boobasket@friendster, r.i.p.

What happens when a social network dies?

I recently decided to take my Friendster profile off life support, to put its pathetic, outdated self out of its misery once and for all.

Before I pulled the plug, I took a tour of my long history on that site. I saw testimonials written by people I'd dated years ago and no longer cared to contact, and pictures of myself before I'd welcomed my two gray hairs. Along the way, I also realized that my number of friends had dwindled; roughly 1/3 of my former connections had committed Friendster suicide. I Ebenezer-Scrooged for a few more minutes before deciding I really needed to fulfill my mission.

So then, why did I hesitate before hitting "delete"? Just moments earlier, I'd been so ready to pull the trigger! I guess my hesitation stemmed from a sad recognition that I'd once invested so much energy in building an online community that could eventually and organically stop growing, not unlike the people who comprised it. I hadn't taken full stock of the contingencies of the social network. It all felt so pointless.

The truth is that networks, of any sort, stay vital through the addition of nodes and the strands that connect them. This is not to say that networks with stale content hold no value; it's just that the value shifts. The surplus of energy that was once created by the members of the network (think: a whole greater than the sum of its parts) ceases to grow and instead gives way to a new purpose. The decaying social network is now more of a snapshot of what used to be - every profile frozen in place. Where Friendster was once a sustainable neighborhood of tin can walkie-talkies, it now appears instead like a museum exhibit buried under dust and quaintly lacking the shiny applications of Facebook. People still visit museums, and for good reason, but it's a different type of activity from plugging into a community that breathes on its own.

And so it goes...So long, Friendster, you gateway drug, you.

the daily boo.

This past week, I spent 40 hours sitting at a desk, looking at a corporate computer and wishing I had access to a personalized little literary gem called my Google Reader page.

Google Reader is probably Nicholas Negroponte's worst nightmare about the emergence of digital media, but it's my most wonderful dream fulfilled. He worried that technology would enable people to choose to hear only the voices with which they agreed rather than the assortment of attitudes and tastes one finds scattered unfiltered throughout the media. An enormous echo chamber without dissent, the Internet would reify people's opinions, not challenge them. As a result, the chasm between us would grow as our disparate ideas hardened into distinct truths and we replaced plurality with complacency.

The way I see it, Google Reader helps me keep my life in order. While I'm sitting in my overly air-conditioned office, toiling over marketing collateral and remembering wistfully the endless hours I used to spend in coffeeshops, my Reader is slowly accumulating and filtering terabytes of information so that today, my first weekend day as an employed person, I can return to my Google Reader page and see an aggregate of the news and updates I missed while at work.

More to the point, Google Reader doesn't, by necessity, estrange me from the thoughts and ideas of those different from me; it brings me closer to them. As always, the problem isn't the technology itself. We shouldn't shun tools that allow us to customize what we see and hear. The problem is that sometimes we take the easy way out. We cover our ears when someone disagrees with us. And in this age, technology affords us not only the means to find people who think like we do, but also the ability to tune out those who don't. So, it seems to me we need to shift our focus from whipping ourselves into a centripetal ball of tightly held opinions to remembering that evolution relies on diversity.

To that end, why can't my Google Reader page make recommendations for sites I should visit that aren't similar to those I already read? Why not look at my list and say, "boo reads Talking Points Memo; maybe she'd also enjoy National Review"?... Okay, "enjoy" might be a bit generous, but you hear what I'm saying, right? After all, you probably already agree with me.

material life, accumulated.

There's nothing like carrying all of your belongings up a few flights of stairs to get you thinking about the place that *stuff* holds in your life.

Since I never really unpacked much of the stuff I moved down from Boston 2 years ago, sifting through my various boxes has thrown me full-force into a wall of complex emotions. To name a few: frustration, relief, glee, shame, and wonder.

Frankly, I'm somewhat shocked that this exercise produced any reaction in me other than mere exhaustion. I've never been all that tethered to things. I would much rather sacrifice nostalgia for convenience and buy everything I need off Craigslist than carefully port my furniture from apartment to apartment as I move up and down the east coast. Since I do move so often, I don't hold on to much that doesn't yield a particular sentimental or utilitarian value.

And yet! This moving process hasn't been without its own redeeming attributes. I've:

• found lost keys to locked boxes of things I thought I'd eventually have to blow up with a stick of dynamite, wile e. coyote style.

• read many, many old letters--byproducts of my 16-year relationship with the united states postal service--and taken note of some of the ways in which my friendships have changed through the years.

• remembered that I am a hopeless paper packrat. I just can't/don't throw out bank statements, insurance policies that have long since expired, or receipts for items I've since sold (on Craigslist). I live as if I'm one step away from a life audit wherein I'd be asked for documented proof of my participation in the capitalist juggernaut. It's such a dumb (and heavy) approach to self-organization.

