Today gnovis ran an article of mine I am particularly fond of. A dash of digital life, family, and The Ting Tings. What do you get? My thoughts a life full of crappy interfaces. Don’t worry. It’s not you, it’s the interface. Here is a taste to wet the appetite:

Talking on the phone with my sister several weeks ago, she began enumerating the reasons she shouldn’t join Facebook. This was hardly necessary. I am fairly certain that the mother of three young kids has very little time for updating her Facebook status or playing Photo Hunt. Still, I tried to play along:

“You could upload pictures of your kids,” I offered weakly. Little did I realized I had hit the issue squarely on the head.

Read the entire article on gnovis: It’s not you, it’s the interface.

As frequent readers know, the New Media team at gnovis kicked off the academic year with a four part series on why we blog. The perspectives were each interesting and provocative, and certainly worth revisiting.

These types of belly-gazing blog posts are common around the web. However, following a link from Steve today, I was surprised to see this conversation in in the Atlantic as well.

Andrew Sullivan (of the Atlantic and on his blog The Daily Dish) has written a compelling piece that situates the act of writing a blog post next to more formal writing. I have been a fan of Andrew Sullivan’s writing since I first read Love Undetectable in high school, and was delighted to see that same prose here. Starting with antiquity and moving forward to Montaigne, he attempts to represent the very ethos of blogging:

To blog is therefore to let go of your writing in a way, to hold it at arm’s length, open it to scrutiny, allow it to float in the ether for a while, and to let others, as Montaigne did, pivot you toward relative truth. A blogger will notice this almost immediately upon starting. Some e-mailers, unsurprisingly, know more about a subject than the blogger does. They will send links, stories, and facts, challenging the blogger’s view of the world, sometimes outright refuting it, but more frequently adding context and nuance and complexity to an idea. The role of a blogger is not to defend against this but to embrace it. He is similar in this way to the host of a dinner party. He can provoke discussion or take a position, even passionately, but he also must create an atmosphere in which others want to participate.

While in the gnovis peice I argued that a personal obligation to participate in a community was my reason for blogging, I have to admit that it is a dynamic community that may constantly be reshaped by the items to which I can only hope I add “nuance and complexity”.

A study on Facebook and narcissism conducted at the University of Georgia was published in this month’s issue of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (which coincidentally was the first journal I ever subscribed to).

“We found that people who are narcissistic use Facebook in a self-promoting way that can be identified by others,” said lead author Laura Buffardi, a doctoral student in psychology who co-authored the study with associate professor W. Keith Campbell.

It seems that everyone is always joking that Blogging/Twittering/Facebooking is about as narcissistic an act as we can think of, but apparently it can get clinical.

“bleedin obvious,” writes one commenter on Physorg’s site. But whether obvious or not, it still is worth investigating.

“We’ve undergone a social change in the last four or five years and now almost every student manages their relationships through Facebook – something that few older people do,” Campbell said. “It’s a completely new social world that we’re just beginning to understand.”

I just have one question: If narcissism is when an individual “has an excessive need for admiration and affirmation” (thanks Wikipedia), then how does narcissism behave in asynchronous forms communication on the web such as Facebook?

(thanks Katie for the link!)

This is just rediculous. I was watching Colbert last night when Steven talked about a cat in Japan that had been appointed station manager. What next? Tourists, of course.

According to this post at Japan Probe:

Little Tama has proven to be incredibly popular, drawing tourists to Wakayama and generating healthy revenue for the Wakayama Electric Railway

Apparently Tama has made so much money that they even gave him an office. You’ve got to check this out:

Right now I am connected to the internet via some wonderful hub named “MS-Wireless” that, despite a genera-horrible name, has been trucking on for nearly 6 months somwhere across the street from my office. With a locked down guest Wi-Fi and VPN, that hub has been a lifesaver.

Well, with anonymity on the brain, I have been suprised at just how hard true anonymity is on the internet these days. So, of course, the following post from Cult of Mac made me smile:

You know what it’s like when you’re strolling around looking for networks. They’re all the same. They’re all called “belkin54? or “NETGEAR” or “BTHomeHub”. So generic. So default. What we really need is networks with imaginative names. Names like “Vicious Evil Network Of Mayhem”

(more…)

Is there a dark side of email? I couple weeks ago I posted the following on Twitter:

Apparently the answer is yes.

Is there a solution? Brett sent me an email a couple days back. All it contained was a link to one of Google’s new projects: “Mail Goggles”

According to Gmail’s blog,

When you enable Mail Goggles, it will check that you’re really sure you want to send that late night Friday email. And what better way to check than by making you solve a few simple math problems after you click send to verify you’re in the right state of mind?

But as TechCrunch points out, it is far from fool-proof:

There are two problems with the product. First, I hate math. Second, if I want to send a drunken email, and all that’s standing between me and success are a few math problems, I’m gonna go find that calculator.

And of course what about Twitter, IM, or the infamous drunk Facebook wall posting? In the meantime Brett, I resent the insinuation that I am bad at math.

They say the one thing you are never supposed to do on a blog is go “silent”. Sorry about that. This semester has been so crazy busy that the blog got pushed to the back for just a bit there.

So what has been stealing all of my time? Well, on top of thesis proposals, chapter edits, preparing to launch the MCAT for the 2009 year, and regular course work, I also will be giving two presentation/lectures in the next two weeks on issues of anonymity and identity online, and computer mediated communication (CMC).

Given my obsession with practices of anonymity and self-identification via technology and communication, these two lectures are a perfect opportunity to share a bit of that crazy passion around campus.

In Communication Theories and Frameworks, I will be providing a veritable smorgasbord  of CMC theories including:

• Cues Filtered Out Theory
• Social Identification Mode of Deindividuating Effects (SIDE)
• Social Information Processing Theory, and
• Hyperpersonal Theory

Of course I am giving the lecture, so there will be plenty of conversation about how anonymity and self-presentation might be understood (or not!) in each of these theories.

In Netspeak, the linguistically oriented CMC course I am taking this semester, I will be leading the class in considering all of the ways that anonymity problematizes our understanding of communication. This is not to suggest there is a deficit, in fact quite the opposite. We will be examining various practices of anonymity and self-identification, and evaluate the utility of the resulting identities across different technologies and user practices.

Hold on to your hats, and I will let you know how it turns out.