140 characters of resistance.

It's not hard for me to admit when I'm wrong. In fact, I suffer from a chronic lack of confidence in my opinions, so believing I'm wrong is actually my default setting. With that said, I want to admit on these pages that I was wrong about Twitter and its usefulness in my life.

I started out using Twitter for purely academic purposes; I was conducting research for a paper about how the 2008 presidential candidates were using Twitter to communicate to their "followers." At the time, Twitter bored me. I didn't get it. I didn't think the candidates were using it in any particularly interesting way; it was as if they'd simply been handed a "Politics Web 2.0" starter kit and Twitter fit nicely in the Microblogging compartment. My guess at the time was that voters who were aware of and using Twitter didn't need to hear from Hillary Clinton that she'd be making a speech at their local Barnes and Noble that day; they probably already knew. Of course, this was just a hunch, and while many innovative research papers have been predicated on a mere hunch over the years, this paper in particular needed some quantifiable data to back up my theories, so instead, I looked at how often (and to how many followers) the candidates tweeted.

After I finished writing the paper, I still saw no use for Twitter.... and then a funny thing happened: people I really like started to use it. All of a sudden, I used Twitter all the time! I didn't always post what I was doing (after all, I hold fast to my contention that my friends can't possibly care about the contents of my breakfast), but I sure started reading it a lot more often. I even signed up to receive tweets on my cell phone so that I could hear up-to-the-minute news from my friends as they walked through their lives in boston and DC.

So, I would like to admit that I was wrong. Like many things in our lives -- especially communication technologies -- a narrative needs to exist for why we should incorporate a new habit, some compelling reason to nudge us in another direction. For a long time, that narrative just didn't speak to me.... and then one day it did.

(I would also like to take this time to state for the record that I think Twitter will be dead within six months, or at least left in a shallow roadside grave once a better / shinier new technology comes around.)

http://twitter.com/boobasket

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.

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.

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.

Play

Lately, I've been thinking about the nature of play. We agree to some extent that play is a part of our nature. We think abstractly. We tinker. We devise more efficient ways of accomplishing tasks. Sometimes we simply devise different ways of doing the same tasks over and over again.

Yet my classes treat the concept of play as if all humans hold the same privilege to access it. I buy the premise of the importance of play (though I would maintain that all mammals possess our capacity/inclination for it). My objection is subtle, but it nags at me whenever a class discussion turns to the subject. Play takes place all the time, and yet, it seems undeniable that people who have access to more leisure time in general also have more access to the time and space in which to tinker, to do puzzles and crack codes.

I went to a lecture today about the marriage of collective social action and communication technologies. An example is the 2003 presidential election in Spain during which a massive student protest was organized via text message. Not only did thousands of students descend on the same square at the same time (all wearing black shirts), but their movement arguably turned the tide of the election.

Online collective projects of today -- Wikipedia, Linux, etc. -- tap into this human inclination for play. People steal moments during their workday or before they go to sleep in order to work on these social puzzles. When we study these movements in school, we pretend like anyone can join in. All it takes, after all, is access to a computer, and a few minutes in your schedule. But how many people are left out of that scenario? A lot.

We study how these initiatives are reshaping the production/consumption cycle in our society, and how wonderful it is that so many people can contribute to so many different areas of discourse that used to belong solely to the white guys at the top. But I guess I'm just more interested in the people who get left behind. They're the same ones who get left behind in most technology narratives... but for some reason, this one bothers me an awful lot more.