Twittered Out.

For one of my final papers, I decided to look a bit more closely at Twitter, the micro-blogging service that's sweeping the geeky nation. I first heard about Twitter last year when a friend sent me an invitation to join (not that it's a club, but he thought that telling his friends personally might encourage them to accompany him on the Twitter journey). So, I checked it out and read all about how Twitter would allow me to keep my friends abreast of every facet of my daily minutiae (except they phrase it a bit more appealingly). My immediate thought was, "um, why in the world would my friends care?"

You see, Twitter works kind of like those silly Facebook status updates. But it's like a status update (called a "tweet") that you can write from anywhere--your phone or instant messaging service or simply through the site itself. I seriously wouldn't be surprised if by next week, they figured out a way to send tweets via carrier pigeon.

Twitter is very straightforward. In fact, compared to other technological devices, it's remarkably unassuming. It works by prompting you to answer the following question (within a 140 character limit): "What are you doing?" As you can imagine, this yields a wide variety of responses, but as you can probably also imagine, few of them are actually very interesting.

Don't get me wrong -- I'm often surprised by how entertaining/informative those silly Facebook status updates can be. I just can't imagine why my friends would ever want to hear little bits about my life in real time, especially when I'm (rather impersonally) telling all of them at once.

"Boo is writing a paper."
"Boo is pacing."
"Boo is eating cereal."
"Boo is looking at photoshopped pictures in which the babies' and men's heads have been switched! http://manbabies.com/1"

See what I mean?

Anyway, for my paper, I decided to look at how presidential candidates were using Twitter in their campaigns. And do you know what I found out? Their lives are just as boring as mine! Not surprisingly, Obama and Clinton use Twitter to alert their "followers" (people who sign up to receive their tweets) of upcoming press appearances, or to remind them to register to vote. McCain, however, likes to tweet attacks on his opponents. My favorite was: "Barack's people ask vulgar question of McCain http://twurl.nl/s0kcuc"

I should take a step back from my criticism for a moment and say that I absolutely understand how Twitter can be useful. After all, it's helped to free someone from an Egyptian jail, report an earthquake in Mexico before the USGS got on the case, and organize activists.

In other words, micro-blogging serves its purpose. I get that. And I think it'll be interesting to see if it ends up filling a gap in investigative journalism or allowing organizers to keep a step ahead of the police trying to shut them down, or making conferences run more smoothly than they typically do. But as a service that supposedly offers some value to my life, I just don't see it.

So, I think I'll keep my tweets to myself for now.

an unlikely source of cruelty.

I just looked up from my frozen, immobile, panoptic cell in the library to see a ladybug crawling on the window right next to me. clearly, it's taunting me. I've never before felt any venom towards a ladybug, but today, when it's beautiful outside and i'm indoors, trying hard to care about my last final in grad school, I just want it to fly away and enjoy the sunshine/greenery out of my line of vision...

dispatch from the bowels of the library.

In the past 72 hours, I have...

consumed:

coffee
cereal
the media

thought about:

collective action
how much i dislike belle and sebastian (and why)

counted:

caterpillars on the sidewalk with my niece
to 10 before i lost my cool

wrapped:

my head around Heidegger (result: a half-baked final paper)
my eye socket around someone's shoulder (result: a black eye)

eureka!

“A commodity is truly available when it can be enjoyed as a mere end, unencumbered by means.”
(Albert Borgmann)

HOMOnyms

My new favorite:

Aciphex/Ass Effects

"Aciphex can help manage the effects of acid reflux disease, working to cool the heartburn and helping your body to help itself."

Time Machiner.

I can't decide if this is useful or fucking terrifying.

Heidegrrrrrr.

"Heidegger observed that technology worked to promote a shrinking of the world. While technology enabled a breaching of distance, it also concealed other forms of interaction which take place within the world. Heidegger argued that the essential nature of things lay in their 'nearness.' Nearness involves how things reveal themselves as meaningful within the context of our dealings with them. Instead of bringing things near, the shrinking of distance and time by technological means has caused nearness to withdraw."
*Simon Cooper*

We tend to think of technological artifacts as mere tools that extend one or another of our limbs or senses. A phone just amplifies a voice that's too far away to hear with the naked ear. A pair of glasses make words and faces come into focus when our eyes aren't up to the task. But by bringing the world in--by making it louder and sharper--do we lose touch with the "essential nature" of the things that fill it?

This makes me wonder if people, too, have a "nearness." Maybe they do. Is it possible that a person's nearness can still reveal itself if it's mediated by technology? Or is it inevitably concealed by the medium through which it's transmitted? Hiding under a layer of carcinogenic, electromagnetic waves... I'd like to think that someone could reach through those waves and find another person floating on a raft and sipping a daiquiri on a nearby crest.

