As young as I can remember, at the end of each year my father would talk about the “top ten”. Always a man for striving and measuring, my Dad would turn to the local newspaper and share what the Deseret News considered the most notable stories of the year. At some point my father started asking us to create our own top ten lists. This has since become a tradition in my family, but one that I have never shared here.

Between school and work, and all the extra commitments I masochistically piled on, this year I have had precious few moments to stop and catch my breath. When my sister demanded that I stop “for just thirty minutes!” and reflect, I was surprised at the list. So without any more explanation, my “Top Ten for 2008”:

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In a broad stroke of interdisciplinarity, I am an organizer of a seminar entitled Intertechnical Bodies at the American Comparative Literature Conference this Spring with my good friends Megan McCabe and Theodora Danylevich. We have just finished sending invitations to some amazing papers and the seminar looks like it is going to be great. So what is an “intertechnical body” you ask?

This seminar considers how the term “local culture” relates to concepts of embodied subjectivity. We argue that the embodied subject is a manifestation, distillation, or representation of local culture, and subsequently ask: To what extent do global communications and global technologies constitute a threat not only to “local cultures” but also to individual (human) bodies?… This seminar invites both a literal and a broad interpretation of the term “technology,” following Heidegger and Foucault with respect to discourse and philosophical heuristics.

My contribution is entitled Authoring the Single-Use Identity: Intertechnical production of the non-persistent subject on craigslist Missed Connections, and takes a look at some of my current work on Foucault and attempts to account for the role of the technology as a collaborator in the production of digital identity. (more…)

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.

As frequent readers know, the New Media team at gnovis kicked off the academic year with a four part series on why we blog. The perspectives were each interesting and provocative, and certainly worth revisiting.

These types of belly-gazing blog posts are common around the web. However, following a link from Steve today, I was surprised to see this conversation in in the Atlantic as well.

Andrew Sullivan (of the Atlantic and on his blog The Daily Dish) has written a compelling piece that situates the act of writing a blog post next to more formal writing. I have been a fan of Andrew Sullivan’s writing since I first read Love Undetectable in high school, and was delighted to see that same prose here. Starting with antiquity and moving forward to Montaigne, he attempts to represent the very ethos of blogging:

To blog is therefore to let go of your writing in a way, to hold it at arm’s length, open it to scrutiny, allow it to float in the ether for a while, and to let others, as Montaigne did, pivot you toward relative truth. A blogger will notice this almost immediately upon starting. Some e-mailers, unsurprisingly, know more about a subject than the blogger does. They will send links, stories, and facts, challenging the blogger’s view of the world, sometimes outright refuting it, but more frequently adding context and nuance and complexity to an idea. The role of a blogger is not to defend against this but to embrace it. He is similar in this way to the host of a dinner party. He can provoke discussion or take a position, even passionately, but he also must create an atmosphere in which others want to participate.

While in the gnovis peice I argued that a personal obligation to participate in a community was my reason for blogging, I have to admit that it is a dynamic community that may constantly be reshaped by the items to which I can only hope I add “nuance and complexity”.

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!)

This is just rediculous. I was watching Colbert last night when Steven talked about a cat in Japan that had been appointed station manager. What next? Tourists, of course.

According to this post at Japan Probe:

Little Tama has proven to be incredibly popular, drawing tourists to Wakayama and generating healthy revenue for the Wakayama Electric Railway

Apparently Tama has made so much money that they even gave him an office. You’ve got to check this out: