Dee Blind Mice

“Social Capital” – Mark K. Smith
I hate the phrase Social Capital – it’s like Human Capital. I remember Padraig Cullinane refusing to call his EU Presidency Conference “Human Capital” rather than Human Resources back in the Enterprise, Trade and Employment days. I’m with him, even more so with Social Capital – reducing the goodwill that exists between humans to some kind of financial transaction doesn’t help with understanding altruism or people in social contexts any better, but forces it into an inappropriate metaphor.

It’s a very scientistic, bean-counting worldview that comes up with that kind of phrase. To be fair, this article isn’t wholly supportive of the phrase, but uses it due to it’s being the current term. That makes sense in many ways, but when a phrase is so offensive instructively, aesthetically, and morally I think it should be put to rest. Also there are some classic examples of the bleeding obvious in this article.

“Science” has discovered that people like it when other people are nice to them. Who’d've thunk it?

“Lessons from Lucasfilm’s Habitat” – Morningstar, Chip and Randall Farmer
This article totally rules. It’s all about these guys who made a cyberspace environment in the 80s using Commodore 64s and some proprietary pre-Internet network. They built this world where people could basically do whatever they want. They realised that the thing that made “cyberspace” was the social connections, not the technology. The quality of the experience is about human interaction, not interaction with computer graphics. Fantastic.

“Autistic Social Software” – danah boyd
Somebody told me this article was lame, but I have to disagree with them. I think Boyd makes a good argument – too much of social software and Internet applications in general is skewed towards the early adopting, continuous partial attention jockeying, neophile, technogeek.

A mode of behaviour and system of values has developed and is accelerating that doesn’t allow for anything to settle, or be built upon, or find its niche, but is a constant search for the next new thing to replace the previous new thing which wasn’t even finished, or useful in any way, in the first place. I can’t see any room for genuine value, real human connection, or life-enhancing technology in a world where it only matters that something is new and exciting and not whether the idea has any substance to it or is worth exploring.

I think she’s right that a society or culture that glorifies newness, lack of attention, constant rapid change, and finding things first is an impoverished one. What are we looking for? How should we connect to one another? What technologies will help us do it right?

These days you hear a lot about tipping points for various things – Jeff Jarvis refers to them all the time when he talks about citizens media.

This week I read a chapter of Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point. It was about time I got around to reading at least some of the book since it’s had such a bit impact on contemporary discourse.

It’s all about people who are good connectors and how they contribute to making ideas popular. It’s a nice description of some stuff I’ve been noticing myself over the last few years.

Some people are good at initiating and maintaining casual acquaintanceships – they tend to know a lot of people and keep up with them and are good at putting people in touch with each other and leveraging their connections to get things done – get someone a job, put a group together for a particular purpose.

Midterm Presentation

Cybergeography by Martin Dodge – a collection of lots of network visualations.

Some of these visualisations are cool. I particularly like

TextArc which is a visualisation the links in a text. Hamlet and Alice in Wonderland are pretty cool. The start of Hamlet runs through all the characters, as is usual in Shakespeare, so you also get a short social network of the play’s characters, which is kind of cool.

TouchGraph’s Google Browser which shows you the network of all sites linked to a specified site.

Other interesting visualisations we looked at for Clay’s class:

Divided We Stand by Valdis Krebs. This is the one that looks at the political books people buy on Amazon. Check out those titles though – it’s no wonder people’s reading is polarised with such clearly partisan and purposefully objectionable stuff being peddled to people on either side of the divide.

Vizster by Jeff Heer. Pretty.

I did a paper comparing two networks for Thinking About Networks. It was fun to write. I love this class.

Read the Paper

I also uploaded a paper I wrote last semester for Red’s Class. It’s an interesting blast from the past. I can’t believe how much new stuff I’ve stuffed into my head since then.

Read about me on the bus

For Clay’s Thinking About Networks class we read a chapter out of each of The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage and The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs.

The Victorian Internet is about the telegraph and how it was the first technology to really make the world perceptibly “smaller” by allowing information to travel signficantly faster than objects over large distances – news could outstrip ships and horses. It was interesting to think of the telegraph in these kinds of social and media terms, having thought about it in more technical terms when reading Code: The hidden langage of computer hardware and software by Charles Petzold. (A book I heartily recommend for anyone even remotely interested in computers and how they work)

The Jacobs piece was utterly engaging and incredibly easy to read and agree with. She spoke to a lot of my own prejudices in her contention that people exist more happily in human scale streets rather than in high-rise blocks of flats. The idea of a middle ground for socialising – a place that is public but that involves plenty of regular, quotidian contact with neighbours was new to me and it makes a lot of sense. The possibility of these kinds of connections makes it possible for people to meet without a need for the intimacy of invitations into one’s home. Where that is the only possibility for contact, many people choose no contact at all.

It did strike me though that Jacobs is perhaps overly enthusiastic for making all neighbourhoods like her own. For many years I’ve thought that people have an incredibly propensity for colonising the built environment, no matter how alienating it might seem. New York itself, which Jacobs holds up (with considerable justification) as a model for happy civic life must have seemed alienating and weird to people moving here from villages in Connemara where public space would have been defined entirely differently and day-to-day non-intimate contact would have had other rhythms. When I worked in Finglas in Dublin several years ago I remember thinking one day as I drove through the neighbourhood how a place that seemed so vast and uniform to me as an outsider was for my students a place full of social context that made each house and cul de sac and green patch individual.

It seems to me that it is in newly built areas, where the location for this middle ground communication hasn’t yet been identified, that people are most likely to be alienated from one another. Further to that I also believe that young people who grow up in an environment tend to find it easy to figure out how to live in it successfully and connectedly. Clay pointed out in class that this is analagous to the way that the young were the first to successfully use the Internet as a primarily social space, with applications such as Live Journal. This is an interesting idea, and one that I shall give more thought to over the next few weeks.