(I know I'm completely skewering Cooper--and in the process, Heidegger too--but so be it.)

Questioning Builds a Way.

I spend a lot of time reading things on the Internet. I bring this confession to you unabashedly. I find the entire existence of the Internet, and the text written upon and within it, endlessly fascinating. Recently, I've been thinking a lot about the contents of my Google Reader page. Funnily enough, the very week I was giving this some thought, we discussed one of these concepts in my class--namely how technology has somewhat blurred the line between work and play, and also inverted their relationship to a certain extent. As a byproduct of the information economy, now some people get paid a wage to supply ideas that emerge from activities we would traditionally consider a part of playtime. And conversely: now employers bake playtime into their employees' work days under the pretext of caring about the employee as a human, not just a cog in the wheel. How does this relate to my Google Reader page? Well, in one sitting, I read friends' blogs, vegan food recipes, Red sox updates, and countless news sources about technology & society. My classmate added his own illustration of reading sources he relies on for "work" within minutes of checking out the latest LOLcat. I'm not sure how I would even begin to parse out that sitting into "work" and play."

Just when I was starting to feel guilty for letting my eyes spend precious time reading up on how to make blueberry muffins using egg-replacer, I stumbled on this amazing piece of prose concerning time and our use of it, and knowledge and the vitality of our subjective grip on it, and most importantly, how that whole question about work/play I just spent a paragraph trying to describe doesn't even matter.

On the one hand, this essay supports the idea that work and play can no longer be separated so easily into pre-defined buckets. On the other hand, it wholly substantiates and validates my endless procrastination. Mostly what I love about it is the giant middle finger it gives to anything close to a prescriptive ordering of our lives. We're told to specialize--to focus--but as Tozier explains, this only cuts off the most interesting path where it's just getting good. To generalize is to ask more questions, to find (and subsequently celebrate) the connections between the bits you find most hair-raising in this world.

This is not to say that my Google Reader page defines me in any way, or that it could do a better job of representing me than, say, this blog could, or even better--a bona fide face-to-face conversation with me would reveal*. But the myriad sites on Google Reader are connected through me, the endlessly delaying, and increasingly unashamed generalist.

*this conversation will reveal even more if, in addition to talking to you, I am also consuming bourbon.

boo recommends 2.

Click here for the first installment of "boo recommends."

Developing Your Thesis Before You Write Your Paper
Yeah, I wrote a 5 page paper of gobbledy-gook, mish-mashed nonsense. Then I had the bright idea to turn in this drivel rather than ask for an extension (I'm not an extension-requesting kind of boo). And now I'm paying for my mistake by spending Spring Break rewriting it. Starting with the thesis.

Dinner Parties at Friends' Houses
Food tastes better when you make it with your friends. I would be surprised if this wasn't already scientifically proven.

Vitamins you can drink
So much more fun than swallowing nasty horse pills, and so much more mature than chewing candy in the shape of Fred Flintstone.

liquid love.

a little known fact about me: I like to take pictures of the beverages I drink while I'm studying or spending time with beloveds. I do this for several reasons: I love coffee and tea, I love drinking them with others, and taking pretty pictures of them in cups reminds me of what was going on at the time -- who was sitting across the table from me, what I was reading, who I was creepily checking out, so on and so forth...

Since I have to get a new phone, I will be losing all of these pictures, so I decided to keep them here for a while.
As you can see, there are some differences among them: sometimes i drank tea. sometimes coffee. sometimes americanos. the pictures also represent different places: dc. boston. school. cafes.
But there are also some common themes: sunshine is one. colored mugs is another. deep appreciation for hot beverages and good company is a third (though my shitty camera phone doesn't always capture that one so vividly and though one of the beverages pictured below is iced).

uhh...

I just fell asleep in the shower. no joke.
also: I haven't eaten spinach in 3 days.

in search of glue.

I really want to be sleeping but my brain has been humming for too many hours and now I can't shut it off.

contents of the hum:

I've been putting some pressure on myself these days -- a bit of it is due, and a bit of it is undue--and I guess I'm trying to sort out how to attend to the due parts (the undue will always persist regardless of how much attention I throw its way, and really, I should be focusing on why I put undue pressure on myself, not what that nagging, vague force is compelling me to do).

You see, this program I'm in resembles, in some ways, scattershot pellets shot into a dark night from a well-intentioned rifle (where pellets = my academic courses of study and dark night = my future). This is the nature of interdisciplinarity, and I get that. Not only do I get it, but I also signed up for it and it's a little late in the game to be complaining about it.

However, now in my last semester, I'm craving a way to tie it all together. I want to weave the last four semesters into a pretty french braid. As a useful corollary, it's Week 6 of my classes which means I'm supposed to be thinking about what I want to work on for my final projects. But all I can come up with are loosely linked concepts that I care deeply about and want to cohere into a larger idea that makes my motor rev. (Oh, how I want, so desperately, to rev.)

