Closer To The Ideal

I like this new site, BetterCodes.org. However it is still buggy. Every time I add a friend, I get an error that the friend can not be added. Though I think the friends are, in fact, being added. Here is a screen shot:

I just joined bettercodes.org. Please feel free to friend me. I will accept any friend request.

Jim Stogdill writes:

The question of data privacy and ownership comes up over and over in our Yammer discussions. The last time it came up the thread ran for nearly 100 responses. Even though the typical post is something like “Who is using Grails?” or “Is the X application slow for everyone today or just for me?” data privacy is simply one of the biggest concerns going for a lot of companies these days. The mere suggestion that our data isn’t under our control is a big deal.

This point was demonstrated to me in a personal and compelling way during my first week on Yammer. I mentioned a client meeting so that I could share a few tidbits with colleagues. Hours later I was surprised and dismayed when a Google search revealed that my comments had been re-posted to the friendfeed of someone I didn’t even know. Someone on our network had written a quick and dirty app to follow his Yammer RSS feed and re-post everything to friendfeed. Then for good measure he followed everyone in our network. When I “politely suggested” he take it down he equally politely explained to me that I just didn’t get Web 2.0.

I think about this in relation to WP Questions. We haven’t yet offered truly private uses of the software, but I suspect that is something we will need to offer soon, if we are going to capture all the niches to which such software can be used.

At some point I’d like to work on one of the dating sites. They seem to often make huge money. Lots of people meet their mates online nowadays. It is clearly one of the main things that people use the Internet for. And some really interesting sociology data comes out of it.

The interesting thing on the OK Cupid site was that the non-normalized responses from men looked as if they’d been normalized into a bell curve – the men thought most women were of average looks, a few women were rated good looking, and a few were rated ugly. Meanwhile the women rated 80% of the men as below average in attractiveness.

Also, GirlsAskGuys is an interesting example of crowd-sourcing brought to the dating world – got a question about the other gender? Ask the crowd.

Community sites tend to develop enforcers who limit what is considered acceptable speach on the site. The enforcers tend to be among the most ardent users of the site. These enforcers do 2 things: they keep the site focused on whatever the enforcers consider to be core to the site, and they limit the potential of the site. In this regard, this conversation about what is appropriate, and what is not appropriate, on Stack Overflow, is fascinating to me:

I don’t get it. Why do people ask so simple questions? Boredom? It can’t be lazyness since it would have been easier to find the answer with google then putting it up here. Spam. – Caffeine Mar 1 at 18:15

For some the question is not simple, and he is asking for a detailed explanation about the operator, as you can see by the answer he accepted. – Ólafur Waage Mar 1 at 18:19

@Olafur – the & operator is fairly simple. He doesn’t want a detailed explanation, he wants AN explanation, because he’s been using it without knowing what exactly it does. While I admire his willingness to admit that he doesn’t know it and desire to learn it, it’s still more of a Google question. – Chris Lutz Mar 1 at 18:39

It’s not about wether the answer is simple, but if posting it here means simply copying it from somewhere else. This is redundant. It feels to me, that some people are really using SO to kill spare time. Maybe I’m a bit biased, but I like SO for puzzles and not for chat-like questions. – Caffeine Mar 1 at 18:41

Wouldn’t it be good if you could find an answer for any programming question on SO? The only way this would ever happen is if “simple” questions get asked as well as “puzzle” ones. On that basis, methinks this a valid question. – da5id Mar 1 at 22:41

Lately I’ve noticed there have been less articles in the media about how the evil online social networks are corrupting the youth. danah boyd offer this bit of history:

While there were many adults on MySpace for legitimate purposes, it wasn’t until white collar professionals joined Facebook en masse that the moral panic started to subside. Finally, privileged Americans “got” social network sites, even if they were stuck confronting their high school identities through the listing of 25 things. At this stage, over 35% of American adults have a profile on a social network site. The adoption by this older, wealthier, more educated crowd changed the headlines of the news. Facebook became the new darling and most people thought that it had squashed MySpace long before it had even a fraction of the number of users.

Also, the features offered by a social site are not that important. With software like Photoshop and Word, more features might be a selling point (though that is frequently debated) but with social sites, more features might simply get in the way of what people really want to do. People go to these sites to socialize, and for that they don’t need a lot of features:

 Many who build technology think that a technology’s feature set is the key to its adoption and popularity. With social media, this is often not the case. There are triggers that drive early adopters to a site, but the single most important factor in determining whether or not a person will adopt one of these sites is whether or not it is the place where their friends hangout. In each of these cases, network effects played a significant role in the spread and adoption of the site.

danah boyd (her name is legally spelled in lower-case letters) points out that most abused children are abused in their own homes, and often by their parents or relatives. So she wonders why various Attorney General’s focus so much time and attention on sex offenders online:

The Attorneys General – mostly angry at me and other researchers – have spent considerable time trying to publicly reject the ISTTF report that was published last month. This week, I watched as they blasted the airwaves with an announcement that 90,000 sex offenders have been removed from MySpace. This PR campaign is intended to provoke fears in the American psyche, to serve as “proof” that we were wrong. The underlying message is, “See, social network sites are dangerous!” Fear mongering by public officials is quite effective, but, once again, I’m frustrated to see the framing miss the reality of the data. For this reason, I want to challenge the message of the current PR fear campaign.

…Why are we so obsessed with the registered sex offender side of the puzzle when the troubled kids are right in front of us? Why are we so obsessed with the Internet side of the puzzle when so many more kids are abused in their own homes? I feel like this whole conversation has turned into a distraction. Money and time is being spent focusing on the things that people fear rather than the very real and known risks that kids face. This breaks my heart.

Why do various Attorney General’s focus so much time and attention on sex offenders online? I assume part of the answer has to do with political convenience – it is easy to go after sex offenders online.

I disagree with this post by Susan Payton:

I think we need to shift our thinking about marketing results in terms of having absolute control and ability to micromanage the results and just sit back and let it happen. You won’t see results overnight, but if you use social networking sites correctly and participate in the right conversations, you will see a positive change. You will see traffic to your site increase. You will see sales climb. Just relax and let it happen.

Let’s all take a deep breath and let out all those years of being control freaks, of needing to know exactly how everything will pan out. Marketing 2.0 is happening as we speak. There is no precedence set. We are making history with internet marketing and social media. Do you want to go along for the ride or sit this one out and regret it later?

I am astonished by the attitude that Payton is expressing. Why are we suppose to have blind faith in social media? Why is it that any normal ad platform has to prove itself to us, but social media gets a free pass? If people are having trouble measuring the results of their social media efforts, maybe that’s because those efforts are worthless and need to be stopped?

One of my current clients has pages on MySpace and Facebook. They occasionally post news bulletins to both of them. They’ve tried to build up a network of friends on both. How much traffic do we see in the referers from either? Generally, we get zero a month, though sometimes we get 3 or 4. Therefore, I am strong advocate of abandoning both platforms. The return on investment is terrible. The time spent on those sites could be better spent elsewhere.

If you can’t measure a result, there is a good chance that you are wasting your money. Therefore, you should not spend money on this kind of media.

Sarah Lacy used LinkedIn to try to help a friends of her get a job. It occurs to her that the depression will be very good for LinkedIn:

In terms of ego and validation, I got the pride of knowing my network could help someone I care about. And not just help someone with something minor– help someone potentially find a new job. In this case she wasn’t laid off but, in an economy like this where hundreds of thousands are, survivor’s guilt runs high. Especially if you’ve been laid off before and viscerally remember that feeling. You want to be able to do something when you hear that kind of news, and LinkedIn offers that, whether it’s an introduction or just writing a recommendation for a laid-off friend. It was one of the first times an interaction with LinkedIn gave me that social media endorphin rush that I more commonly get with Twitter, blogging, Flickr or Facebook.

Darren Hoyt got me thinking about who is online, with his remarks about RSS feeds:

Google Reader’s popularity is surging and the number of people consuming web content via RSS readers has grown overall, but no one’s claiming RSS is a mainstream concept just yet. It’s mostly the geeks and early-adopters who know what it is and what to do with it, thus they don’t need to be sold on whether a blog offers an RSS feed—their feedreader can auto-detect it based on URI anyway… Yet so many theme designers use valuable screen space to display a prominent (and mysterious, to most) orange RSS icon. Non-techy users will either avoid the icon or click it and be taken to a page of XML gobbledygook.

I started to wonder about non-techies and when and if they will ever think it is natural to subscribe to RSS feeds. I wrote this as a comment on Darren’s site:

My mom is in her 70s and over the last 3 years she has become a regular reader of Google News. I set it as the homepage on FireFox and IE on her computer. After I’d set it up, she surprised me by exploring it enough to learn how to customize it. Since she is fluent in French, she told Google News that she wanted news in both English and French. She now gets titles in both languages.

More recently, she’s become a regular reader of DailyKos. For years my brother has sent her links to occasional posts on DailyKos, but only recently has my mom become a regular reader. Assuming she eventually gets interested in other political blogs, I imagine there is an RSS feed reader in her future.

There are young people whose reading habits were shaped during the era of the Web. They’ve grown up getting their news online. And every year they are another year older (eventually they become that demographic that advertisers value most). On the other hand, there are certain paper magazines that have what I’d guess are slightly older audiences. Think of magazines about fishing or boats. The audience for these magazines will, I suspect, be slowly eroded by the generational shift. To me, the conclusion seems to be that eventually whole categories of print-based magazines will be endangered by their online rivals. If this decade saw the maturation of the tools needed to build complex, dynamic websites, the next decade is likely to see large scale shifts in how the public gets its news. RSS feeds seem like an obvious part of that shift.

At the end of the 80s, tech oriented college kids went onling (the internet was available on all campuses, though it wasn’t yet available to the general public). During the 90s, tech-oriented youth went online. Tech-oriented gay teens, in particular, began to find an escape from harrassment online. I’m using the phrase “tech oriented” rather than “affluent” or “college educated” or any other such phrase. danah boyd has written of the difficulties of defining social classes in America. People involved with the tech industry were among the first online, for obvious reasons. During the current decade, the web became an important resource and support for new moms. People with non-majority political viewpoints found the Internet an important place to converse and organize. Professors began to build reputations online (though the majority of professors still don’t have weblogs and the web has not replaced the peer-reviewed process). Law professors started posting essays on their weblogs, a few of which were cited in court cases. A new generation of journalists found they could launch quite successful careers through their weblogs. The news industry was transformed. The gambling industry was also transformed, and to the extent that we can consider the sports industry separately from the news industry, it too was transformed.

Except for the professors and the tech crowd, most of the other groups that went online had in common a sense of isolation. New moms, gay teens, and folks with minority political viewpoints greeted the web as a place where they could finally connect with others. Gamblers too, for different reasons.

Each year that passes sees the web become more central to people’s lives. This decade saw an explosion of online social networks, such as MySpace and Facebook and, for professional contacts, LinkedIn. People nowadays often meet their romantic partners online.

When the economy recovers from the current recession, society’s acceptance of the web will enter a new phase. The early adopters have all adopted the web, and the middle part of society has mostly embraced it too. The late adopters will be increasingly online over the next few years.

Much of the content now online is subsidized by existing offline publications. For instance, the New York Times online is subsidized by the offline version of the paper. My mom is a very great fan of the New York Times. She subscribes to the paper version of it and she loves to read it. Myself and my brothers only read the New York Times online. So, to some extent, older folks like my mom are subsidizing the reading habits of younger people. As the demand for the older, offline product shrinks, the ability of the offline product to subsidize the online product will also shrink. Personally, I think the New York Times will survive for a very long time to come but other publications will disappear. Some very small niche subjects will likely only be able to support online publications. For online publications, the exciting possibility is how much additional revenue will become available to them.

