The AlloSphere: getting inside your head

Last week, we looked at treemaps (and how they're used on the website smartmoney.com to graphically represent how stocks are doing in the market). I had always seen my dad looking at the cryptic red and green bricks under the guise of "checking our investments," but I never understood just what the graphs meant. The graphics seemed so far removed from the x-axis/y-axis graphs I had learned about in school that I didn't ask my dad to explain them.

But when treemaps were explained in class last week, the concept seemed almost second-nature. Of course, it makes sense that larger bricks represent larger stocks, green means up, and red means down. A good statistical representation should make sense, and a great graphical representation should make sense and have an inherently beautiful form.

I have a friend who really knows his TED talks, and posts his favorites on Facebook. That's how I came across a particularly elegant way to represent data: the AlloSphere. Described by composer JoAnn Kuchera-Morin as "a large, dynamically varying, digital microscope," the AlloSphere lets you literally get inside of data by standing inside a giant, spherical screen while listening to data represented as sound over time (music). There are several examples and demonstrations given in the talk, though the one that stuck with me was the notion of surgeons being able to "fly into the brain as if it was a world and see tissues as landscapes and hear blood density levels as music."

The AlloSphere is impressive, and at first glance, it seems as if nothing like this has existed before. But when you think about it, this is just like our traditional forms of data represenation -- just taken to a new level. The same kind of mental leap must have existed for the inventor of the stem-and-leaf-plot, or the pictograph. It's the same concept of seeing facts without actually seeing facts.

I was also struck by how this relates to the new media concepts we've been discussing in class: is Skyping really the same as talking to someone face-to-face? When you write a message on someone's Facebook wall, is it just like telling them in person? Technologies in both realms of data representation and online networking are trying to move in the same direction: making the unreal more real. Strictly speaking, Skype is software and the AlloSphere is a computer. But both strive to make virtual reality more like reality.

Coming back to social networks

As I wrote a few posts ago, my friend and I recently decided to take a month off the social networking
parts of the Internet. We decided that sites like Facebook, tumblr, last.fm, and Twitter were making our lives too complicated, and affecting the way we perceived ourselves (since everything we wrote could be viewed by large numbers of people).

Well, the month ended last Thursday, on April 9th. I thought I'd share a few thoughts on the experience:
- My friends' reactions were pretty interesting. One friend got angry: "Do you know how painful it is to see one’s measly 244 friend count drop to 242? You should warn me!” And another one was hurt: "I’m blocked from your Facebook. Is it something I did?”
- I was a lot more focused in getting my work done -- I didn't have the option of switching back and forth between the essay window and my Facebook window.
- I felt like I got to know people in a different way. I'm naturally an introvert, so I value one-on-one conversations more than I do large announcements (which I'm sure played a role in inspiring me to do the experiment to begin with). I found myself getting to know people I had assumed I "knew" because I was Facebook friends with them.
- I thought that leaving last.fm would cause me to listen to music in a different way -- I wouldn't be waiting for tracks to "scrobble" to a public profile. However, my listening habits didn't change. I listened to the same bands, and the same quantity of music.
- My phone plan? Allows 250 texts/month. My month off from Facebook? I used 502. Whoops.
- I didn't miss Twitter at all. In fact, I haven't logged back in, and I don't plan to.
- I didn't plan it this way, but the month overlapped with Spring Break (3/15-3/21) as well as my birthday (3/31). One would think I "missed" a lot of hanging out with old friends over break, and "missed" the slew of birthday wishes that show up on everyone's Facebook. But I was super busy over break, and my birthday felt more special when it was just the dozen or so friends who remembered.

My friend ended up going back to Facebook and Twitter after a couple of weeks; but as I said earlier, she's an intern at Newsweek and needed to find contacts for a story. (That, I think, says something about how much these social networking sites are a part of our lives.) I stayed away for the whole time, and I don't recall ever missing Facebook, Twitter, last.fm, or tumblr. However, that could be because I knew I was only going to be gone for a month.

In the end, I'm glad I took the month off. It convinced me that I don't rely on the internet to have a meaningful life (in fact, some dimensions of my life grew away from the computer), and it reminded me that I always have control over my relationship with new technology. Everyone should have that feeling.

