when online selves collide.

In the past couple of months, I've had several new thoughts about my identity online. in some ways, this exercise mirrors one i've undergone for years with my offline self: how to reconcile my various nicknames.

some people never get nicknamed; their given name follows them around, never straying too far so that when it comes time to fill out a form or choose an email address, the identifier simply rolls off the tongue. i live on the other end of the spectrum. only people at work and a few family members still call me by my given name; most others call me "boo" (and still others have developed their own nicknames for me over the years).

in my offline world, i've found ways to navigate these different names. i usually introduce myself with my given name, but it often doesn't take long to reveal that i prefer "boo." online, however, this has grown trickier, making me think that technology isn't necessarily as flexible as we purport. after all, though i could always edit my username, it seems that once i choose one, it is somehow hard-coded into my online representation. but if i have different names in different worlds (e.g. work and not-work), this gets complicated.

for example: if my co-workers don't know me as "boo," do i need to create a given-name doppelganger of online selves to maintain a web presence? a given-name facebook account and twitter profile? (i welcome your comments.)

while some laud the Internet's capability to host our splintered, idiosyncratic selves, i crave more synchronicity; i want fewer email addresses to monitor, less clutter, and a smaller set of information i have to memorize in order to enjoy the Web's majesty.

movie about urban space - can't wait.

MY PLAYGROUND - TEASER from KASPARWORKS on Vimeo.

gMurderers.

forget privacy or our desire to maintain control over our representation in the public sphere. the real victims of surveillance society are woodland creatures.

Google's StreetView camera car hits a baby deer

(LG, you might get a point for this)

boo recommends 3.

sexy people
Pictures of people from previous decades are almost as funny to me as videos of people falling down. "sexy people" finds a place on my list because unlike people falling down, the only victim on display is pride.

asking for help
It's taken me a while to learn this one, but sometimes it's better to request assistance than to do foolish things like: scale the shelves at the grocery store to grab something out of reach or apply for jobs on the same job boards that everybody else uses without first talking to people you know who can personally deliver your resume to their bosses. I won't go into a treatise on altruism here; I'll just say that people seem to like to help even if I don't often seem to like to accept it.

chard
The John C. Reilly of cruciferous vegetables, chard falls between its better-known siblings, spinach and beets. Like Reilly, chard often plays a supporting role to starring ingredients such as tofu or exotic miniature chickens. Unlike Reilly, it comes in a variety of colors.

caffeinated punctuation
Now that I'm unemployed, I choose to demarcate my time with coffee -- my morning is em dash trips to the french press, my afternoon is a hazy ellipsis of slow sips on lukewarm cups at one coffeeshop or another.

dear old love
bite-sized catharsis.

what pedestrianization means to me.

In re-reading my last post, I noticed that while I explained that the challenges I faced as a pedestrian in DC colored my overall perception of that city, I didn't explain how or why that was the case.

In the last four years or so, walking has emerged as my primary mode of transport. In fact, the best thing I could say about my most recent job was that it was close enough that I could easily walk there from my apartment (red flag: I preferred ten minutes of walking through slush to 8 hours of sitting at that desk). My favorite times to walk, however, are on the weekends. I like to wake up early and walk to the grocery store and wait outside with the other insomniacs until the store opens its doors. After that, I like to run errands ("walk errands"?)--the bank, the dry cleaners, the post office. I'm privileged enough to live close to these quotidian outposts, and I try to take advantage of their proximity whenever possible. Walking from place to place gives me a sense of the goings-on in my neighborhood better than if I'd chosen to view things through my car windshield.

Boston is home to many people who travel mostly by bike, and its suburbs and exurbs are saturated with people who rely on their cars and the Mass Pike to get around. I own a car but choose not to use it very often. Driving a car seems wasteful and indulgent to me, a way of prioritizing my own personal comfort/convenience over the interests of my immediate neighborhood and the global environment. And I choose not to bike because, frankly, it freaks me out.

And so, I walk. When I lived in DC, I would walk to school. For my first year, I lived in Adams Morgan, a lively neighborhood of ethnic restaurants, colorfully painted houses and highly unsavory frat bars. The walk from my apartment to school guided me over half-puked congealed pizza on the sidewalks lining Adams Morgan, down the hill next to the hotel where President Reagan was shot in 1981, through Dupont Circle (arguably the gayest, but not nearly the queerest, neighborhood in the city), alongside part of Embassy Row, and then through the two halves of Georgetown bisected by Wisconsin Avenue. I would arrive at school sweaty and incredulous that so much history could be packed into just a few miles beyond my home. And yet, my description of landmarks obscures the realities of my walk -- the dodging of cars' failures to yield, the blaring horns, the buses near-misses. I was a regular Frogger out there trying to cross my own personal highway. DC's broad streets and ill-timed walk signals created traffic hazards at nearly every corner between my origin and destination.

Walking around a neighborhood or city tells you something about the civic and personal relationships contained within that space. In her book, the Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs emphasizes the importance of sidewalks in building and sustaining neighbhorhoods. In her view, sidewalks generate and maintain trust by facilitating heterophilious interactions, a key attribute of a strong network. The more a community can support its pedestrians, the safer and more enriching that community can be, whether or not its sidewalks are paved with congealed cheese.

hopeful urban streets.

This week, my hometown city was besieged by millions of people who wanted to feed off the collective energy of the Obama juggernaut. Even if they didn't have a chance of getting closer than two miles to his dreamy aura, people traveled down pikes and through tunnels just to be there. With DC in the spotlight these past few days, I've been thinking a lot about my experiences in that city.

In the accumulation of twenty years I've spent living there, (until I was 18 and then for two years of graduate school), only eight of those years were ruled by a non-bastard president (namely: Clinton: 1992-90). I wonder now, as I'm living 500 miles away and Obama has finally moved into the White House, if the energy of that urban space has changed in any way. Has the influx of new blood actually altered its path through the city's arteries? As the city exudes a collective sigh, and more oxygen is released into the atmosphere, do residents think more clearly? Can they exercise more efficiently? Will their matches light faster when they strike them against the box?

During my most recent DC term (2006-2008), there were days that I felt actually beaten down by the city. It was more than a feeling of displacement or misunderstanding. I felt an active force pushing against me, pushing me out of the way, a profound sense of not fitting in. While many laud DC's layout, I felt continually challenged as a pedestrian in that city. The abundance of tourists and out-of-state temporary residents on the roads and the confusion of congested corridors, resulted in constant flouting of laws designed to protect those of us who often crossed intersections on two feet. The daily feeling of nearly being run over was not simply a metaphor.

Like so many others, though, I have hope that things will change, and I have no doubt that Obama's deep respect for collectivism will leak out of the White House and stain the DC streets a better hue.

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.

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).