feeling that there are people around you, yet very little more. It might be something like walking through an airport - would it be comforting to be aware of others, or disturbing to be aware of the proximity of strangers?
It's as if someone has joined the two hallways with a series of thin, vertical, translucent windows. Something like you might find at an airport.
The idea is that this is one way of creating a basic distant awareness: the feeling that there are people around you, yet very little more. It might be something like walking through an airport - would it be comforting to be aware of others, or disturbing to be aware of the proximity of strangers?
Beginning: what makes a non-verbal community?
So, here we are. What makes a group of people a community? ...even a community of strangers? It seems uniqueness and repeatability of identity has something to do with it. What are examples of communities that exist without any verbal or visual communication? There is the effect of 'familiar strangers' - the people you habitually see, such as the person with the umbrella at the bus stop.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)