Buddy list begone
Ah, the buddy list. Remember when we actually liked advertising to our friends that we were online, and maybe even wanted to chat? That was high-tech — in 1995. The buddy list (also known as presence) is a kind of social transparency, and while we still need social transparency mechanisms built in to our communications media, presence is no longer the appropriate mechanism. Presence comes from a time when the normal state of affairs was that you were unavailable, usually because in order to be available, you had to be at a desktop computer with a modem, and had to dial in to your ISP. Available meant connected, and connected meant available. When always-on connections were still novel, the away message became all the rage. (Remember when, in undergrad, we would regularly leave our computers on all night as an answering machine?) And presence became more sophisticated, using not just away messages, but idle states and times. But in many cases, just being visible on a buddy list is too much presence.
At the other end of the spectrum, historically speaking, was SMS. Being mobile, it was assumed that one was always connected (and therefore available) via SMS; therefore, presence was unnecessary. Yet people aren’t (or at least don’t want to be) always available.
Now that the nominal assumption is one of connectedness, connectedness and availability can no longer be assumed to be the same. And because connectedness is the assumed state, it doesn’t need to be advertised.
This, it seems to me, sets the historical context for a new (except for BBM) trend displacing presence: notifications of engagement. Rather than explicitly articulated status, action (or inaction) by the receiver signal availability to the sender. They do away with status, but provide the social transparency needed to manage sender expectations. Or, more simply, the sender can see whether their message has been received and read.
While right now this is almost exclusively used in mobile-to-mobile systems (BBM, Kik, Whatsapp, etc.), it has always bothered me that there is no desktop client for any of these systems. Finally, Apple — who pioneered FaceTime’s always-available-no-presence-like-a-telephone availability — is poised to bring such a system to the desktop (as well as iOS) with iMessage [1]. It’s instant messaging, without presence, with delivery, read, and typing notifications, that works on the desktop and mobile devices.
Personally, I can’t wait.
- Fanboy alert [↩]
Avatar: A disembodied cybernetic dreamscape
I just finished Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture. In it, he tells the story of how the communalist movement of the 1960s evolved into the technoutopian vision of the 1990s. It’s a compelling story, although it left me feeling distressed as I watched the characters tend toward a corporateist libertarianism as they “sold out”. (The pendulum swings yet again….)
But that’s not what I came here to talk about. I want to talk about Avatar. Yes, the movie with the blue people set on Pandora. The deep-seated appeal of this singular cultural artifact becomes clear when looked at in the historical context of the cybernetic- and LSD-influanced counterculture as well as, later, the digerati.
Two overarching concepts from the culture Turner describes permeate the movie. First is the cybernetic view of individuals — biological and otherwise — as nodes in a network, sensing, transmitting, receiving, and reacting to surrounding conditions in a giant feedback loop, just as the control sysem of an electromechanical device is, in the literal, electrical engineering sense of the word, a feedback loop. This, in an explicit way, is the very structure of Pandora’s biology, spiritualized by the native people, and romanticized by humans.
The second concept is disembodiment. Whether it was through electronic music (in the 1960s sense), strobe lights, and drugs, or later with networked computing and computer-mediated communication, 
Turner claims that many in the communalist-countercultre–turned-technoelite sought to leave the confines of the body for “an opportunity to feel a psychic union with others”. As a modern (or hypermodern, cyberpunk) interperatation of the word “avatar” would suggest, Avatar lets us imagine what it’d be like not only to become disembodied, only to reappear in a networked, interconnected virtual reality or cyberspace (whatever those words even mean anymore), but to actually leave one’s human body for a genuine alternative reality in which such connectedness is not only the norm, but real, meaningful, and organic.
But disembodiment is a non-ideal solution to the connectedness people seek. Because human biology 
lacks the networking hardware of Pandora’s life (c’mon, the pairing of a hunter with his bird is exactly like trying to pair with a Bluetooth device, complete with epic struggle), people use technology to escape their bodies and connect with others. But without that limitation, the protagonist of Avatar ultimately stops experiencing the cyberbiological world through technologically mediated disembodiment, and comes to fully embody that deep, network-like connection with all beings on Pandora.
People, Conversations, and Dangerous Things
Why medium collapse is bad for communication
Google and Facebook have been working on some interesting projects lately that try to group and otherwise organize people's communication based on the way each company feels people conceptualize their communication. Though email threads weren't new, even back in 2004 when Gmail came out, "conversations" that included sent messages were a unique [citation needed] addition. So, message organization 1: conversations.
Then Google came out with Wave, which obviously didn't last long and wasn't the revolution Google was hoping for. I believe this was because email and instant messaging have traditionally come with different expectations about normative behavior, and the choice of one or the other can be a strong signaling mechanism. Formality, expected length of response, how long is acceptable before responding, and even implied tie strength all play a role in media choice [citation needed]. Google Wave collapsed these two media into one, eliminating the communicative power embedded in media choice alone, confusing users in the process. This is message organization 2: conversations on steroids. Everything is still threaded more or less by conversation, but it becomes less dependent on media choice.
