rick roll’d on the sidewalk…

i don’t know if this counts if you can’t click on it…

from latimes

for the past year i’ve been working on an ethnography of social classification project. this has been mainly a pilot study of what it is that people actually do when they are adding things into sites like del.icio.us, flickr, etc. there’s been some early research (thx gleemie!) so far that begins to really incorporate ideas of social connection and social relations in digital social classification, rather than simply assuming that it happens like magic. as i’ve been plowing through my data, i’ve starting thinking about the ways in which these systems represent acts of collecting, rather than classifying. after looking around it seems like the tags that people really use are pretty arbitrary. there’s been so much focus and analysis on the tags themselves, that the research so far has been pretty limited at getting at what it is that people are actually doing. collecting seems to be a good way to think about this…at least that’s what i’m thinking so far.

as i’ve been chewing on this idea, i’s got thinking. there’s something about collecting that gives us a sense of who we are. there’s something about amassing things over time and then looking back on them that allows us to understand our historical trajectory. there’s something about collecting that gives us some kind of home in time, that allows us to place ourselves in the stretch of years past. how can i begin to think about acts of collecting in relation to space and time? it seems that people collect and it can either operate as a window into some unknown other , like with curio cabinets. but in collection personal artefacts, there’s something about memorializing ourselves, and imbuing objects with this kind of role of memorialization. think photos. think yearbooks. think that rock you picked up on the coast during the summer trip to rosarito. perhaps memorialization isn’t the right word as it makes it seem too much stuffy and official, but there’s definitely something in the act of collecting that  is about ordering in time and constructing space, some kind of domestic space. some kind of personal space. but also some kind of shared space too.

so a lot of these little things that we toss into our digital filing cabinet, these so-called tagging systems, they’re like digital scraps. digital news clippings. digital ephemera of sorts. i think researchers have made a mistake so far by looking at the terms of organization, the tags.  i think the real story is about how people relate to their digital scraps. i think there is a really kind of under the radar, seemingly quiet-boring tension here that we haven’t really explored yet.

has anyone been able to find a good source for asian news in english that isn’t from an UK-US based organization? i find myself going to the NYT and the BBC primarily and then looking under their asian sections. this is usually part of my morning routine as i sit down and get started on my day, however i’m interested in finding sources from asia directly. any tips?

…and we’re back! in school that is.

today was the first day of classes, as ucla is on the quarter system, and it was such a treat to be back on campus, seeing the gaggle of freshmen  roaming around. after the initial confusion and overload of my first year, i’m wholly excited to start the second round and delve more deeply into the ideas i’ve been toying with so far. i was back in san francisco last week visiting friends and someone asked me “how’s school going?” i stopped to think for a second, beamed, and replied “it’s going great!” that’s not to say that there aren’t frustrations, but after having taking time off from academia for several years, being back in this environment feels like being  a kid in a candy store…albeit with many more deadlines and insecurities.

those of you who know me, know that i have struggled quite a bit: panicking about tight deadlines, getting a slightly (ahem) neurotic about my abilities for innovative ideas but no matter what i’ve always been able to genuinely appreciate the fact that this is a time of experimentation and curiosity. during bitchfests with other students, i think it’s easy to forget why and how we ended up here in the process. i’ve known of other students who go through this whole process with tunnel vision, fixated on hyper-specific tasks and goals and my heart always sinks a little only because i really do feel really lucky and privileged to be an academia where we have the freedom and choice to make of it what we will. perhaps for most people this kind of freedom can be paralyzing, but i sincerely believe that academia is one of the last places where you’re encouraged to think creatively and wrestle with difficult questions. it’s true that the bureaucratic elements can be ghastly and i have yet to contend with the challenges with being a professor and the pressures of tenureship, but i’m really enjoying this time where i’ve been able to carve out space for myself to just try things out. it’s pretty damn fun.

a professor once complained to me that nowadays, people forget that education was in large part an experience rather than just a process of information delivery and i’ve taken this statement to heart. in the near future, i will have to start conceptually committing myself which seems so difficult to do when i’m so genuinely curious so many varied aspects of everyday digital life. part of me resists this only because it smacks of academia’s insistence on boundary demarcation. i know that i can’t just play like this forever but so for the time being i’m just going to stay in my candy store frame of mind until i really have to.