There are many groups that are slow to adopt technology. There are a few groups who feel that technology, by itself, is contrary to their mission or ideology. My experience with iHanuman.com reminded me that there is a great resistance to technology among some who are students of yoga (some yoga instructors insist that sitting in front of a computer is bad for your body and therefore contrary to yoga). My experience with The Second Road has taught me that the recovery community is only slowly moving online. In fact, in many ways the online recovery community resembles where political blogs were about 6 years ago – they all have small audiences, the overall audience is probably growing quickly, especially for younger folks.

I recall a Second Road meeting where someone asked why anyone would go online to seek support. We were discussing young people (under age 25) with a counselor who worked with youth. We wondered, if a 20 year old is at a party and someone pulls out meth, and that 20 year old is trying to stay clean, won’t they simply call someone else in recovery? Don’t all young people have cell phones, and don’t they use them all the time? The counselor corrected us. Most young people have limited cell phone plans. They are constantly having to save their minutes, or they are out of minutes. Also, at a party, it is much more socially acceptable to say “I’ve got to check my email, can I borrow your computer?” than it is to say “I’ve got to call my sponsor, can I borrow a phone?”

Middle class Baby Bomers are now entirely online, and they now organize their social lives around the web almost to the same extent as the younger cohorts do. Most of the big web companies that have so far thrived have been built or lead by Baby Boomers (early adopters, to be sure). Even those Baby Boomers who missed the first wave of the web eventually joined up. I’ve known Baby Boomers who made a lot of money selling things on Ebay or Amazon. I’ve known Baby Boomers who’ve met their current romantic partners on the web.

The groups that haven’t yet moved online are the ones that have so far had some reason to resist computers, or some obstacle keeping them from the Internet. Rural areas, which are only now getting broad band, poor people and older people are major demographics who’ll be moving online during the next few years.

If a technology is truly disruptive, then it will cause the bankruptcy of many large, established firms. Over the last 15 years, since the web did not cause large-scale bankruptcies for large, established firsm, some people began to doubt whether it was truly disruptive. But consider the way that Clayton M. Christensen first defined a disruptive technology:

New performance introduced by a disruptive technology, which typically begins at a lower level of performance, but rapidly improves until it meets the majority of customers’ needs.

It’s possible that the web is only now reaching the point that it becomes truly disruptive. Many people have rejected it up till this point. The way of accessing it has been through a personal computer, which has been expensive and cumbersome. And broadband connections were slow to spread, especially in the US. Perhaps we are only now arriving at the critical moment of ubiquity.

All the remaining groups, all the factions of the population that have so far resisted the Web, or been unable to reach it, are now (over the next 5 years) likely to be brought online by the collapse of offline alternatives. The massive bankruptcy of the old ways of doing things will leave these groups with less and less options. For those groups who wanted to be online but were kept from doing so, more and more options will probably ease their path.

Conclusions: over the next 5 years, one of the biggest opportunities for content sites will be those that aim to directly replace existing paper-based content. Such sites were much hyped and much predicted in the mid 90s, but it turns out those predictions were premature. 13 years later, I believe we’ve arrived at the moment for such predictions to come true. No one person can be aware of all of the possible demographic niches that are now ready for content via the Web. I am aware of a few possibilities, which I’ve mentioned above. I believe now is the right time for a new wave of investment in content sites.

danah boyd makes some good points about the legal proceedings against Lori Drew, in the case that grew out of Megan Meier’s suicide:

Bullying is a horrific practice, but it’s also a common response when people struggle to attain status. Backstabbing, rumor-mongering, and enticement aren’t unique to teenagers. Look in any corporate office or political campaign and you’ll see some pretty nasty bullying going on. The difference is that adults have upped the ante, learned how to manipulate and hide their tracks. In other words, adults are much better equipped to do dreadful damage in their bullying that children and teens. They have practice. And it’s not a good thing.

Lori Drew abused her power as a knowledgeable adult by leveraging her adult knowledge of psychology to humiliate and torment a teen girl. Put another way, Lori Drew engaged in psychological and emotional child abuse. Child abuse includes the psychological or emotional mistreatment of a child. Unfortunately, most legal statutes focus on sexual and physical abuse and neglect because emotional abuse is very hard to substantiate and prosecute. But realistically, she should’ve been tried with child abuse, not a computer crime.

