I have an article running on gnovis right now about privacy, Facebook, and its third-party partners. Facebook has a new system called “Facebook Connect” which is attempting to do a number of interesting things on the internet, but with the history of Beacon’s privacy debacle haunting Facebook’s reputation, it will be interesting to see if Facebook can expand into other services on the net.

This leaves me with the following question: What is the price of our privacy? Or, more to the point, when do we decide that our privacy is valuable? No one seems to mind the potential privacy issues surrounding social networking sites until something horrible like Beacon happens. So who is responsible for our privacy? And how can Facebook and its partners make sure that these mistakes don’t happen again?

Read more here >>
gnovis Journal – Facebook and the Price of Privacy

Okay, I’ll admit it. I’m a freak about typography. I love well used type. Okay, I’ll admit it. I am also a transportation freak. I love a beautifully designed transit system. While I’m confessing, I’ll admit it: I almost changed my undergraduate major to graphic design and urban planning. Maybe if they had had a joint program…

Well, today I got the closest thing: Paul Shaw’s AIGA article on the history of typography and the NYC subway system. Entitled The (Mostly) True Story of Helvetica and the New York City Subway, Shaw blends a beautiful history of fonts, signs, and the complicated birth of the modern NYC subway system.

There is a commonly held belief that Helvetica is the signage typeface of the New York City subway system, a belief reinforced by Helvetica, Gary Hustwit’s popular 2007 documentary about the typeface. But it is not true—or rather, it is only somewhat true. Helvetica is the official typeface of the MTA today, but it was not the typeface specified by Unimark International when it created a new signage system at the end of the 1960s. Why was Helvetica not chosen originally? What was chosen in its place? Why is Helvetica used now, and when did the changeover occur? To answer those questions this essay explores several important histories: of the New York City subway system, transportation signage in the 1960s, Unimark International and, of course, Helvetica.

It’s been a long day – you enjoy a treat. Read it here.

What will happen to your Facebook account when you die? What about when you try to kill it? gnovis is running a post of mine on the topic of “user death”. This article considers the implications of death in online environments, and emerged out of conversations at CSCW, and the insightful work of several of my (now) peers.

Here is a taste to wet the pallet:

When online, what counts as a “body” or “identity” emerges out of the coconstruction, negotiation, and even contestation of users and technologies. While users may prove their existence with each Cartesian account (i.e., “I login, therefor I am”), the terms of their existence is often preregulated by the technology. Moreover, these jealous applications may go to extremes to prevent you from leaving. Technology does a great job of enabling our own sense of immortality.

Read more here >>
gnovis Journal – Death of a User: The Overlooked Use-Case

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.