Ready for something amazing? This last Friday I got to see what other people think about craigslist for a change.

Civilian Art Projects held an opening reception for a show titled “craigslist” featuring work inspired by the site and its occupants (Read on Civilian’s website here, and Steve’s coverage, and awesome photos, here, and then my Flickr photos here).

The curatorial write up captured exactly what I have been arguing over the past year:

A curious outcome of our global internet society is that while we are more hyper-connected than ever, our identities have become increasingly malleable to the point of anonymity… Anonymity can bring out the adventurous side of people, particularly when it comes to exploring socially transgressive situations. In this exhibition, the artists take full advantage of this growing social identity phenomenon and investigate how anonymity generates a new kind of portraiture.

This was readily apparent in Jason Zimmerman‘s pieces. (more…)

(This is the fourth post of a multi-post series on the relationship between the real and digital world. To read them all, start here, and continue here and here.)

“Does anyone know when the new ‘primetime’ is?” Dr. Tinkcom posed this question one day during a critical theory seminar. We had been discussing advertising and the impact of the Internet on traditional television viewership. Several students hypothesized that busy schedules had shifted prime-time back a couple hours. Others, myself included, wondered if it had been obliterated all together.

“Its between 8 and 9 in the morning, and 5 and 7 at night,” he answered, but then asked: “Does anyone know why?” Considering my own penchant for anything in syndication, I figured it was due to shows like The Simpsons and King of the Hill that show across the nation during the 5-7 time block. It was one of my quieter peers who answered his question correctly. “Commuters,” she said simply. (more…)

(This is the third post of a multi-post series on the relationship between the real and digital world. To read them all, start here, and continue here.)

Say you spot a cute guy across the dance floor, and try to make a move, only to get blocked by his posse. It happens to us all. This is a prime candidate for a Missed Connection, right? “blocked by posse at Town – m4m – 24.” Town, that new DC gay club that is harvesting club kids’ personal information, is interested in a more immediate response. My friend John brought me up to speed.

“So as soon as they scan your driver’s license, they slap a number on you.” The look on my face must have been priceless. Not only are they scanning you like a number, but then they actually slap a number on you. In this case, however, the numbers aren’t for Town. Instead, they are for Town’s “users.”

“You can just look at some guy’s number,” John continued, “and then write a message on a piece of paper, and you hand it to this guy, and he types it up. Then the message goes up on these screens in the club. So like ‘342, you are totally hot – let me buy you a drink – 126.'” (more…)

(This is the second post of a multi-post series on the relationship between the real and digital world. To read them all, start here.)

Last year I attended a session at the Aspen Institute featuring John Clippinger of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. His book, A Crowd of One: The Future of Individual Identity, was about to hit the shelves and so a conversation ensued about how digital identity (in the technical sense) was transmitted and authenticated in digital environments. What struck me about the group, however, was the absence of discussion about protocols and authentication schemas. Instead, this group was looking for examples from outside of technology (policy, biology, psychology, etc.) to help guide technical efforts. It was not an easy conversation.

“The problem with identity on the internet,” Clippinger said, cutting through the palatable frustration in the room (and paraphrased of course), “is the same as going to a bar.” The room held its breath, waiting to see the connection. “When you hand the bouncer your driver’s license, how much of that information does he need?” (more…)

What is the relationship between ‘real’ and digital world? Anyone who reads my blog knows that much of my research revolves around this very question, but I wanted to return to the topic explicitly. It seems that in many recent conversations I have been arguing that they are tightly coupled. Castranova seems to agree with me:

There is certainly a relationship between the synthetic world and the real one… people are crossing all the time,… carrying their behavioral assumptions and attitudes with them. (Edward Castranova, Synthetic Worlds)

While I feel it is theoretically sound, and have spent most of my time discussing implications of this connection, my more pragmatic peers have been looking for an example. I can’t blame them. When I argue, for example, that the m4m section on craigslist is a proxy for the gay community, they want to know where I get off making such a claim. If that isn’t enough to get them riled up, I frequently continue on to insist that the distinctions between online and offline selves are not as tidy as we might like.

We are going to trying something new over the next couple of posts, and try to build out these concepts with some interesting examples based on recent occurrences locally in DC and across the broader interwebs. What is on the agenda? Privacy, relationships, and Missed Connections, of course.

(Image credit: SecondLife via abcNews, and on a side note… I probably need to invest some more time there.)

A quick note here to point out Google’s latest approach to breaking down social network data warehousing.

One of the current struggles of which all social networking evangelists are aware is centered around who owns your data. Google’s embryonic OpenSocial seems to hold some promise there.

What is sometimes missed, but becoming more pervasive as we are now users of multiple different social networking sites, is how to create relationships beyond the boundaries of Facebook, MySpace or Friendster. Google seems to have a solution via their SocialGraph API that would let you scrape various online spaces in order to navigate interpersonal relationships across various platforms.

To top it all off, they gave us a nice video!

The links are based on XFN and FOAF markup, so I can see some adoption problems there. My blogging software allows me to manage these, but it certainly isn’t foremost on my mind. Facebook app, anyone?

Read more about it at Google Code (link), and thanks to WeSeePeople for catching this.

Approximately one year ago, Eric Nakagawa launched a site entitled “I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER?” and provided one internet meme the focal point with which to start one of our quirkier fads.

A year later most people are familiar with the “LOLCat”, even if they don’t know it by name. The unmistakable combination of cat and garbled text that began with Happy Cat is now inextricably entrenched workforce culture. During last semester’s finals, when disclosed that I had wandered the library navigating browsers to LOLCats, what I didn’t mention was that it was the LOLCats posted everywhere in paper form (they were being used for some flier on stress) that had me thinking about LOLCats in the first place. Some how they had escaped from the ‘nets.

Last fall I had the opportunity to learn a distressingly large amount about LOLCats while writing do research on media comparisons. The resulting paper argued that the relationships between image and text in both LOLCats and silent films share striking similarities. Both captions and intertitles were introduced to augment and extend the possibilities of the visual content. Probably more important, the paper included plenty of pictures of really cute cats.

In the name of those cute cats, I am posting it here. Enjoy!

wants moar: the appropriation of text in the framing of visual media a comparison between LOLcats and intertitles

(cartoon courtesy of xkdc.com)

At what point does the term “missed connection” abandon it’s craigslist roots and run a-muck with an evolving definition of its own? Over the past year I have heard the term increasingly used outside of a craigslist context, and so I ask you: What would you define a missed connection?

Take the recent Levi’s commercial:

(As a side note, Levi’s ran two seperate ads, one with a man and one with a women in the phone booth. You can see the other one here.)

I have spent the last few months fascinated with this ad, but haven’t been able to put my finger on why. (more…)

gnovis ran an article of mine today on Facebook Relationships. Here is a teaser to convince you go and read it:

It is an age-old story, boy/girl/* meets boy/girl/*, they go on a few dates, and all seems well. Then one of the two (or three?) brings up a daunting topic: the Facebook Relationship status.

Read it here!
Facebook Relationships and Information Architecture @ gnovis

Fred Stutzman on his blog Unit Structures mentioned an NPR segment on privacy issues online from the most recent Weekend Edition. Fred’s humorous prediction of paranoia in listeners is unfortunately not far off. While scholars James Rule and Kathryn Montgomery were both quick to point out that different generations have different notions of privacy, I am generally frustrated that we do not discuss the value of privacy in relative terms.

I am split on this issue. I find it disappointing to hear Dr. Montgomery (director of American University’s Center’s Youth, Media and Democracy project) answer these difference by suggesting that “we need to help them understand what privacy is and to make more conscious decisions about what they share.” (more…)