i have been doggedly reading through such a myriad of texts these days. there’s something to be said about waking up at 10:30am, making a cup of tea, and slowly plodding through a big stack of books without imminent pressure on time. it’s all quite luxurious. UCLA is on a quarter system and a 11 week term is ridiculously hectic. it feels like mental and logistical sprinting for 9 months straight and so i’m more than happy to take things quietly right now before i fully ramp up again in september. i’ve been going out (gasp) and hanging with family and friends more than my workaholic usualness. oh yeah, i also pimped out my bike and have been seriously tooling around LA on my bike which has been so mega-awesome.  LA isn’t the most bike friendly place and so find myself duking it out with pedestrians for sidewalk real estate, but needless to say, i can understand now why dogs stick their heads out of car windows. i also learned that i still know how to pop a wheelie and bike with no hands. so ha.

a lot of my reading so far have meandered quite a bit. i started out thinking i was going to bone up on all the po-mo lit, but that has since evolved into information theory, literary criticism, and STS work in classification. the main point of all this has been to try and think about various metaphors to describe tagging systems. understanding my own information flux i was really intrigued with notions of noise to describe the ongoing and circuitous flow of information in my daily life and weirdly enough i just came across a posting from alice marwick that expresses those same sentiments.  when looking at tagging more specifically, i was always struck by just how noisy these systems were. i mean, it’s like a big “miscellaneous” heap as David Weinberger would say. alice takes on this is a rather optimistic spin on the medium is the message, or rather that flux and noise are the message.

i’m a bit more ambivalent about this. i don’t think it’s necessarily about being a good or bad thing. instead, i think that this is a shift in how we look out and into the world, which in turn shapes how we sense and construct ourselves. when i think about tagging in relation to information infrastructures, tagging systems (including the ways in which we opt to describe ourselves social networking sites because they are essentially discrete terms in some simplistic “this is who i am” schema”) seem to operate like some kind of informational exoskeleton that braces our digital selves. and so rather than supporting from within, much like a brace, these systems awkwardly and uncomfortably hold things together from the outside. the inherent chaos that comes from flux-driven noise lends itself to this kind of awkward piecing together.

i certainly believe that there is an inherent beauty to chaos and noise, after all most innovation, creativity, and imagination have their origins in the previously unknown and unconnected. however i think there are some serious implications for how we manage the noise and thus the meaning of the noise. if noise and flux are meaningful purely within their own terms, this kind of self-referentiality is kind of depressing.

anyhow, an update for fall: i will be presenting at 4S in Montreal and then schlepping off to Vanouver for AOIR. all this is gonna happen within a week of each other. yipes! i’m hosting a panel, with my friend katie shilton at 4S titled “Technologies of Forgetting and Exclusion: Case Studies in the Social Benefits of Forgetting” where i’ll be talking more specifically about the information tracking of sexual offenders, which if you haven’t been following, is a rather egregious example of the problems of this whole “right to know” attitude in our age of digital data capture and surveillance.

okay. need to go to bed. smell ya later.

this is what i did

heehee! seriously, watch nick drum and just be in awe because he is an AMAZING drummer. he is so much fun to watch! this was from a show we played, probably in 2004? at liminal warehouse in oakland. ::sigh:: now i feel old…
[a bit of shameless self promotion, but it just brought a smile to my face]

this was a comment i got quite a bit in elementary and junior high school. when i think back on it, i can recall specific topics and teachers that just didn’t click for me for whatever reason. i remember staring at the carbon copy of my report card, usually in some starchy pink or yellow color, trying to decipher my teacher’s penmanship and being complete befuddled: how did they even know what the heck my potential was?! i certainly had no clue as an  8 year old. did this mean i was doing well? did this mean that i was doing poorly? i was getting straight As so what were they talking about????? now, in hindsight i have a better understanding of this. these teachers were telling me that i was doing fine, but that somehow i was capable of more. but just what this “more” is continues to be evasive.

recently, i started asking fellow students, teachers, advisors here at school “at what point do you know you’re good?” in grade school you have little spaces in your report card for teachers to write things like “does not work up to potential.” however, in grad school, i find myself running into this same notion, albeit in an altogether different context. at this current stage, it’s hard to get a sense of what it means to do well in grad school. so far, i’ve found that a lot of the things that really matter happen outside of coursework. the most interesting and compelling growth and development extend beyond the boundaries of the official paperwork that gets shuffled around and this can be a source of anxiety for me, only because it’s fuzzy and unclear to me if i’m really making any kind of progress.

