NetDynam 2.0

I turned off Google Buzz for several reasons. The most important reason is that social apps such as Buzz and Facebook aren’t compelling in any awesome way for me. It could be said that I indulge Facebook. I spend less than an hour ‘there’ in a given week. It is not the best way, using the internet, to communicate with me. Basically, I can take it or leave it. Although reconnecting with old friends has been rewarding, real connection makes demands Facebook doesn’t support.

On the other hand, I like Facebook’s gallery feature, and, I like the feature that allows for publicizing blog posts, (where the feed automatically posts slugs from blog postings across my two personal blogs, and netdynam. Facebook would add more value if I leveraged it more in that direction. But, I do not.

So, Google Buzz, doesn’t trip my undeveloped social app triggers at all. It’s more intrusive in being tied into gmail, and, as it happened, I was forced to deprecate gmail its HTML interface because–in the aftermath of Buzz’s rollout, I discovered add-on java broke Gmail’s java as far as its advanced interface goes on OSX Tiger. between Tiger’s awful java implementation and Google’s hellish support, I was stuck.

I’m on Myspace-Musicians too. (Kamelmauz) Ugh.

A netydnam colleague emailed an interesting article from The New York Review of Books,

In the World of Facebook, by Charles Petersen; reviewing two books, The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal (by Ben Mezrich) Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America (by Julia Angwin).

The article’s second paragraph:

What is “social networking”? For all the vagueness of the term, which now seems to encompass everything we do with other people online, it is usually associated with three basic activities: the creation of a personal Web page, or “profile,” that will serve as a surrogate home for the self; a trip to a kind of virtual agora, where, along with amusedly studying passersby, you can take a stroll through the ghost town of acquaintanceships past, looking up every person who’s crossed your path and whose name you can remember; and finally, a chance to remove the digital barrier and reveal yourself to the unsuspecting subjects of your gaze by, as we have learned to put it with the Internet’s peculiar eagerness for deforming our language, “friending” them, i.e., requesting that you be connected online in some way.

If I wanted to look up the author, Charles Peterson, on Facebook, I would be unable to do so. His name is too common. It’s interesting: if you have a unique name you’re much more accessible on Facebook.

The article is fascinating and worth reading in its entirety. Still, here’s a Netdynamics-worthy clip:

But Facebook doesn’t want to simply branch out onto a few more Web pages; the site hopes, in a somewhat sinister but potentially very useful (and profitable) way, to begin following us around the entire Web. This is the ambition of “Facebook Connect,” a special service that members may activate, and that has enabled many popular Web sites, such as Netflix, YouTube, and the Huffington Post, to tie activity elsewhere on the Internet back to Facebook profiles. If you leave a response on a Huffington Post story, for instance, it can, via Facebook Connect, automatically be shared with your friends on Facebook; subsequent responses by Facebook friends could eventually appear both on your Facebook page and on the original Huffington Post story.

If Facebook Connect is widely adopted—and the service has been quite successful so far, with Yahoo and even MySpace signing up—we may begin to see changes to many of our basic assumptions about the Internet. Once a commenter knows that a vitriolic statement will be shared with a large and personal social circle—appearing more like a letter to a small-town newspaper than an anonymous outburst—the typically venomous atmosphere of online comments, for example, may well diminish.

‘Aggression‘ mitigation? Sure. It would be hard to conceptualize a Facebook driven by users identified by handles or nicks. Meanwhile, Buzz uses your address book–at the least. I haven’t investigated Buzz of course, yet I recognize it’s a slightly different experiment.

The Psychology of Blogging

You, Me, and Everyone in Between

Laura J. Gurak
University of Minnesota, St. Paul
Smiljana Antonijevic
American Behavioral Scientist

Volume 52 Number 1

September 2008

excerpt

The Psychology of the Blog: Public or Private?

A recent Pew Internet and American Life Project (2006a) report concludes thatthe most popular topic among bloggers is “me.” Speed, reach, anonymity, and interactivity all provide the base for blogging. Yet the blur between private (“me”) andpublic (everyone who is—hopefully—reading about me and writing to me and linking to me) are truly the most interesting psychological features of blogging. Millerand Shepherd (2004) point out that blogs invite “the peculiar intersection of thepublic and private,” in a way that can often be contradictory (par. 1). According tothe authors, the genre of blogs appeared in “the cultural moment . . . that has shiftedthe boundary between the public and the private and the relationship between mediated and unmediated experience” (par. 16). Badger (2004) makes the same point,stressing that although “the first person narrative [of Weblogs] . . . can make usfeel that we are partaking in a one-on-one exchange” (par. 5), blogging also promotes a high level of self-exposure to the audience often large and largely unknownto the author. The cornerstones of Internet communication—speed, reach, anonymity,and interactivity—promote and facilitate such a dichotomous character of blogs. Miller and Shepherd observe that on Weblogs “people are sharing unprecedentedamounts of personal information with total strangers, potentially millions of them,”concluding that “the technology of the internet makes it easier than ever for anyoneto be either a voyeur or an exhibitionist—or both” (par. 16).

