gnovis ran an article of mine today talking about craigslist Missed Connections.

How can you not love a missed connection? Anonymously thrust into the ether of cyberspace, they are little stories with endless possibilities.

Will the bookworm’s post lead to an exciting new chapter in life? Will the Starbucks flirts reconnect over a triple raspberry mocha frappuccino latte? And will those gym-bunnies ever hop into each other’s lives?

Imagining the possibilities is probably the best part. But for better or worse, sometimes real life is much more explosive. Check it out!

I have just completed my first response to the Personal Identity Narrative I wrote for Gender, Sexuality, and the Body. Having spent the first part of this semester working through the problematic research issues that were originally raised in Joan Scott’s chapter “Experience”¹, I am now attempting to answer those criticisms in my own work.

Scott took issue with a number of practices she saw in the academic community, but the naturalization of experiences was at the top of the list.

“[Scholars] rhetorical treatment of [experience based] evidence and their use of it to falsify prevailing interpretations, depends on a referential notion of evidence which denies that it is anything but a reflection of the real” (24).

Scott is complaining that when experiences are presented as data in academic research, say the experiences of several African-American women in 1872, it has the tendency to silence or otherwise not represent the diverse experiences of individuals whose stories were not included.

This seemingly obvious point (that different people have different experiences) becomes much less clear when the experiences represented come from a vastly different culture, time, or context than our own. Carrying on with the example of our 19th century black woman, Scott would ask us as researchers to consider not just the histories of those individuals, but also the history of womanhood, race, location, culture and time, historizing all of these factors into their relative and holistic context.

This was the task at hand when revisiting my previous narrative. I threw up a wall between myself as a researcher and myself as the researched. I wrote for quite a while, assessing absent labels in my story, presumptions I had made of the presumed readers, and the contexts in which the story took place. I ruminated on unclear aspects of the narrative, outlining possibilities which “the author” might have intended.

This is when things got strange.

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Footnotes:

1. Scott, Joan W. “Experience.” Feminists Theorize the Political, 1992.↩

katie didn’t just emailed me. Apparently the NYT is reporting today that Verizon is blocking text messages that it deems “controversial or unsavory.”

New media and censorship. Here we go again:

“No company should be allowed to censor the message we want to send to people who have asked us to send it to them,” Ms. Keenan said. “Regardless of people’s political views, Verizon customers should decide what action to take on their phones. Why does Verizon get to make that choice for them?”

Is text messaging an open space? What rights do we have to insist on outside of a Verizon/customer relationship? Text messaging is not subject to the same content allowances as voice communication, and I should point out that pornography has had problems gaining access to text messaging as well.
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Have you ever found something from the past that just makes you cringe? A journal, perhaps. You twinge with every misplaced comma, and hold your breath as you espouse some maddening logic from the past. You want it to end, but you just can’t stop reading. Brace yourself, and read on.

With the Personal Identity Narrative I recently wrote, and the next version in the works, I have been thinking a lot about the artificiality of our memories. Tonight I was trying to find a statistic from a study performed in conjunction with an apparently now defunct/repurposed online magazine named Oasis. Finding the website non-existent, I ran over to the Internet Archive and began to search through time for the rough date when the data was published.

About two seconds after I found the data, I had a daunting epiphany: In high school I published an article with this magazine. (more…)

gnovis, the online academic forum sponsored by Georgetown’s Communication, Culture and Technology program has accepted a short article of mine on the reliability of email.

Here is a taste:

By design, [SPAM] solutions block email somewhere along its path. This means email administrators must deal with the terrifying risk that legitimate email might fall through the cracks. This is far from trivial. If you were to choose between loosing one legitimate email and weeding through 100 junk messages, which would you choose? What about 1000?

Read the entire article here:

Pursuing Reliable Email: How can we leverage the user?

Or better yet, get involved!

In order to improve my qualitative research methods, I am part of a seminar this semester entitled Gender, Sexuality and the Body. In order to both generate experiential data to work with and personal means by which to experience the theorists we will be discussing, Dr. Coventry open endedly asked us to come to class the first day with a written personal identity narrative. We were told that it should narrate our relationship with our gender, sexuality and body, and to keep it short (a task that proved substantially difficult and ended up having large ramifications on the product).

Over the course of this semester, this entry will be rewritten through the lense of theorists like Butler, Foucault, Lacan, and as Coventry might say, other “vauge and abstract French philosophers.” So without any other dressing or taste correction, here is my approximation of the past. (more…)

Given the rise in the social and viral aspects of the Web 2.0 movement (concept, effect, trend…) it is not surprising that Wal-Mart contracted with Facebook to create a sponsored group for dorm-room style called “Wal-Mart Roommate Style Match.” After all, what could be worse than mismatched comforters? For a generation of students who will most likely meet their roommates on Facebook before they meet in person and have the opportunity to fight for top bunk, a collaborative shopping cart seems like a good solution.

But the social web can be a unruly place, and unfortunately for Wal-Mart, Facebook groups come with a wall where users can post comments. And these comments don’t have to be nice. Computerworld ran an article that was quickly picked up by Slashdot, highlighting the reaction to the group captured on its wall. Apparently none of the posts are talking about dorm room styling.

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A 1:00 AM flight from Las Vegas to D.C., Judith Butler in hand, haven’t really slept since (check the time stamp). Georgetown here I come.

It seems that every website is bursting at the seams with the information it is trying to tell us, but lately I have been questioning this. What would it mean if we inverted the equation? What if it were the application’s responsibility to listen to the user rather than talk (or yell) at the user? What form would a “listening application” take?

Kevin Brooks, Principle Researcher at Motorola, presented on story-telling at Adaptive Path’s User Experience Week. While speaking on the role that stories play in our lives, he emphasized the importance of one reciprocal requirement of the narrative process: listening.

While his session focused on simple story structures and the interpersonal effects of listening, I am left re-applying the metaphor of story-telling to web applications.

The history of the web contains little more than a set of glorified brochures. Any story-telling is one sided, the web asking curt questions in order to provide small twists in the story that only it is allowed to tell. We on the other hand never question this, delighted when an application knows our name after only having provided it a minute earlier.

But what if the user was able to tell the story instead? What if it was the application’s job to listen? Kevin Brooks explained that when people take a listening role, understanding between people increases, the speaker is empowered, and the relationship between speaker and listener is deepened. More intriguing, Kevin spoke about listening addiction: “You just can’t get enough.”

An application that is gratifying, deepens connections with its users while empowering them. This seems like a metaphor worth exploring.

You may recall that in past work I looked at how members of the same micro-social community would reinforce each other’s autobiographical narratives towards a community based and shared prototypicality. That thesis was based in part on the interpersonal “co-construction” of an individual’s narrative that Pasupathi (2001) theorized to be an inherent aspect/effect of any narrative delivery. While her seminal work focused on co-construction and development of the autobiography over one’s lifespan, some of her current research is also exploring co-construction with the self when presenting to a projected audience (for example, when writing).

There are aspects about both of these that are fascinating, and both these angles arise in my own thought process, but I have become increasingly interested in a third option, what one might consider co-construction against a non-dynamic other. (more…)