The End of Cyberspace

Community Building

(Notes from Mobile Mash-Up 2007. As usual, these are my notes, for what they're worth.)

Moderator: Serena Glover, Tango
Matthew Rothenberg, Flickr.
Jessica Alter, Bebo.
Kevin Yen, YouTube.

SG: Where do you see communities going? Broader with less depth, lots of focused communities, what?

MR: People tell stories through photographs; we're enabling that.
JA: The purpose of most networks is to facilitate self-expression. People go to Flickr to interact, but also to express themselves: they say things, and have people to say them to.
KY: Groups within Flickr are forming around specific interests; we provide breadth, and let people create their own depth.

SG: How will open APIs change the nature of communities? Good, bad, change the value proposition?

KY: The cool opportunity is to develop one app that works across several platforms, eliminating versioning work (which "is a big drag on creativity"). Little apps may clutter the experience.
JA: We're surprised by what people turn out to like. Multiplatform development is good for developers. Downsides: something like Open Social probably won't be as deep as the applications developed for Facebook; user experience can be diluted and made more confusing by a proliferation of apps; you've got to give up some control.
MR: Flickr was built on open APIs, and they've always wanted to make it as easy as possible to move data into and out of the service. Open APIs don't excuse us from having to moderate and watch what these APIs do, or what people do on them: if application developers subvert the tacit social contract between Flickr and its users, then we've got to step in.

JA: Needs to be a real focus on the user experience. Mobile "is an inherently different beast than the Web." (What differentiates genuinely mobile networks from ones that have a mobile portal?)
KY: Utility is obviously very important, and people will be willing to trade a measure of convenience or ease of use for functionality.
MR: Interaction of mobility with social interaction sites: ease of accessing or creating content. "The next generation is creating services that augment your experience in the real world." Most current services are about taking you away from your social context, but social context matters immensely for mobile phone use.
JA: Mobile phones matter a lot more than PCs in other parts of the world: you've gotta pay attention to that.

SG: Do you think existing communities will jump to mobile?

KY: "Flash communities" of people who are in the same event-- like this conference. From taking pictures to live streaming media.
JA: Mobile social networks have a Web component; you've got to design for both. "Taking your real life and creating a mobile experience" around it will be really important.

SG: Web communities are global, and users play a big role shaping those communities and their norms. Will mobile communities be more local, or have other kinds of social norms than obtain in Web communities?

KY: In YouTube, we're still learning: for a long time it was all in English, and we're starting to localize in the UK, Japan, and elsewhere. Even still, a huge amount of the traffic goes to the U.S.
MR: Flickr has been a global site since the beginning, and we're trying to figure out how to make it possible for users to group and wall themselves off when they really want to-- or protect themselves from things they consider objectionable.

Technorati Tags: community, end of cyberspace, Mobile Mash-Up 2007, mobility, social software, Web 2.0

At Mobile Mash-Up 2007

At the conference. I walked in after the first session, and as all the tables seem to be full, and I'm not sure there's power at the tables, I'm sitting on the floor near a plug. It's probably more comfortable for me, anyway.

Incredibly, there seems to be no Wifi in the room. Can that be? Can we have hundreds of people here, and the ratio of wireless devices to people is probably over 2 to 1.

The conference has an interesting format: it's alternating between traditional sessions and "fast pitch" sessions with entrepreneurs talking about their mobile products. So Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn gives a keynote, then several people from companies that are in stealth come up and give quick demos. Unfortunately, they can't find the wifi either; as one of the moderators put it, it seems we need to make more sacrifices to the demo gods.

They're raffling off Nokia N95 phones. I haven't won one yet, alas, but it sounds like they've got a decent number.

Someone just walked off with my program. Sheesh.

Technorati Tags: conference, end of cyberspace, Mobile Mash-Up 2007, mobility

Rooms and conference calls

I'm listening to a demo by a company called Vello. It's a phone conferencing service, but doesn't require dial-in numbers or passwords. If the organizer of your conference call has your coordinates (Entourage importing, yadda yadda), you can just dial in from your mobile phone, and it can automatically "drop you into the room where your conference is happening."

So we talk about virtual "rooms" where you talk to people. Since meetings happen in real space, it makes sense to use the term.

Technorati Tags: conference, end of cyberspace, Mobile Mash-Up 2007, mobility

Mobile Mash-Up 2007

I'm going to be spending much of the day at Mobile Mash-Up 2007. I'm moderating an insanely short discussion on "The Future of Connected Communities," featuring Eric Paulos (Intel Research), Marc Davis (Yahoo), Andrew Fiore (Berkeley), and Scott Golder (HP Labs). It's one of those panels where the job of the moderator is to watch the clock and get out of the way-- the best kind of moderator gig.

Technorati Tags: community, conference, end of cyberspace, Mobile Mash-Up 2007, mobility

Budapest talk.

I've put my "End of cyberspace in the age of convergence" talk from the Budapest conference up on Slide Share.

I thought that the notes-- which carry most of the serious content-- would show up, but they didn't. So I've also uploaded the original presentation (it's a 1.7 MB file, so downloader beware), as the slides are pretty cryptic (or beautifully understated, take your pick).

Jeremy Shapiro and Linda Crafts, "The Streaming Body as the Site of Telecommunications Convergence"

Talk at the Philosophy of Telecommunications Convergence conference (caveat).

People's bodies are interfaces for media, and the processes by which people import media and radiate their bodies out into the world of media and networks (the streaming body) are the subject of Shapiro and Crafts' talk.

Inscribing the Body. We do lots of things to inscribe cultural values and representations onto the body: think of tattoos, scarification, piercing, etc.. The Apple iTunes ads suggest how we sync our bodies to devices; we also stream bodies, posting videos of everything from lip syncing to sex, contributing to diet or medical advice Web sites, etc..

Synching and Streaming.

Action and Perception --> Technical world --> Simuli (ICTs, media, Internet, etc.) --> Embodied Human -->

We're familiar with the technical structure of convergence; we have some knowledge of the cultural dimensions of convergence (this is what Henry Jenkins talks about); what we want to do is talk about the corporeal, drawing on phenomenology, science studies, etc..

[ Posted from Hungarian Academy of Sciences via plazes.com ]

Technorati Tags: mobility, philosophy, Budapest, pervasive computing

Albert-Laszlo Barabasi on "Time and Motion in Mobile Communications"

Talk at the Philosophy of Telecommunications Convergence conference (caveat).

(Author of Linked, and various other cool things. Now at Northeastern University and the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard.)

When do events take place? When doing things like calculating the capacity of communications system, we assume that it's random, uniform in time, and the timing follows a Poisson process. In reality, communication tends to be bursty: e-mail, for example, tends to be sent in clumps. It follows power laws, and can be mapped as a straight line on a log-log scale. This same distribution is also the case for library visits (measured by checkout records), document printing, web page views, cell-phone calls, and just about everything else we can measure.

Why does life work in bursts? Look at to do lists. We tend to assign priorities to tasks, rather than do them randomly or treat a list as a stack. When you follow priorities, high-prority tasks are completed quickly, and some will be done after a long time: you end up with a power law.

Does the length of the queue matter? No-- you get the same kind of behavior.

Random Walks. Lots of things follow random walks, or Levy walks (where jump size can vary). Studies of animal motion follows Levy laws, and humans do too: an analysis of money movement from Where's George also follows Levy laws, as does the motion of cell phones detected from tower triangulation.

[ Posted from Hungarian Academy of Sciences via plazes.com ]

Technorati Tags: pervasive computing, ubicomp, conference, Budapest, mobility

Jane Vincent, "Emotion and My Mobile"

Talk at the Philosophy of Telecommunications Convergence conference (caveat).

There are 2.5B users, and in some countries more phones than people; there are more Internet-enables phones than PCs. So there are lots of people using mobile phones, and using them in lots of ways.

Vincent's interest is in the emotional dimension of mobile phone use. She uses it do some familiar things-- talk, take pictures, write to others-- and this familiarity is important in the object's ubiquity. She also uses it to remember things: they take pictures of stuff in stores, posters for upcoming events, ads, etc..

On the other hand, there are differences: photos 100 years ago were memorabilia, while today's cell phone pictures are often completely disposable. The picture-taking itself can also be the point, rather than the pictures. People also use it to capture more ephemeral memories: to record things that might not have been commemorated (it's more ethnographic than ritualistic).

The research. Looking at emotional relationships or attachments to phones. Working out of the interactionist theory (following Goffman), emotion work (Hochschild on managed emotions and "moments of pinch").

