danah boyd has been working for years on the life of youth and particular what role digital media plays for them. At last year’s Aspen Ideas Conference she made three statements that I found extra interesting (beyond my general respect for her work):
teenagers engage in emotional exchange with their peers, especially late at night. This is new because without (digital) media they couldn’t meet at these hours before as they were not allowed to go out so late.
they don’t need/want super-immersive online worlds for their friends (like 2nd World) but meet them in asynchronous online communities. Problem here is that you can’t connect from MySpace to Facebook.
best thing for them is to “take their friends along in their pocket“, i.e. on their mobile phone. But carriers wall their networks and services even heavier then online communities do and, in consequence, “you don’t see innovations happening in mobile” on the social network side.
And this is a sad thing. As you can see here and as we also found out by our own research, mobile communication has the potential to address exactly these wishes of young people. Already now they make use of the technology in maybe unexpected ways: from sending photos from the fitting room to check their new look with their peers to subtle ring tone patterns that inform friends about the success with dating the latest crush.
T-Mobile’s My Faves looks like a move into the right direction because it is open to “even landlines and other networks” — it seems to be a success in the US but is discontinued it in Europe (where “other networks” were only available in one of the options). It’s people who live in social networks and these networks are not determined by a certain web framework or carrier. If carriers want to respond to that they need to open up and get ready for it before the online communities do and take the lead completely.
Here comes the all new and sparkling abstract of my Thesis (old stuff). You might want to have a look at it and give it some comments!
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In my thesis I propose the idea of a socially aware computer. In order to get to know the user‘s circles of friends, it will mine and analyse the data that is left as traces by her communication, mainly phone call logs and email archives. As a result, a value for personal or subjective importance can be computed for each person in the user‘s network.
This allows for a new arrangement of the personal address book so that more relevant persons can be found more easily – an important feature regarding our ever expanding and globalized personal networks.
Moreover, tasks that require knowledge about the user‘s personal relations can be handled automatically: One is turning the user‘s attention towards old friends that tend to be neglected when he is burried in work or because he is always on the run due to our mobile and flexible times. Another one is managing access to her personal data that she stores online, like photos, travel plans or her activity stream that gets created by recent software like Jaiku or Twitter.
Handling friends and acquaintances in such an environment opens up new challenges that are explored by means of a visual prototype. Different types of displaying, managing, and enriching information about related persons are developped. Results from a user testing will be provided.
As a preliminary study, the data sets of several people have been analysed and plotted into an interactive diagramm in order to investigate the potentials of the communication data given. It also offers the possibility to look for the relevant parameters that determine different types of relations (e.g. best friend or old friend).
To provide a conceptual background, existing social network theories are explored and related to personal, ego-centric ones. I take a closer look onto the whole process of operationalisation, i.e. turning human behaviour into quantifiable data by statistical methods. Finally, implications and problematic consequences of both, the software itself and the concept of the „network society“ in general, are discussed. The felt need to turn our friendships into „social capital“ is one of the most remarkable shifts in the functioning of our societies. Others can make draw profits from this capital if they collect detailed data to establish profiles of us and our relationships. Thus, the whole field of privacy is entangled.
And across all these dynamics, computers become so inseparably intermingeld into our daily social life that borders between our (extended) self and the machine is often hard to determine.
Usually, your phone bill is a vast amount of numbers that nobody ever reads actually (secret services left aside). It gives you some interesting details if you search for something particular but it’s hard to get an easy overview over what was happening the last month. Now, this has changed! After some weeks of tinkering with code (mySQL, PHP, HTML and some JavaScript) some visual tools have rolled out of my workshop.
The first simple step sums up all of your time spent calling someone on the phone. Different colours for working hours and leisure time (and for the month under focus) are added for further pattern recognition like collegue/friend identification. First evaluations revealed already that some patterns are really characteristic for particular events in the past. That way, the visual attractiveness of certain patterns leads us to remembering interesting stories attached to these dates (that sometimes have been forgotten already). As a nice Extra the whole plot seems to be somehow related to a powerlaw.
A second graph is more oriented towards science and theory. One of the background-chapters in my Master-Thesis focuses on the (mathematical) structure underlying our social networks. Some (Barab�si) say all networks of free choice are governed by powerlaws, others (Watts) think that our network of friends is described better by a bell-curve. Maybe I can deduce in reverse from the pictures I get what type of network is contained in a phone bill. It looks as if we talk a lot to non-friends, so far.
A third (not yet fully matured) version will focus on temporal patterns and therefore plots the month of the year against the hour of the day to locate each call. With this method I want to look for “hot” times with a lot of traffic, usually calm zones and possible dissenters.