Neither good nor bad

"We offer two basic morals. The first is that information technology is inherently neither good nor bad—it can be used for good or ill, to free us or to shackle us. Second, new technology brings social change, and change comes with both risks and opportunities. All of us, and all of our public agencies and private institutions, have a say in whether technology will be used for good or ill and whether we will fall prey to its risks or prosper from the opportunities it creates."
from Blown to Bits by Hal Abelson, Ken Ledeen, and Harry Lewis

I completely agree with this sentiment, and I think it sums up what we've talked about here in HONR229F. A lot of our class discussions revolve around whether new technologies invade our privacy and provide information overload, or make our lives better and simply replace already-existing forms of communication. It's tempting to assign qualities of "good" or "bad" to the internet, as any kind of revolution topples the old forms in favor of the new. But I think it's a temptation we should avoid, because regardless of what we think of them, new technologies inevitably overtake the old. This is the competitive principle we've built our society on -- if someone has an idea for something better than what exists, we should embrace it and allow that idea to grow. Trying to assess the "opportunities" themselves is wrong, not to mention impossible.

I also believe we are collectively responsible for the use of these technologies. There's a delicate balance between how a tool is used, and how its construction demands it be used, but I think our tendency is to underestimate our power in these matters. Whether Second Life, for example, becomes a learning community or a pornographic playground is ultimately up to us. Now if only we could all agree...

CADIE

Every year, millions of people play pranks on their friends, family, and co-workers as part of April Fool's Day (incidentally, the day after my birthday -- phew, that was close!) The pranks range from simple to the cruel and elaborate. However, I'm most drawn to the large-scale pranks, such as those carried out by NPR, that don't cause any physical or psychological harm -- while still fooling the masses.

While I didn't get pranked myself this past April Fool's, I did check the Google blog several times throughout the day, anticipating Google's yearly tradition of announcing a new, fake tool. (Given Google's out-of-the-box thinking and rapid rate of development, I've certainly taken these "tools" seriously before.) And I wasn't disappointed: yesterday, Google introduced CADIE, an eerily HALesque "Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity" which associated itself with the image of a panda. Of course, CADIE was much more than a panda -- as posts from her (now-removed) blog revealed, she was growing in both intelligence and maturity, surpassing her creators in a single day. As the Google blog ominously concluded, "It seems CADIE has a mind of her own..."

In a matter of hours, CADIE found some improvement to make for nearly every Google tool, such as Brain Search for your phone and making Chrome available in 3D. Though I already knew that this was an April Fool's Day prank, I wondered how someone would take these "developments" seriously -- the notion of a computer (or CADIE) running the world seems so outdated, the stuff of mid-century sci-fi. Even for someone who had forgotten it was April Fool's Day, the whole thing seemed a little ridiculous.

As I thought more about it, I realized that our generation seems more concerned with how other people behave. Our class discussion on the digitization of medical records, for example, revealed that we worry about the government and large corporations far more than we worry about some sentient computer. It's important to keep in mind that with any user-based technology (such as Google), the most significant factor is the users themselves.

Online togetherness

My last post described how I'll be taking some time off from social networking sites for a while. I'm still continuing the experiment, and once the month is up (April 9th), I'll write a decent post about my experiences. I'm mentioning the experiment, however, because it hinges on one assumption: that using these social networking sites makes people uneasy and that having one online profile to represent you is unnatural.

It's a pretty one-sided assumption to make.

So to avoid coming off as one of those culture critics who only see the Internet as evil, I've decided to devote today's post to... PostSecret!

Most of you college kids already know what PostSecret is, but for the uninitiated: PostSecret is a blog of sorts, run by Frank Warren. It started off as a small community art project where people were asked to anonymously mail in postcards with a secret, but word traveled and the project expanded to include postcards from all over the world. Every Sunday, Frank Warren posts a selection of the week's postcards on his website. Four years, four books, and several nationwide tours later, PostSecret is still in the top twenty most popular blogs.