often, when i’ve expressed this to other classmates, i’m met with a “don’t worry!” which is sooooo exasperating. it’s not that i’m worried about failing, or that i’m worried about not making it (whatever that means). i’m really just generally worried about not sucking. but not sucking on *my* own terms. while in grade school, teachers may have had a sense of what my potential was, there’s no one now really telling me where that point of demarcation is. and obviously, there isn’t one. however, the ability to establish  a grounded sense for myself has be constantly reflecting on whether or not i’m moving in the direction where i want to go. this whole process seems to involve a lot of intellectual ambulation, which can be really exhausting and straining. but i think this is just the nature of being in an interdisciplinary environment. there are no well trodden paths. nothing is linear. there are potentials at every intersection and possibilities of intersections across disparate planes. it’s mind-boggling to try and play with connecting the dots all the time.

when i’m feeling tired, i just wish someone would just tell me what to do. most of the time though, i relish in the messiness of it. however, it’s all beginning to dawn on me just how challenging this process of inter- and cross-connecting really is.

Alright, so I just got a Macbook a week or so ago and I thought I’d share some of the functionality funkiness that’s going on, or rather, the beef I have with Mac right now.

1) Download process: why do I NOT have the control to designate where I want to save things? Why do things have to automatically be downloaded to my desktop? I feel as if my control has been stolen.

2) I can’t seem to formulate a good mental map of my HD. It seems that Macs assume users to have pretty bad organizing patterns. Organizing files on PCs was very conducive to fairly hierarchal models that made it easier to organize things by folders, and particularly, subfolders. Since I’ve more or less imported my organization schema over to my Mac, I’ve run into all kinds of weirdness when I try to resave things, where I don’t have the option to put it back in its original sub-sub-sub-sub-folder home. THIS MADDENING!

3) I love shortcuts. Having to relearn shortcuts = so annoying, but that’s actually quite easy.

4) No right click on the mouse. Thankfully I have a separate USB mouse, but c’mon people. Right click is the bomb.

5) When I download new apps, I have no idea where they live! This relates to (1) and (2). These not-knowing issues is really maddening to me, particularly at this beginning stage as I’ve been setting things up on my computer, but this “getting to know you” period is awkward only because it feels that there are certain key things that have now been wrested from my control and me no likey.

I think this is kind of the darkside of user friendliness. In a lot of ways, they’ve taken the decision-making out of the hands of the actual user and embedded it within the machine as to streamline it all into something more elegant. I say pbbbt. I’ve already formulate some workarounds for this, only because I’ve had to really. But damn. Has Apple just assumed that people organize poorly? Or am I just so PCed out that I am blind to my own preferences?

I just got a new mac…the pain of shifting from a PC to a MAC is very felt but it’s slowly subsiding. We’re still in a casual courtship, but she just might be the one.

so i have been in a bit of a vortex. you know, the vortex of ::my mind:: [insert appropriate finger wiggles]. just kidding. but a vortex none the same. things had been plodding along just fine at the beginning of the quarter but after the forgetting workshop had finished up, i kind of fell flat on my face in terms of my productivity and general with-it-ness.

[sidenote: the workshop was awesome. we had invited people from varying backgrounds which made for a very rich discussion, jumping back and forth between the various considerations of the increased pervasiveness of data in our everyday lives, including ethics, history, security, philosophy, design, art, sociology, law, and anthropology. for an academic n00b like myself, it was really enlightening to see such lively and discussion by people in such different domains. proof that interdisciplinary work is, indeed, the bomb.]

unfortunately, my crash has carried on now for week or two and i am only now beginning to hoist myself back up to finish out the remaining weeks of the quarter. in the larger scheme of things, i think i had been sprinting quite a bit during the first terms for the school year: reorienting myself to being back in school, orienting myself to living in LA more generally, putting every single feeler out possible for anything that even seemed remotely interesting and stimulating…i think all of this culminated mid-April and my brain just needed to check out for a spell.

but i’m back. sort of-ish.

i feel a bit recharged now, however there is a flurry of activity still to be had. i am heading to the annual ICA conference in san francisco at the end of may (always fun to head back to the bay!) and i will be presenting at the new network theory conference in amsterdam at the end of june. fun! both look like they’re gonna be really great events. i was awarded the UC DIGSSS summer fellowship for 2007 and so i’m hoping this summer will give me an opportunity recenter and focus on the social theory and social software issues i have been contemplating over the duration of the year. i hope to put myself on lockdown for a bit and push through the shitload of ideas that have bombarded my brain so far. hopefully i will be able to get some coherence out of all this.