Shaowen Bardzell (my illustrious collaborator and spouse) and I recently wrote an article entitled, “Intimate Interactions: Online Representation and Software of the Self,” which has just been published in Interactions magazine. In it, we argue that online representations do not always represent our offline selves, and it is a mistake to think they should always…
I’m in an informal reading group with some of the gang from complex systems, cog sci, and linguistics. One of the papers we’re reading for today really illuminated – in an HCI/d way – the talk Jeff was giving yesterday about the shared collective space of intention, meaning, and understanding. Since I know Dewey and…
Sorry to purely link to this, but i think it’s worthwhile for this group: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/02/weekinreview/02wright.html
So this morning, for the second time this year, my high school graduating class lost one of our own. She wasn’t a close friend of mine, but she was definetely someone who I loved talking to, always seemed to be smiling or laughing loudly, and had a close group of friends that loved her very…
Goffman’s Presentation of Self in Everyday Life was published in 1959 with the intent of establishing a description of meaning in social interaction. Goffman said that people present an “idealized” version of themselves in public (front stage). People present more consistent versions of themselves to coincide with norms and societal laws. When not in public…
Read more My Paper: Goffman’s Presentation of Self and YouTube
This weekend I helped tar down loose shingles on my roof, fixed my gutters, repainted parts of my house including my garage door and roof-pipes, and installed a new window to meet city regulations. I ended up paying about $100 in labor for two guys to help me out for a several hours. Now just about everything we did…
Read more Home Improvement Social Network & the Social Network Big Picture
I work full-time in the office of international services and part of my responsibility includes assisting in technical aspects of international orientation. This past international orientation, we invited admitted international students to a facebook group as a medium to communicate prior to arrival to the United States. Our intent was for facebook to be a place where the students can…
Read more Email and social networking for international events
So i’m reading a paper today by Chris Langton on the subject of Artificial Life (available online at http://www.aec.at/en/archiv_files/19931/E1993_025.pdf), in which he points out the fundamental differences between approaches to studying linear and non-linear systems. I would say that in researching Interaction Culture, we must more fully understand ourselves to be dealing with non-linear systems,…
Read more Interaction Culture: the Study of Non-Linear Systems
Without getting into the deeper philosophical concept of identity as performance or sign, i find the recent news of MySpace founder Tom Andersen’s alleged age-shifting mildly amusing. “Tom Anderson, the co-founder of MySpace and the first friend to anyone who creates a MySpace profile, isn’t really 32 like it says on his MySpace profile. His…
Jimmy has sent me a deluge of questions, and I’ll do my best to answer them here. Some answers I am more confident about than others. AMM >What are the defining characteristics of AMM? What is it NOT? I think the defining characteristic that I am settling on is creativity practiced by populations, rather than…
Interaction Culture 