What I like about PostSecret is its ability to bring people together in a truly anonymous way. Frank Warren has comments disabled for the blog itself (though there is a PostSecret Forum at a different URL, for those inclined to discuss the secrets with others online). However, I'm not a member of the forum, and my involvement with PostSecret goes no further than reading it every week. (No, I haven't even mailed in my own secret! :) ) My own PostSecret experience is a passive one -- I'm able to appreciate the site without having to contribute anything to it. No username, no profile, nothing.

Of course, there are different degrees of involvement with the site. While I've been a mostly passive participant, PostSecret becomes "interactive" media when someone mails in a postcard, sends an email to Warren, or posts in the forums.

In the end, I enjoy PostSecret for its flexibility: it is a fairly emotional form of entertainment that can be as anonymous or participatory as you want it to be.

Options

tumblr
My good friend, who is currently an intern at Newsweek, called me up two nights ago. After I caught her up on the more mundane details of my life, we turned to discussing the internet: "Take a look at my tumblr," she said. "How does it seem to you? I'm worried that I'm coming off as too scatter-brained, like an nineteen-year-old kid who doesn't have her tastes together. It's not cohesive enough, it doesn't have the right aesthetic."
"Well, you are a nineteen-year-old kid. And why are you worrying about aesthetic? Who reads this, anyway?" I asked.
"The people at Newsweek. The ones I really want to impress."

Facebook
"I'm worried about how I come off on my Facebook," I continued.
"What do you mean?"
"I made some new friends this weekend, and they wrote on my wall about certain things that I wouldn't want employers to see. Now I have two choices: I can either delete the wall posts (and risk alienating the people who wrote them), or I can leave them up (and take the chance that an employer might deny me a job.)"

LiveJournal
"Yeah, I guess I don't have that problem," my friend said. "I just post potentially sensitive things in my lj."
"That's a good way to do it."
"I guess. But it's also hard to decide who should read what, even in the LJ community."

last.fm
"I don't have an LJ, but what really drives me crazy is last.fm," I went on.
"Oh last.fm is the worst!"
"I know, right? I completely rely on it now to make my playlists. I use it to find out about new music, instead of talking to people or asking for mix CDs like I did in high school."
"With me," my friend said, "I just can't stop listening to a song until it scrobbles on my profile. I'm obsessed with the number of tracks I've played."

Xanga
"Hey, remember when everyone had a Xanga?" I asked.
"Yeah, haha, that was ridiculous."
"If I remember correctly, you went through several usernames."
"(Yeah, Xanga was wild.)" My friend is maybe a little embarassed by this.
"I wonder what happened to mine? I haven't logged in in years... It used to be so important to me. Did you know that that's how I became friends with Jon? I had always seen him around school in ninth grade, but it wasn't until I started commenting on his Xanga that we actually started talking in person. And now he's one of my best friends; how weird is that?"
"I feel like Xanga changed the way we made friends or met people. Before, if you wanted to get to know someone, you actually talked to them. You found out who they were. Then Xanga came along, and suddenly it was so easy to know someone without saying a word to them."
"I would argue that we don't even know people with this new method. I mean, with Facebook or any of these other websites, you know someone's favorite movies, bands, or authors, but that doesn't mean you know the person."
"Ugh, you don't know how many times I've assumed someone's going to be my best friend based on their profile, and then found out I didn't like them at all," my friend said.
"I believe it."

Twitter
"I hate Twitter," my friend said.
"What, why? You do realize the only reason I got one was because you had one, right?"
"Yeah, and the only reason I have one is because of Newsweek. All journalists feel pressured to get one, just to show that they're on top of everything. But it's so stifling; I can't be consistently witty in 140 characters or less several times a day."
"Right. And half of the things I write on there aren't very important or necessary, in retrospect. And as for seeing what you're up to, I might as well just send you a text message."

The problem
"Or an email."
"Or a Facebook message."
"Or check your scrobbles on last.fm."
"Or read your tumblr."
"Oh my God."
"I know," I said.
"This is terrible!" she said.

