Made out of people

More on identity

One important reason for maintaining identity is beacuse it affects your behavior. Paul Resnick's work shows that reputation really makes a financial difference. People can remember how you've acted, and respond accordingly. Indeed, as a rational actor, I would expect that, in a space where no person is anonymous, where every word is logged and saved, there would be nothing but exemplary behavior.

This may be true of some email (some!), but certainly not other media. There we were, hanging out in the much-discussed, and maligned, backchannel. I'm sitting next to Joi Ito, who is sitting next to Clay Shirky. In public, we are polite, well-mannered. I'm looking for a job, possibly from one of Joi's connections.

In other words, this is a poor place to act up. And you woulnd't expect it.

The IRC is there, and we've announced that it will be logged. What ends up winning is, perhaps, the historical use of IRC--the puckish jokes that come out of it, the meaningless noise, the too-honest confessions.

"Joi Ito 0wnz0rs this channel!"

The text would scroll away, into oblivion, and disappear. Out of sight, out of mind.

Turkle suggests that even if we know that there's ways we should behave, we often don't. We should behave with email like it's written on a postcard. We should act like we're at a conference when we log into a conference IRC, but we don't. The medium is seductive; it gives us its rules to follow; and we follow them, far more seductively than we might have had we said the words aloud. At this conference, one organizer popped into the backchannel to write,

thats why I"m here... bit bored

I suppose this is Life On the Screen (see the last post) backfiring entirely. Here we have a medium that screams, "use me for entertainment! enjoy yourself! play pretend!" and, not-so-secretly, is recording everything. The conventions and social affordances of the space are deeply at odds with how the space will be used over time.

Indeed, I was not the only one startled to see bits of the back-channel on screen during the closing talk. Hey! Where did that come from?

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it
-- Omar Khayyam

Life on the Screen meets the Internet Archive

One of the reasons I'm in this field is because Sherry Turkle wrote a book called Life on the Screen. In it, she discusses people switching identities and personas while maintaining multiple chat and conversation sessions. The life that people set up on the screen has a certain amount of identity wrapped in it--and the people who were then adopting BBSs and the earliy internet were often doing so as a place to communicate, to play at being someone else.

Turkle suggests that "You are who you pretend to be" online. "On the internet, no one knows you are a dog," says the famous New Yorker cartoon, and that means that you get a chance to explore identities. Turkle suggests that this experimentation allows people to play with identity

Of course, a lot of what the conference was about is that this story doesn't work anymore. The internet knows that you're a dog, and knows who your friends are, and knows everything that you posted since you were 17. Look at the vast quantities of information that we put up about ourselves. I am personally highly aware of how much of an information trail I leave (both intentionally and un-), due to the whole nearly unique name thing. But everyone is leaving these footprints behind. Posting under a fake name won't help you: look, for instance, at the relentless search for more information on John Lott, who may or may not have posted under several other names ("mary rosh") and may or may not have faked study results. It's too easy to track writing styles, to track similar obsessions, to chase down IP addresses.

Of course, it won't happen to you. Unless you run for congress, or something, and then all bets are off. How sure are you that you'll never, ever be famous? That you'll never need a background check?

The internet strikes me as a pretty lousy place to play identity games. Indeed, if you really want to be like something else, go do it in reality. Drive to the next city over, drop off the car someplace inconspicuous, walk a few miles, and pay cash. At least those moments will pass quickly.

--

I asked Prof. Turkle about this, and she suggested a different plan. She now counsels that people consider using identities in online games. Within the context of an online, multiplayer game, it is a codified norm that you may be someone else. If you aren't a 12th level bounty hunter in reality with an anti-kobold sword (and you aren't, and you don't), then who is to say how you act? Online games, then, are where she sends those who need to experiment with persons. Be dishonorable! Close down the account, or pay another $9.95, and be honorable!

(to be continued)

Plugging into the backchannel: "Continuous Partial Inattention?"

Liz has been talking about the backchannel that emerged at the conference (followups here and here). I was an active participant on the channel: indeed, I was one of the few academic participants, actually, on the first day¹.

Here's my take.

The channel was an interesting place. It was filled with an awful lot of noise, random insults, weird proto-in-jokes, and silly name memes. But it was also filled with in-line questions and clarifications, links to researchers' work, discussions of how the work might be expanded, refined, or applied to other topics, discussion of how the theories might be used, and similar.

