I just got to San Diego for CSCW 2008, and am totally stoked. Not only is there conference (stay tuned!), but a number of professors and students from prospective PhD programs are here, so I am excited to see what their work is like in person. The best part? Well, Morgan Ames, my good friend from high school, is here as well! We were such strange, troubled kids back then (who wasn’t, really), and it has been a delight to reconnect with her recently (thank you Facebook), only to realize how much our academic lives overlap.

I suppose that might be one reason why staying at the Hilton on Mission Bay is trippy. The last time I was here was during high school during an obligatory Concert Choir tour to Southern California. To this day, I can’t figure out what the purpose of taking the school choir on tour was, aside from a random vacation for students, and major headaches for teachers. This, however, is totally off topic.

Some might be wondering what “CSCW” stands for. I have told coworkers and academic colleagues that it stands for “Computer Supported Cooperative Work”, which, of course, does not good, as this is equally confusing. From Wikipedia: “CSCW focuses on the study of tools and techniques of groupware as well as their psychological, social, and organizational effects.”

For now, I am off to go have some fun!

The internet allows billions of people to communicate anonymously each day, “and boy, are they pissed off!”

CNN ran an article today entitled #@*!!! Anonymous anger rampant on Internet, considering everything from cyber bullying to flaming, and all of those less then polite and less than identified treasures around the net.

“In the [pre-Internet era], you had to take ownership [of your remarks]. Now there’s a perception of anonymity,” said Lesley Withers, a professor of communication at Central Michigan University. “People think what they say won’t have repercussions, and they don’t think they have to soften their comments.”

The basic theory is that computers obscure cues that can be used to identify an individual and their behavior. But does that turn us into different people?

Markman is quick to observe that he doesn’t believe there’s more anger out there. But, he said, “there are more ways of expressing it on the Internet.”

“We’ve all had interactions with unpleasant people, but we don’t confront them. We take it out elsewhere,” he said. “What the Internet has created is groups of people where there are no repercussions with being too aggressive.”

I, however, remain skeptical. Interpersonal communication shapes our understandings of ourselves. Narrative psychologists Pasupathi and McAdams have shown this over and over again. The structures (aka “technology”; see Yates and Orlikowski’s Adaptive Structuration Theory) in which those interactions occur, then, must play a role in the types of conversations that occur, and they types of people we become. Now, I am far from a doom sayer when it comes to the internet (quite the opposite, actually), and it may be that these anonymity/anger effects are contextually bound to communication on blogs and chat rooms. Either way, it is interesting to consider how anonymity is used as a tool, regardless of the objective. In the words of laywer-brother when I asked my family why they thought people go to chatrooms, “[there are] limited repercussions for participatory benefits.” Makes you wonder what makes one a “participant.”

CNN’s article is worth a readYou can find it here: #@*!!! Anonymous anger rampant on Internet

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.

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!)

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.

Did you know that 80-90% of all scientific discovery has been accomplished in the last 100 years? Apparently if we calculate the percentage of scientists who are still alive from the total number of scientists that have ever lived, we will get just about the same number: 80-90% (Sismondo, 2004).

Of course asking a question like “do you believe in science?” might seem absurd. Ever since my days back in Alexander’s lab at the University of Utah I have considered myself one of those scientists, but now having read too much philosophy I find myself questioning what I was doing. Much like Bruno Latour’s anxious friend who only dares to admit he isn’t so certain about “reality”, I find myself trying to justify this scientist identity.

Looking towards the past, and in anticipation of my future, gnovis is running an essay of mine that briefly considers two theoretical heavyweights: Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn.

If Popper is right, then we are accomplishing some of the most remarkable work in human history. However, if Kuhn is correct, then we might need to come to terms with the reality that all of that work might be thrown out the window some day.

This time around I don’t have any answers. If you do, I would love to hear them.

Read more here:
Falsifying my Paradigms @ gnovis Journal

TheMachineIsMe twittered me after my post on Treadmill desks to make sure I had heard of the Hawaii Chair.

Oh, yes. I have. Here, TMIS, is a rocking endorsement:

It kind of makes me appreciate my non-walking, non-moving desk. Just don’t take away my second monitor. Then we would have a problem.

Welcome to the week!

Today’s video entertainment is brought to you by Microsoft. After teasing the world with two either brilliant or horrendous ads featuring the unlikely duo of Bill Gates and Seinfeld, the two co-stars have (literally) walked into the sunset. Speculation remains on whether these two ads were faux or not, but either way they have been replaced with this:

Always a sucker for ads, I was excited to see this new campaign. It is certainly smart. We will just have to wait to see if it is effective. Engaging in brand wars while employing the competition’s terminology (“I’m a Mac/PC”) is always dangerous.

Enjoy the movie, and check out the comments on YouTube if you get a chance. blackghost10sg’s quip was especially entertaining:

I’m a PC and i have virus now. oops! I’m dead now. lol!