• Relationships and mobiles are integral but not always symbiotic.
• Communications occur in the "middle stage" of interactionist theory.
• There's an emotional paradox of wanted and unwanted communications.
• Managing the intrusions of Back Stage-- dealing with "moments of pinch."
• Using emotion work to manage mobile phone communications.

Some "events... occur in a special or unique way when mediated by the mobile:" some users have practices that are unique: some couples talk while commuting on different systems, or use the phone to take pictures of kids because the kids react in certain ways. What they love is not the device, but what you can use it for.

[ Posted from Hungarian Academy of Sciences via plazes.com ]

Technorati Tags: ubicomp, mobility, conference, pervasive computing, Budapest, communication

Zoltan Kovecses, "The Cell Phone as a Conceptual Category"

Talk at the Philosophy of Telecommunications Convergence conference (caveat).

Background in cognitive science and linguistics.

Wants to understand how people think about and describe cell phones (and it'll be completely objective, since I don't have a cell phone). People seem to use four dimensions: function, significance, effect, and use.

Function. Cell phones are like computers; by implication, because we tend to think of computers are somewhat like human brains, this suggests a measure of cognitive anthopomorphization of cell phones as well. Integrates a handheld device with a model of the mind. Cell phones can be like other devices as well: comparisons with the Swiss Army knife are also popular. Some people also describe cell phones as friends.

Significance. Cell phones are like essentials: air, food, lifelines. They're like extensions of the body, organs or appendages. They're like languages: being without a cell phone is like not knowing the language.

Effect. Having a cell phone is like smoking: it's addictive. Cell contracts are like prison sentences.

Use. People conceptualize the value in numerous ways, but one dominant metaphor is automotive, both in terms of importance, and in terms of customization and price (you can pimp out both, there are basic and expensive versions, etc.).

Naturally, there are gender metaphors: cell phones are like hookers-- the thin ones cost more; they're like men-- after the first one, you know how to choose them well.

Appropriate versus inappropriate uses: driving while talking on the cell is like drinking and driving; regulation of cell phones is appropriate.

(It would be fascinating to do this study for several languages-- for English, Finnish, Korean, Japanese, etc.)

[ Posted from Hungarian Academy of Sciences via plazes.com ]

Technorati Tags: Budapest, communication, conference, language, pervasive computing, ubicomp

Mark Turner, "What Are We: Convergence of Self and Communications Techology"

Talk at the Philosophy of Telecommunications Convergence conference (caveat).

"I'm going to talk about everything in the world:... self and technology." 10 minutes on nothing about technology, then 10 minutes connecting the first 10 to mobile communications.

Humans are "designed to operate with objects:" we're the only species who also engage in conceptual blending, to take things that are complex and diffuse, and to integrate them into familiar frameworks.

Take cause-motion constructions: I threw the ball through the window, but "England pushed France to war" is a cause-motion construction at a vastly different scale, and even though they're different phenomena, we use the cause-motion construction to make sense of it. This allows us to turn unfamiliar things into familiar ones, make big phenomena into ones at human scale, develop and evolve culture, etc..

Ironically, we're not built to understand ourselves: we're built to understand our world well enough to avoid being eaten and to find things to eat, but self-consciousness is an accident rather than an evolutionary advantage. We can describe ourselves in terms of stable identities, even though we vary greatly over our lives. We explain our actions in terms of desires or rationality, even though we often act first and "make" the decision a few milliseconds later.

What has all this to do with technology?

We have always blended our selves with our technologies. Writing and language are technologies, and are especially powerful ones. (The metaphor of communications is especially powerful in cause-motion constructions: we think of the self as converser, talk about "peoples of the book," etc.) These days, we think of ourselves in terms of our communications technologies, by blending our general concept of ourselves with our understanding of how the communications technology works. In a sense, we know our technologies better than we know ourselves.

This matters because of the addictive power of communications technologies; the ease with which we can create avatars or online identities radically different from the ones we have in real life; the opportunities it creates to merge with others (or at least to engage in collective action), to differentiate or contextualize our identities (e.g., having different SIM cards that work in different countries, have different contacts).

[ Posted from Hungarian Academy of Sciences via plazes.com ]

Technorati Tags: Budapest, cognition, communication, conference, mobility, pervasive computing, philosophy, psychology, ubicomp