It was an informal space for chatter (about which I will write shortly), but it was a place where certain amounts of useful, social work could get done on the side. If nothing else, I met and had a chance to talk online with Liz, Clay, David, and Joi. On the second day, after the workshop, Tom Erickson and I sat down for a while, talking through some ways that a back-channel could be used in a corporate setting. It's a space for questions, for links, for discussion. At a large corporate meeting, there is a lot that might get done.

I realize things like this have been tried before in some forms: Active Class, for example, provides a way for a professor to poll his class, and a way for students to pitch questions at the professor. But it's not a full-on annotation system. Are there any out there?

There's a problem, though. For all that we proudly spoke of continuous partial attention (to use Linda Stone's term) and "multi-tasking", I have to admit that I got less out of some talks than I should have. "Continuous partial inattention," perhaps? I sometimes forced myself to drop the lid and watch with full attention, but the temptation was great. Must ... check ... IRC.

Of course, if there wasn't a back-channel, I'd still be online. There would be email to check, crises to defuse, code to write, and blog entries to blog. Indeed, the back channel guaranteed that the conversation, and my thoughts, stayed roughly on topic.

And if we couldn't be online, some people would sit there, twitching in their seats and pressing buttons on their cell phones. Others would go through withdrawal. The moment the conference was over, the more wired section would run off at high speed to go find a network connection somewhere and go log in--instead, they lingered, talking for hours and rehashing the issues in new ways.

The second problem is that it's kind of rude to be splitting your attention. We were all aware of the problem: there were jokes, for example, about monitoring speaker quality by how much and how loud the typing got. It was, roughly, a reverse applause meter. Roughly, because the typing would also get loud for particularly controversial comments and even particularly good ones.

In the end, then, I'm curious. Can we picture the back-channel as more than a source of noise? I think--I think--that it was a valuable contribution. In the forgettable, and mercifully forgotten, film "Starship Troopers," TV broadcasts came with hyperlinks. A year or two later, WebTV promised the same feature for ordinary TV broadcasts. Of course, those are annotations provided by a central company; they are pumped down from the same people providing the program.

I liked the alternative stream we provided. How do I maximize its value without costing my attention?

hr.

fn 1. We largely divided our world, it seems, into bloggers (Clay Shirky, Joi Ito, et al) and academics.² The first day was a little tense-neither group trusted the other-but I think we got a little better, and more accustomed to each other, on the second.

fn 2. danah, as suits her, defied genre

Sometimes you have to date someone who is butt-ugly

The panel is called "Democracy and Dating: Social Computing on Purpose." While the main conversation was pretty much entirely about social action (except Pam Meyer, who gave us some amazing--but unwritten--statistics on how men and women view dating services), the back channel was fascinated by the idea of mixing the two. We've already seen ActForLove , 'the cause-oriented personals service that lets you "take action" while "getting action."'

The the question was asked in reverse. What do we learn from dating services about politics?

Michael Cornfield had the answer immediately: "Sometimes you have to date someone who is butt-ugly." It's necessary to seduce the ugly: building a coalition of voters takes a lot of people, including people who you don't agree with. In fact, Cornfield thinks this is what killed Dean: his people were enthusiasic, good at recruiting each other, but bad at building coalition and seducing people who really didn't agree with each other. If someone loved the war, were Dean volunteers ready to bring them in?

"Seducing the ugly." I'll have to keep this phrase around for a while, I think.

(Yes, I am wondering what Google hits I'm going to get on this).

Danyel

Why Blogs, Why Now?

There is virtually no technology involved in the construction of blogs that wasn't available in 1997. But somehow people tried to all build their own (perpetually-under-construction) home pages and got overwhelmed. Services like Geocities emerged to help you do this. And it was pretty much a total loss.

Blogs emerged, popularly, about a year or two ago. I wasn't sure why it they were prominent now, but I was pretty sure that it WASN'T a delayed reaction to the drop in prominence of Usenet? or the rise of Google.

Scoble disagrees. When we talked at lunch, he suggested that his own particiaption in Usenet had dropped to nothing when he created a blog. Usenet wasn't good at status: there was no way to tell the sheer coolness of a Scoble post from a noisy post by someone else. And when you wanted to disregard someone, it was extra work. The group could ban someone--but you either needed the group to agree on it; or you needed to have your own killfile.

In contrast, a blog means that you can Follow Scoble's Words (or whoever your a-list bloggers are)--and, if you dislike them, you can ignore them by dropping his RSS feed. You choose your set of authorities, and follow them. And authorities know that they have their fixed set of followers.