The experiment
"What if we just quit everything for a month?" I joked.
"Haha, nice."
"I mean, we can't though. Too much of our lives are on these sites; we need them to find out when things are happening, what our friends are doing."
"Yeah, that's true. ...But maybe that's the problem. We need them."
"What?" I said. She couldn't be serious.
"Let's do this." She was.
"Give everything up?"
"Yeah, just for a month. We would still keep our emails, and of course our phone numbers -- but I feel like anyone who really wants to reach me can do it through means other than Facebook, tumblr, Twitter, last.fm, or LiveJournal, can."
"It would certainly simplify everything."
"And I wouldn't spend hours worrying about how I look to the internet."
"It wouldn't be an issue."
"Excellent."
"Excellent."

__________________________________

So that's the plan. For the next month, my friend and I have blocked ourselves out of: Facebook, LiveJournal, tumblr, Twitter, and last.fm. We're not doing this for Lent, we're not doing it because we need to study for midterms, and we're not doing it because we're addicted. We're doing it because we constantly worry about the online versions of ourselves, and because the very nature of social online networking turns you into a sort of public figure, whether you want to be one or not.

I once said in class that I believed online social interaction was merely an extension of our real-life social interaction. I'm wondering if I should revise this statement. The energy that goes into maintaining an online representation of yourself is different than that of choosing an outfit or making small talk. Or perhaps it's the same kind of energy -- but expending more of it online than you do in the real world is, I think, not necessarily a good thing.

We'll see what happens. All I know is, the past two days have been far less stressful for me than they have been for the handful of friends who have emailed me, frantically asking, "Where did your Facebook go?"

The new, new, new Facebook

Yesterday at 3:17 pm, Mark Zuckerberg (the creator of Facebook) published a post on Facebook's official blog, objectively titled, "Improving Your Ability to Share and Connect." He discusses several (more) changes that will be made to Facebook, such as new celebrity Pages that look more like user profiles. He also includes a somewhat cryptic promise of changes to come for the Home page: "You can find out what it is your mother, your high school classmate or President Obama are doing, thinking and sharing right now just by logging into Facebook."

Now I care as much about Facebook itself as the next person (in fact, I probably care less if that person is your average college student), but I'm not as interested in this post as I am in the user response it has elicited. Facebook has changed its format dramatically since it began in 2004. There were Applications, which excited some and annoyed others (including myself) who had left the busy look of MySpace for the more minimalist design of Facebook. There was the now-infamous Newsfeed, which showed exactly what your friends were doing (as well as where and when they did it).

In true social-network fashion, these changes were not met passively. As if rebelling against some oppressive government, users self-organized into groups, circulated virtual petitions, and updated their statuses (and other immediate information) to show their disapproval. Of course, others liked various incarnations of the "new" Facebook, and they too got on discussion boards and argued it out with dissenters.

Now I may be wrong, but I don't remember a Facebook blog existing at those times. Facebook didn't provide us with an official forum for discussing these changes that so affected our Facebook-lives; therefore, Facebook itself became its own forum. (How many of you are still in groups protesting the "new" Facebook?) But with the blog, users are able to provide immediate feedback to Mark Zuckerberg himself. Some comments from yesterday's post:

"Facebook has come a long way. I like what I am seeing and looking forward to seeing how it all evolves. "

"Can Facebook go 8 months without radically changing something? Just as I get used to the new homepage, you change it again! >:("

"I HATE THE NEW HOME PAGE!!!!!"

"I love you facebook!!!!!!!"

Also interesting: a text search reveals that "twitter" (or some form of it) is used 20 times in the comments -- but not once by Mark himself.

In my opinion, the Facebook blog is necessary and useful: not only because it alerts users to changes before they happen (as opposed to surprising them one day with a Newsfeed), but also because it centralizes Facebook discussion. I didn't scroll through all 700+ comments left on the post, but from the few I did read, it looks like users are not only responding to the blog post but also to other users.

While I'm not sure how wild I'll be about the new-and-newer Facebook -- especially since it will probably change again in a few months -- I am definitely a fan of the Facebook blog. Mark Zuckerberg should sleep easy at night with the knowledge that he's done at least one thing unequivocally "right."