This about sums it up.

Last week on Mashable, I read a blog post stating, “Facebook is doing its very best not to make you terribly sad.”

I expect you have noticed the new “Photo Memories” box that appear in the upper right-hand side of Facebook’s interface — basically a photo including you and one of your friends. Although I rarely click on them, I kind of like the addition. I had not, however, realized that this addition might be making scores of Facebook users depressed by showing them painful photos including their exs.

So Facebook has fixed this, and its all well and good. But it did give me chuckle given my propensity to rant about attempts to turn our social lives into algorithms.

The day before I read this post, I gave a lecture on “Remembering, Forgetting and the Challenges of Representing Humans” in Social Implications of Information Systems. During  this lecture I talked to students about the ways in which the design of a site like Facebook can help us share details from our lives, but in doing so it also restrains what can be shared.  When talking about Facebook’s Relationship Status I made the point that a drop-down box of values is probably too limited to capture the full range of our relationship experiences (something I have blogged about before).

One of my students explained that even when we do use the system Facebook designs, sometimes the information we provide is an outright lie. On her Facebook profile, apparently, she is married to her “best gay friend.”

So back to the photos. It’s great that Facebook is no longer making people depressed. Also, I kind of like the new feature. But it seems that Facebook is once again relying on the data people provide in ways that might be problematic. After all, I suspect my student will eventually meet the man of her dreams, and when the time is right they’ll update their Facebook and let the world know. However, this also means she’ll have to break up with her best friend, and Facebook will no longer remind them of the fun times they have had over the years.

There has been a lot of prospective student activity this week. Not only has my dear CCT friend Margarita been here giving the antro department one last look, but I have been on the recruitment committee for Informatics so there have been a lot of new faces.

I just sat down in LUCI for a few minutes to take a break from today’s schedule, only to have Meg remark: “They must be exhausted.” I suspect she meant the prospective students, but I think it could apply to any of us.

Visiting student days are always intense and there is just too much information to process. It is just impossible to describe the immensity of choosing your PhD program. That said, these students look great, and I certainly hope they all choose to come play with us in Irvine. In just a few minutes, they will get to relax as well: We are all piling in cars and heading to the beach.

For today, I leave you with this picture in honor of our prospectives. A baby anteater — fresh-eyed, full of ideas, and ready to do some research! (You can see it, right?)

And were off! Early this morning, Ellie, Leslie and I braved the weather, hopped in Meg’s car, and splashed our way to the airport en route to CSCW. Lilly just texted to let us know about the swimming pool waiting for us — ah, Savannah in February. Glad we’re not on our way to DC.

So cookies basically helped me make it through my thesis. As Margarita and I madly typed, sitting across from each other at her dinning room table, she buttressed herself against the pain with power smoothies while I sublimated it with coffee and cookies.

During a recent dissertation defense, a colleague joked that she was tempted to dedicate her dissertation “to tea.” While every laughed at the ridiculous and endearing joke, a mild horror crept over me as I realized that I, in fact, had mentioned cookies in the acknowledgements section of my thesis. (more…)

Those who have known/tolerated me for at least a year probably know this story. It’s the same one I told last year. As children my dad would make us play a game — guess what the local news thought the 10 most notable stories of the year were, and then try creating  a list of our own news.

Top 10’s were popular this year, perhaps inspired by the end of a decade: Top 10 LOLCats, Romantic Comedies, One Hit Wonders of the ’90s, ’80s, ’70s and so on.

One might almost think top 10s passe, but as one friend of mine explained: “I’ve been loving it! I have been looking at all these top 10 movie lists, revisiting favorites, and catching the ones I never got around to.”

Last year was particularly important for me. Particularly with my graduation from Georgetown, and a move to UC Irvine, a lot has changed. How funny — I just realized that a decade ago (1999) was the year I graduated from high school and moved away to college. New beginnings, new opportunities, I suppose.

Well, without further delay, 2009 in 10 bite size pieces. (more…)

Looks like I am going to Savannah! I received word a couple days ago that my paper on PatientsLikeMe was accepted for the “CSCW Research in Healthcare: Past, Present, and Future” workshop at CSCW 2010. The paper, co-authored with Caitie Lustig and my advisor, Gillian Hayes, is the start of some research engaging with issues around the representation of patients via PatientsLikeMe’s health data system.

The project is still in its formation, but if you would like to read more, you can find information on my personal page, where you will also find a copy of the workshop paper.

http://www.jedbrubaker.com/patientslikeme/

In the meantime, any thing I just can not miss while I am in Savannah?

Quick and crazy factoid for the night:

Upon his death, Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) (of Panopticon fame) asked to be permanently embalmed and kept at the University of London, where his corpse “now fitted with a head made of wax, is regularly wheeled into college meetings, where it is duly recorded in the minutes as ‘present, but not voting’” (Hijiya, 1983, p. 356)

Talk about persistence. A-mazing.

I am currently sitting in a lecture on ubiquitous computing, and sensors is the name of the game.

I have recently been thinking again about the engineer’s role in reinforcing essentialized notions of identity. This is particularly relevant in the ubiquitous computing space where the focus on sensors explicitly aims to sense the body.

There is a complicated theoretical argument to be articulated, but honestly, I am writing final papers, and Derrida has been keeping me up at night. So, for today, I will summarize my thinking with the following comic from ThreePanelSoul, lovingly sent my way by Daniel.

Enjoy. I’ll see you next week.

I have a strange habit. When things get really stressful, I start fantasying that I am somewhere else. This is nothing unique, but in my case, studying technologies that actually allow people to be somewhere else, it expresses itself in slightly strange ways.

When writing the literature review for my thesis, for example, and having spent so much time researching virtual communities, I decided that I should do more than read about them — I should live in one too! And so off I went to LambdaMOO, one of the most famous text-based virtual communities.

Sitting in my DC condo, I would slide my LambdaMOO existence off to one of my screens, while continuing to typing away in Word. A quick glance to the terminal with its black screen and white text was enough to remind me that somewhere else, some portion of me wasn’t enduring the pain of writing a thesis. This worked, kind of, but not for very long. (more…)