He also believes that Google means that you can now post something, and let the world find it. Yes, that worked on the newsgroups: but that meant an extra click or two off of the default page. Blogs are a way of making sure your voice is heard by the world, and that it's your own controlled territory.

Paul Resnick

Paul Resnick (has a blog!) is speaking at the conference on reputation systems. He uses eBay as his laboratory, because he can do semi-controlled experiments on things like the effects of reputaiton on sale price.

I've seen variants of his results before. The big picture, takeway for me is that reputation is defined temporally. That is, reputation is a factor of accumulation over time. The other aspect is that there needs to be an entrance cost to create an identity--and that entrance cost defines a maximum negative extent to which reputaiton will drop.

That is, if reptuation is costing me 10% of the cost of the things I sell--and he was able to show that negative reptuation does have a cost--and it costs $100 to join a site, then I have an incentive to hang out in the site until I want to sell $1000 worth of stuff. If it's free to create a new identity on the site, then I'll do so as soon as I have an even vaguely negative reputation. (Obviously, since cost and reputation are interfachangable, you can also start users off with a negative reputation at zero cost.)

I'm considering how this relates to the work at (for example) kuro5hin where the head is actively wrestling with reputation issues...

Cross links

Words on the conference from David Weinberger and Scoble

Clay Shirky on design errors

Clay Shirky discusses the clumsiness of the explicit networking services.

Orkut had a click. "X has added you as a friend. Are you X's friend?"
But people were indiscriminately adding too many people. So they added a second click. "Are you sure that X is your friend?"
Now they've added a third click. "How much of a friend is X? Close friend, peripheral friend, etc"

This is all trying to hack around the fact that, basically, people are good at subtle sociological judgements, but computers aren't. (Measured on the time scale of our social capacity, fire is a recent invention and agriculture is still a novelty. )

So why is it hard to do in software? Shirky's (new) law: "The more you know what you're doing, the less you know what you're doing." A new chess player can say what he's doing far more easily than a chess master (who is more likely to say "gosh, that doesn't look right.")

Then, too: "it is always tempting, as an engineer, to think that the tools you know how to use are well suited to the problem at hand."

And he ends with an "exhortation to people building software: it's tempting to believe you can create a formal model, because that's what computer work well with. Avoid that temptation. We don't need to relive the tragedy of AI as the farce of social networking. "

from left to right: Linda Stone, Joi Ito, Ze Frank, Tim O'Reilly, Clay Shirky, and Steven Johnson.

Ze Frank makes fun of Friendster

At the start of his talk, Ze Frank ran a little reel talking about his problems with Friendster.

• "Friendster asks you how you are different, and then asks you for your favorite television show."
• "Friendster looks at friends from the perspective of a loser": it makes you think you have more friends than you do.
• If this was really like real life, than you'd need to click 500 times to make someone your friend. Or drive them to the airport.

Conversely, though, he wants to play out: Britney Spears should hold an exclusive concert for people within three links of her.

-

Joi Ito--our most wired and connected member--speaks. He points out that his mobile phone now permeates virtual space (it speaks IM, for example), then gets to talking about IRC, and his own channel, #joiito. He apparently built it as a place to expand a conversation that was happening in other places that would be fairly obviously "his living room"--that is, a space that he felt he could control.

People go to #joiito for sex, for conversation--and they are fulfilling their social needs.

His rant concludes that simple infrastructures for spaces are good, especially ones that builders of sites can tweak and play with ...

Three definitions of social networks

I've heard people say "Social networking" a half-dozen times this morning, each time referring to "friend of a friend" tools. David Weinberger worried that all the good social networking is behind TOS and corporate walls, which makes it hard to repurpose or analyse.

I'm noticing several different defintions of "social networks" running about, which need disambiguation. I think we're up to three different ones, for better or worse.

1. YASNS ("Yet Another Social Network Service"--a danah coinage): This is the high-publiciity form of social networks. Friendster, Orkut, Ryze. Click in your list of friends, and let them click you back.
2. Social Network Analysis. This is the academic subfield that I have been playing in for four or so years. Interview people, draw a network diagram, calculate centrality and that sort of thing.
3. Social networks for CSCW: This is the people who scoop up social network data from various sources. Largely, this is analyzing online experience and trying to get a quantitative or--more often--qualitative picture of how groups

Now, I grant that (1) may be the one that's making the headlines, making the VC money, and has six million users (on Friendster) running about shouting "social networks". And I'm pretty sure that the word has been completely taken over by a new context. But I sitll try and fight the pure fight. And sometimes I just try to find a new word for what I actually do.