Recently, Facebook began rolling out its new messaging system. This system does two interesting things. First, rather than thread by conversation, it threads by recipient, much the way the SMS app on the iPhone does. Second, while not as unique from a design standpoint, it goes farther than Wave did in its attempt to almost completely abstract the message away from the medium. Their whole pitch was basically that it would let you send a message to a person, without having to think about what medium you were using. In theory, this sounds great, but they forgot that, like I said, different media do actually have different affordances, and media choice can be an almost active participant in a conversation. To write a long-form email, a quick hello, or a social coordination message (SMS-style) all in the same interface just doesn't make sense to me, especially when the sender can't know what kind of device the recipient will be using.
In a small concession to this awkwardness that I think speaks volumes about the way people really use different communication channels, Facebook did add two checkboxes in the messaging interface:
One lets the sender decide whether or not to send the message to the recipient's mobile phone, and the other essentially changes it from IM/SMS mode (press return/enter to send) to long-form mode (press return/enter to insert a line break). These completely change the nature of the medium, and I'm not convinced they should ever have been combined in the first place.
Assuming a conversation/people dichotomy for message organization, how does usage context play a role? Is the conversation model more appropriate in a task-oriented environment, which email often is, and is the person-no-matter-the-medium model more appropriate to social contexts? Maybe. But I'm going to stop here.
And of course, I need to bump George Lakoff's book Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind to the top of my reading list now.
A return to girltalk?
Several friends-who-are-girls of mine have recently starting talking on Twitter about listing (the closest one can get to "friending") each other on the online dating site OkCupid. This struck me as odd, especially as a guy, but a bit of further consideration has led me to this hypothesis:
As close ties have become weaker and fewer [1] [2] and the concept of friendship more explicitly and publicly articulated [3], I can't help but wonder if opportunities for "girl talk" have become fewer. Girls listing their real-life girlfriends on OkCupid provides a way to articulate those ties and provide a social object [4] (the profile) around which to engage in conversation about boys and dating in general.
As not-a-girl, I can't speak first hand to any of this, so comments/discussion are welcome.
- Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone. 2001 [↩]
- Akst, Daniel. America: Land of Loners?". In The Wilson Quarterly. Summer 2010 [↩]
- Larsen, M.C. Understanding Social Networking : On Young People’s Construction and Co-construction of Identity Online. 2007. [↩]
- Engeström, Jyri. Bookmarks, Babies, Barack... and other social objects. 2008. [↩]
How is the weather?: data, observation, and the generation gap
This past weekend, my parents were out of town, and unforeseen circumstances made it necessary for me to spend a lot of time (all but overnight really — although night starts pretty early…) with my maternal grandmother, better known as Bubby.
For those of you who may not know, I’m a bit of a weather nerd, so when a tornado watch went up Friday afternoon, I was pretty excited. After taking Bubby out to dinner, I put on a movie (Fiddler on the Roof, just to be stereotypical), but, of course, I had to keep abreast of any potentially severe weather conditions. Out of this came my favorite interaction of the whole weekend.
As we were watching the movie, I pulled out my iPhone to check the latest watch/warning/advisory and mesoscale discussion issues from the Storm Prediction Center, the latest statements from the local National Weather Service office, and, of course, radar. I explained to Bubby that I was checking the weather, at which point she simply looked out the window, listened to a peal of thunder, and shrugged her shoulders, saying, “It’s bad,” as if to say What do you want to do about it?.
And that, to me, is representative of the difference between my data-driven generation and previous generations. On one hand, having data can be both insightful and actionable. But on the other hand, is our reliance on sensors, data, and computer modeling enabling our detachment from the observable world? What has been gained — and what has been lost — by my getting weather data that was collected by ground-based and satellite sensors, sent to the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma, run through computer models, and sent over fiber optic cables to servers that let me retrieve aggregate and interpreted data on my phone, when looking out the window can clearly tell us that the weather is bad?
Even today, the NWS recognizes the fallibility of sensors, relying on storm reports from thousands of trained weather spotters, most of whom use amateur radio, a technology that probably deserves its own blog post for its incredible power despite — and because — it does not rely on any large communications infrastructure.
To be sure, forecasting saves many lives. But was forecasting of acute severe weather events really that bad before humans had even urbanized? I heard it said on the BBC the other day that at one time, some people could tell what species a tree belonged to just by listening to the wind rustling its leaves. I bet those people knew when a storm was coming, too.
The Cost of Text Messaging
A couple weeks ago there was a post in a New York Times blog about the cost of text messaging that I would like to briefly recap here. A British space scientist, Nigel Bannister, ran some quick numbers and concluded that
"The maximum size for a text message is 160 characters, which takes 140 bytes because there are only 7 bits per character in the text messaging system, and we assume the average price for a text message is [about 10 cents]. There are 1,048,576 bytes in a megabyte, so that's 1 million/140 = 7490 text messages to transmit one megabyte. At 10 cents each, that's [$734] per MB - or about 4.4 times more expensive than the 'most pessimistic' estimate for Hubble Space Telescope transmission costs [of $166 per megabyte]."
So basically, consumers have allowed mobile phone companies to charge literally astronomical rates to send a text message: we pay at least 4.4 times as much to send a text message than NASA does to download data from the Hubble Space Telescope (in cost per unit data, anyway). I can't believe we put up with that. Disgusting, I think.