Here, in no particular order, are the aforementioned half-baked concepts:

• collective action -- the power of mobs
• social capital as a byproduct of virtual activism (in other words, just because we can't always quantify the benefits of online political movements doesn't mean that their effects are moot)
  
• the (un)importance of transparency/authenticity in building trust

In other news, I realized that I am addicted to spinach. see also: caffeine and songs about robots.

boo recommends.

I'm totally aping this idea from McSweeney's, but I think every once in a while I'm going to create a list of recommendations, i.e., things I stumble on and/or have loved long enough to calcify into my daily routine. Perhaps you will find these recommendations helpful, or perhaps you will simply find them fodder for your ongoing campaign to tease me into silence. Either way, I hope you enjoy.


Pre-cubed Tofu
It bears more than a striking resemblance to a foam pit but it saves time. An added bonus: for some reason, tofu in pre-cubed form seems to absorb less of the packaging water which means you don't have to press it before you use it.

Said the Gramophone
Music blogs rarely inspire me. This one does on nearly a daily basis. Things I'm inspired to do: purchase music. listen to music. fall in love. write. walk through a blizzard. try harder.

Red/green felt tip pens
Last semester I was in the CVS pen aisle when I found these old school beauties. What do they grant me? The freedom to mark significant passages and take notes in my school reading without having to use a highlighter (which I hate). Two functions in one! The spork of the writing instrument world.

Scrabulous
Surely many of you are already hep to the beauty of this Facebook application, a.k.a., the only reason I visit Facebook more than once a month. This unassuming game can take many forms: procrastination tool, olive branch, harmless flirting mechanism, acceptably modest forum for above-average vocabulary. As far as I can tell, its only negatives are that it allows ridiculous two-letter words ("ne"? "da"?) and it doesn't automatically kick me out even after I've spent 45 minutes trying to figure out a 6-letter word that ends in "J."

Sisters
If at all possible, try to make yours a twin. But in the event you were conceived at two different times, then aim for yours to be witty and intuitive. Even better if she can call you on your shit when you need it most.

Creative wrapping paper
The wrapping paper industry makes no sense to me. Why would I spend $7 on a roll of pretty paper that will soon lose its cohesive luster? Instead, I try to re-use wrappy things I already own: old magazines, rags, W-2 tax forms, shower curtains (not clear!).

trusting the lipless.

This semester I'm taking a class called Globalization, New Media and Social Activism. Its title reflects the audacious ambition of its syllabus. We're only 3 weeks into it and already, I'm tempted to skim the reading and soothe myself by humming a quaint "It's a Small World" lullaby.

I think part of the reason I've bristled at the reading/in-class discussions is that I wonder why we're discussing these issues as if technology is the panacea to all our ills. The source of my skepticism isn't apathy (did that sound defensive? probably). I actually do care a great deal about the inequities of money and resources and fucking time that exist among the people on this planet. But it seems to me that our goals for improvement are moot without the presence of trust.

So what if new media has produced ways to communicate that we never before imagined? If a Facebook group forms in the woods, and no one is around to join it...

Wait: back to my point about trust. And how to generate that on the Internet. And how to translate that online trust into embodied activism.

By (dis)trust, I don't mean the type of identity-thievery we see in those Citimortgage credit card ads. I mean the type of trust popularized by Robert Putnam’s discussion of social capital.

Definitions of social capital vary widely, but here are a few I've been mulling over as I do my reading for this class.

‘the process by which social actors create and mobilize their network connections within and between organizations to gain access to other social actors’ resources’ (Knoke 1999, p. 18).

‘the web of cooperative relationships between citizens that facilitate resolution of collective action problems’ (Brehm and Rahn 1997, p. 999).

‘features of social organization such as networks, norms, and social trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit’ (Putnam 1995, p. 67).

Is activism more/less effective if it is embodied? e.g. are in-person protests more likely to get a response than online petitions? And: does this matter? If an online petition doesn't achieve its desired persuasive outcome (encouraging a congressperson to vote a particular way, expressing displeasure at a new Wal-Mart practice), then has it still succeeded at generating an intangible, unquantifiable amount of trust that can be used for future activism or stored in a giant community bank? (full disclosure of my position: yes).

In order to focus my wayward thoughts in this class, I'm choosing to concentrate on this notion of trust because I think its presence can help to narrow the gap between the virtual and the embodied.

We spend so much time arguing about technology in polarized terms. The object/tool in the argument du jour is either feared or revered. Let's just shoot our load on this one and admit that technology will no more solve all our problems than it will create them.

So: trust: how do we produce it, maintain it, and capitalize on it?