(In other news, I just watched a UI change happen at Ryze. As I was sitting here, Adrian Scott tapped a little bit of PHP, hacked a script, and then uploaded it. That's kind of cool.)

"Don't Blog This"

Nardi may be "blogging this" (as her paper title assures us), but there's a degree of hyper-awareness out here that blogs are ubiquitous. There's a wiki, there's an IRC back-channel, there's a slew of prolific and influential bloggers ... and there's people who really, really want to gossip.

So far, after just a few hours of a conference, I've heard the phrase "don't blog this" four or five times.

(Photo: Richard Scoble is blogging this. With Marc Canter )

The Bellevue Apple Store

When I interned here eight years ago, Bellevue was a small town, with a few shopping strips and a lot of empty and low-density lots. It's now built up a fair bit, largely as shopping area occupied by Microsoft employees. Which raises the interesting question... just who shops at the Bellevue mall Apple store?

One topic, many voices

This weekend, I'm off to the Microsoft Social Computing Symposium

It's a chance for those of us in the social computing field to get a chance to talk to each other: there are research groups at a variety of schools, teams at Microsoft, IBM (twice!), and a variety of other places, just on the CHI-attending, CSCW-publishing, SOCNET-reading academic side.

Then there's the bloggers. A fair number of bloggers--some academic, some from other backgrounds--spend a great deal of time studying blogs. (The course-oriented, now-defunct Metablog was a nod to that. The fact that there's a startling number of Google hits on metablog suggests I am not the first to notice this.

I'm now thinking about the symposium, and how information travels through the internet, and how these relate to each other.

There's certainly a well-known layer of bloggers, and some of those are coming out, too. Of course, word spread about the event, and now it has a virtual observer --and its own blog-sized tempest about just what sort of people were invited, and whether it's secret, and why it's invitation only, and whether this goes against the whole purpose of symposia, or of blogs, or of the web. (Read comments on Scoble's last , for example, to get some idea of more negative reactions.)

I guess I'm fascinated by several things. One is the deep desire to see each other face-to-face. As a CSCW researcher, I'm not really all that surprised: collaborative work is faster and easier when you meet face to face¹. People like seeing each other, and getting a broader channel. On the other hand, we really like to tell a story about how distance doesn't matter. Perhaps we're coming to a better understanding of how the factors interrelate. And sometimes, you just need to come to the party.

The other is the way that the story echoed. David Wenberger has persuasively argued that the internet (or, at least, the world of blogs) is not an echo chamber. Rather, it's a place where people of like minds can explore the places where they disagree without having to rehash the basics, over and over again.

It may not be an echo chamber, but the discussion of the Social Computing conference got awfully loud. And it's not that other discussions of equal value aren't happening in other places: how about Scientists, designers seek same for good conversation: A Workshop on Online Dating? Or WS#19. Social Learning through Gaming?

Somehow, these haven't crossed the collective blogosphere's field of view. They aren't interesting yet. Why does the one echo, and the other doesn't?

For some insight, I'll turn to VanDyke's model of how news travels on the internet, which suggests that there's a comparatively small number of channels for information. I'd read a second-order idea, which is that there's a limited number of topics that the blogs can "pay attention to" at once. It's a combination of wanting to stay current, and of wanting to respond to each other--but either way, when the agenda is set on (say) "Bush and Vietnam", the political blogs on both sides pretty much stick to the topic, dedicating half or more of their coverage to the one topic.

We may criticize TV news for having a short attention span, and for only wanting to talk about one thing at a time. Certainly, the blog world does better than that in many ways: it seems to be more willing to check Lexis/Nexis, to pull up old interviews, to remember lost details.

But there are far more stories happening than Blogdex will tell me. More than news.google will tell me. A scan over the front section of the New York Times will tell me about more stories than will Instapundit or Atrios from their various sides.

So in summary: I'd suggest that the internet that isn't quite an echo chamber in the diversity of opinoins--but is a little constrained as to topics.

¹ Note to self: Think about the connections between the rise of the internet and distributed work, and the new movements toward extreme co-location. Why is it that we're inventing stuff like XP (face to face, one keyboard, customer on-site), at the same time that we've got an internet so cool we can edit movies and write code around the world? Perhaps it's the case that we're now tried the distributed thing, and--well, it's not always right. (IIRC, Joel Spolsky's written about the competitive advantage of not offshoring before...)