The work on this graphic as well as the others shows that rather simple data from a phone bill can generate some complexity when it comes to meaningful visualisation. In order to manage this abundance of information I want to add more options to select and filter the dataset. I also need some means to enlarge the “resolution” (i.e. less information per area) for those points in the graphic that are currently examined by the user.
Basically, I will look at how Computers can help us with managing our ever growing networks of friends.
I will try to make use of models from mathematical-sociologic network theories and apply them to subject-related, private areas (my network and I). The thesis of social objects will be part of this effort as alternative or addition.
Special attention will be given to the process of operationalisation which converts interpersonal interactions into machine readable numbers. Which actions have to be considered and which parameters are used in this process? At the end of such an automated analysis a computer will have an image of our social relationships available. These considerations will be worked out as applications in the practical part of my Master’s project.
The use of new technologies to organise inter-personal relationships will change them inevitably: But do we transfer the responsibility for our social lives to algorithmic machines in the end? Possible consequences and alternatives have to be taken into account.
In the context of my mini-exhibition of spam art at the FHP, I had a very inspiring conversation with Christopher and Martin (who study at the FHP as well). It started off from the exhibits themselves and that spam might be the Basis for the Pop-Art of our time as it is more typical than a Coke Bottle.
On the other hand, it is a radical interference with our communication needs and intentions, which should be one of the reasons for the strong emotions (fierce hatred?) towards it. That relation builds the link to my master thesis, which is focused on the organisation of our addressbook according to our communication behaviour.
At the moment, it seems as if we face a heavy communication overlaod: Twitter, Skype, ICQ, Blogs (with shoutboxes and comments), SMS-connectivity, Plazes, Facebook/StudiVZ, messages even via last.fm. Is there a goal everything is converging to, one “integrated commuication application”? How intense and instantaneous do we want our communication to become? Sometimes it looks as if we try to connect our brains. Or at least, we make publicly listenable what we usually would mutter to ourselves at best. Is it all about being afraid of feeling “un-connected” and alone when anyone else is excited about the new possibilities for interpersonal conncections? …
Today, Prof. Dan Smith who is engaged with the development of Service Design at the Glasgow School of Art visited Reto Wettach at the FH Potsdam. The topics of our talk made me have a closer look on Livework in London, a company focused on Service Design.
While this field of design can be considered emergent itself it deals a lot with new technologies and possibilities as well. In a kind of hands-on-research, Livework developed the loome (edit: original page vanished, but some info is left here) service that lets you sell your private data like bank transfer and grocery shopping histories to the highest paying company (one of the involved designers sold a personal record of 800 pages for 150 GBP on ebay as a proof of concept). …
While science did and still does struggle to explain some basic relations in our physical environment, several man-made layers were added on top from global economies over finely balanced political treaties to magic-like technologies.
From an everyday perspective, Quantum Mechanics and Magic are more or less equivalent.
as Terry Pratchett once put it (in an 2002 Interview by Die Zeit). The same holds true for our personal environment, where we clutter our harddisks with images, bookmarks, music — and addressbook entries. …
Identity in digital media, as discussed by Dick Hardt and Kim Cameron.
Dick Hardt proposes in his OSCON 2005 Keynote an identification system for the virtual world modelled after reality: Some authorities issue ID-certificates to the user and she can use these IDs independently for a variety (best: all) of services (e.g. shopping). The service doesn’t have to ensure the integrity of the user by contacting some 3rd party authentification authority with every login (as it is now) and the user has one ID for everything (simple). That’s (very roughly) what he tries to sell with sxip. …
Immersion (lat.: imergere = to dip): feeled presence in another world
A “world” might be defined by
a set of objects and individuals
an inhabitable environment
its complete understandability (for external spectators)
space of possibilities (to take action etc)
building blocks of immersion
being caught (backgrounds from cognitive science)
a computergame defines the setting and the “destiny of the voyage”
by interacting we accept the (game)rules
There is no effort necessary, only conscious analysis is capable of distinguishing between real and virtual. Familiar images and hardware that is intuitively operable help to stay “inside the world”.
Finding ourselves in a state of “amphibic” awareness, we flicker between sensing reality (keyboard, environment) and the game world.
“Possible Worlds” is a term established by Analytical Philosophy (David Lewis): We define our world as a part of the real, absolute world by our perspective. Our view and the real world are linked indexically.
Immersion/Imagination shifts the center of our (real-world) perspective into a fictional world (recentering). The new world is constituted by its rules only which cannot be questioned in consequence.
Marie-Laure RYAN, Narrative as Virtual Reality. Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. Baltimore/London 2004: Johns Hopkins University Press …