The character of blogs as simultaneously private and public enables the formationof both individual and group identities. Through extensive narratives and oftenhighly personal descriptions of day-to-day activities, and through the use of images,a blogger reveals and creates—intentionally or not—his or her unique online identity. Through the use of blogroll, links, and comment features, and through development of communal norms (see Wei, 2004), the blogger reveals and creates his or hergroup identity. In the same manner, a specific blog community often emerges. For example, The Julie/Julia blog, which was one of the most popular blogs with morethan 7,000 hits per day, depicted both the daily activities of the author, Julie Powell,and experiences of the Julie/Julia blog readership, enabling thus formation of a blog community (see Blanchard, 2004).

Being at the same time private and public, individual and collective, Weblogs invoke the notion of a contradictory genre and activity, with “you,” “me” and everyonein between being brought into a single, semiprivate or semipublic space and experi-ence. However, this notion of contradiction can be understood as stemming from ten-dency to perceive blogs as objects rather than events. When perceived as writtenobjects, Weblogs do give the impression of ambiguity. Who is the author of this writ-ten object, one might ask. Is it the blogger, the audience, or both? Why would a per-son want to create a private written object, day after day, and then offer it for publicscrutiny? Finally, why would the audience want to scrutinize, day after day, a privatewritten object of an unknown person? Seen in this way, blogs invoke, almost automatically, the ideas of voyeurism and exhibitionism. When observed as communicative events, though, Weblogs give a different impression.

To understand more fully this feature of blogs as communicative events, let us recallthat blogs are commonly interpreted as online diaries. Regardless of its content, a blog is always a record, a (reverse) chronological trace of one’s activities, experiences,and/or thoughts. Blogs, therefore, enable temporal structuring of a person’s activities,experiences, and/or thoughts, which is the function of traditional diaries. As Harris(1995) pointed out, “The diary is not just an adventitious by-product of writing, but ahighly significant application of it,” the one that “produces evidence that is not memory-dependent” (p. 43). Diaries, thus, enable integration of one’s past and presentexperiences, which is the need deeply rooted in human psychology. Weblogs havethe same role. Even when the blogger’s online identity is fake—as in the case of aKansas housewife posting as a fictional cancer patient Kaycee Nicole, and/or in thecase of a Serbian blogger posting as the ex and late Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic—the blog integrates a person’s (fictional or real) experiences in a chronological narrative. That is what blogging is about. Unlike personal Web presentations,structured around “the essence of me,” blogs are structured around “the process ofme.” Unlike chatting, pointed toward “hear me out at this moment,” blogging ispointed toward “hear me out throughout time.” Blogging, thus, is a twofold communicative event. On one hand, it is the event of “writing oneself” through continuous recording of past and present experiences, just as in the case of traditional diaries.Harris also notes that “the diary [as event] tends to be overlooked by theorists who assume that communication is essentially a process of linking two or more individuals. Indeed,” as Harris concludes, “the notion of a single individual being both a sender and receiver of the same message is sometimes regarded as problematic or paradoxical” (p. 38). On the other hand, blogging is the event of “rewriting oneself”through interaction with the audience. Unlike writing a traditional diary, blogging isa process of linking two or more individuals.

This is why blogs are both private and public. This is why blogs cannot be either private or public. And this is why blogs are online diaries, that is, both a technology and a genre of computer-mediated communication. Just as other social phenomena that have gone digital, the phenomenon of writing oneself through chronological narratives incorporates both an old human need—the need for temporal structuring andintegrating of past and present experiences—and a new way of doing that—relying onspeed, reach, anonymity, and interactivity of Internet communication. “The fact is that once again, as in the past, the introduction of new technologies has extended theboundaries of writing. What lags behind is our conceptualization of the change”(Harris, 1995, p. 41).

Dreamlines, a web art generator by Leonardo Solaas.

Leonardo Solaas is a programmer. His focus point is on using Java as a platform, the web browser as an interface, and, data processing routines as, in effect, painter’s brushes. However my weak attempt at description defers to the artist’s own words,

“The thing is, now I spend most of my day in front of my loyal laptop, working as freelance developer & interface designer for the most interesting clients I manage to find, and going about my own experiments and ideas when I can get to that.

This site intends to be a hub for several kinds of traces left behind by my so-called ‘artistic’ practice, plus related pursuits. I’m not sure what all this ‘new media art’ thing is all about, but for me is a convenient playground where I can mash up all sorts of interests with relative freedom.”

This excerpt, from his short first person bio is tagged accordingly:

autnomous agents-blog-castellano-data visualization-design-digital image-drupal-experiment-flash-generative-hand -made-internet-me on myself-multiplicity-particle system-physical-processing-social-teaching-text-theory-workshop>

(Inspires me to think about what tags I’d apply to me.) Anyway…these tags cover a lot of ground.

Being fascinated with how computing power and user interaction can be used to create stuff, I fell right into Leonardo’s Dreamlines.

Like it is with other generators, the role I play is that of an Initiator. And, as it also is with the best of those generators, the Initiator also has to be a ‘chef of time;’ (inasmuch as I’ve learned to be patient and wait for resonant results.) What initiator/time chef waits for are rewarding moments in the stream of serendipitous visual mixing. The process is for me akin to music-making, yet the process isn’t anywhere as demanding.

I’ve noted over at Explorations blog,

Mechanical Kitsch, or New Frontier? further brief reflections about several of the issues raised by the ‘generator medium.’

Here’s several captures from mixes I initiated.

Title: Semiotics

Title: Found It

Then, it occurred to me I could try an experiment. My hypothesis was simple: if I captured the visual mix as it unfolded, how well might it coincide with some of my music? The main thing though was that I wasn’t going do anything but slap the two pieces together, so the experiment was seeking to hit rather than miss. This is different than editing music to expressly fit the visual.

I’ve posted the result over at noguts noglory studios. 21 minutes of abstract flow. (You can always turn down the audio!)

Quark

When I transferred the result using iMovie to a DVD and played it on the big HD screen, I was amazed at how good it looked.

There’s a sort of “future creativity” lurking in the seams of generativity, person-code, shallow manipulation, and, the immensity of the raw data archive.

For some reason my comment was refused on new book announcement – related blog. This usually has to do with server security settings*.

Anyway…

Well, good ol’ Language of Blogs is emphasizing ol as in: not updated since October.

It’s an outcome, right? But, there’s no easy way to know the back story.

Irony! Here is a blog about blogging and its velocity quotient is on the home page 9 posts in 26 months. No navigation to the archive is provided at the bottom. Oh, but there in the sidebar are pointers to the rest of its (sorry?) history. Okay, 2 more posts. 11 posts in 31 months.

Interesting content; extremely low velocity–then in blog terms it drops off the cliff ‘it’ created.

Begging the question of whether a reader of the book should wax in post-modern mode and fold in the evidence of the inert blog into a consideration of the book.

Of course, the author may have come to an untimely end! I note some comment spam (to Japanese sex sites) so even a brief forensics is suggestive of somebody walking far away.

And this strikes me as both weird and par for the course.

* It took my web hoster almost ten days to fess up that an Apache security update was the force behind thrashing three Wordpress installations.

Having read resources offered by Frank, I’d like to elevate one. Clay Shirkey: Gin, Television and Social Surplus. April 23, 2008.

If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enterprise, I’d say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened–rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before–free time.

And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.

[]

And it’s only now, as we’re waking up from that collective bender, that we’re starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We’re seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody’s basement.

Questions about how people use time, these days, may be framed (and analyzed,) within the rubric of behavioral economics. (I can’t do this myself, like Mr. Shirkey, I’m only able to offer phenomenological intuitions.) Still, I bring the frame of ‘time investment’ up because I suppose a finely differentiated analysis of how people actually deploy their time, with various internet utilities comprising part of the picture, would enrich intuitions.

For example, as I’ve mentioned before, a music fan can acquire more music (mp3s) than this fan can expect to deal with in the old sense of ‘dealing.’ This is true for other resources, such as ebooks, articles, movies, software; is true for any ‘object of potential interest’ discovered in the web, (or candy shop,) of intended and unintended distribution.

Time deployment exists in various contexts. These contexts can be described too. (I’m fairly sure Shirkey’s idealization doesn’t wash, were it to be suffer the details.) I wonder if cognitive surplus is accompanied in specific cases with its own surplus-derived stress?

What would constitute a robust conceptual ecology with respect to the factors of time investment and anticipation of benefit? Each of these is a very broad brush. For example how would time spent commenting on blog posts be accounted for were some benefit to figure into the account?

Another feature–these days–I term, truncation. Twitter exemplifies this, yet, also there are the short form messages tacked to Facebook walls, terse emails, blog and forum comments, abbreviated annotations of various sorts, and, of course, text messages.

I reckon truncation is not the result of having too much time.

“I can see this thing being marketed to adults.”

[future iPads] “…less of a giant iPhone for old people.”

Well…somebody’s kid; publishing their review–574 views and counting.

Another millenial’s view.

Comment. Them younger peeps want me some robust gadgets and they want it all now! 

iPad will be a big hit. However, as an Apple user for 25+ years, and as a casual observer of Apple, I know enough to wait for the second generation to arrive. This will happen in 12-18 months. I haven’t checked out the full specs, so I’m hoping that its flash drive storage can be augmented via USB. The only other requirement for me personally would be that it can display Adobe Acrobat. This would allow me to read scholarly papers while horizontal. I don’t know why Apple hasn’t licensed Adobe Flash, although I could go and find out. Maybe some combination of dollars and security figure into this odd deficit.  

iPad connotation?

The scene used here has been redeployed many times in other parodies. Still, this works for me and is headed to viral heights.

Whereas the following video has already made rounds years ago.