The fact that technology was involved is of little matter. Sure, she couldn’t have said those things to Megan’s face, but she could’ve hired a boy to do so. (How many movies have been made of boys being roped into teen girls’ humiliation schemes?) The crime she should be convicted of should have nothing to do with technology. She should be tried (and convicted) of psychologically abusing a child.

Why do we focus on the technology? Is it because it is the thing that we don’t understand? Or is it because if we were actually forced to contend with the fact that Drew was abusing a minor to protect her own that we’d have to face our own bad habits in this regard? How many of you have done something problematic to protect your child? I suspect that, at the end of the day, many parents could step in Lori Drew’s shoes and imagine themselves getting carried away in an effort to protect their daughter from perceived injustices. Is that why we’re so centered on the technology?

Our biggest project of the last 8 months has been The Second Road. This site is built on top of the framework that I started developing back at Category4.com (which they released as open source). We had a big roll-out on May 29th, which we completed and clarified much of the functionality. The site just got a nice write up in the local paper:

Often it is late at night, when there is neither a 12-step meeting to attend nor anyone awake to phone, that the craving for a drink is strongest.

And it is times like these when Ginger Bauler goes online to reach out to others recovering from addiction, finding solace in their tales of success and providing encouragement for those trying to break the shackles of dependency.

Bauler, who used to manage a research laboratory in Charlottesville, writes a blog about her struggles with alcoholism and her quest for sobriety on The Second Road — a new online support community for drug and alcohol addicts started by Charlottesville residents.

Writing about her battles enables Bauler to become “accountable” for her recovery, she says. And meeting and keeping in touch with those dealing with similar experiences gives her strength.

“I develop these relationships with total strangers, but with whom I’m completely connected because of this disease,” said Bauler, who has become a managing editor of the site.

The Second Road is the brainchild of local documentary filmmaker Melissa Shore, who partnered with Chip Ransler, owner of a digital publishing firm, to launch the site in November. By late May the social networking site had 225 members and more than 1,400 different people had visited it in a recent 10-day stretch.

Each member of The Second Road has his or her own profile page, similar to sites such as Facebook and MySpace, where they can post information and display customized features. The site also includes a series of blogs, chat groups, a “sharing wall” for inspirational quotes and testimonial videos from recovering addicts.

Shore, who grew up watching family members battle addictions, noticed that there was a gap in services for people in recovery and a need for round-the-clock services.

People in recovery do not always have access to meetings or counseling services, and some may have no one to turn to in times of crisis, Shore realized. That is especially true in rural communities, where social services either might not be readily available or are far away.

“There are hours of the day when you can’t or don’t feel comfortable reaching out for help,” Shore said. “The beauty of the Internet, of course, is that it’s 24-7.”

The site has won praise from many in the local mental health community as a vital tool to help round out recovery services.

“The concept is absolutely brilliant,” said Jeff Gould, administrator of the Charlottesville/Albemarle Drug Court. “This type of online recovery network is just perfect for people who can’t get to meetings.”

Beth Elliott, a retired social worker who advises the site’s creators, says that members are using The Second Road to implement the treatment plans they develop with counselors, through making lists and blogging about their successes and missteps.

I’ll link to this article because I know I’ll want to refer to it later. I very much enjoy its dicussion of the negative effects of “network effects”. Like credit in a stock market, “network effects” exaggerate both the upward and downward swings.

You see this happen all the time at dinner parties or events. Things are great until one or two people announce the intention to leave. If those folks are fun and entertaining, there’s an immediate realization that the quality of the experience is about to go down. And yet more people announce their intention to leave, and so on, until you are left with the party hosts and a big mess ;-)

Advanced discussion: Social Network Death Spiral
Now let’s do a more advanced discussion using the concepts above – for some new readers, this discussion might completely be incoherent ;-)

Let’s consider a specific scenario where a social network could easily start to “Death Spiral” – here’s some set up on the scenario:

• You have a bunch of users, let’s call the total number N
• The total number of users in the ecosystem, called the carrying capacity, is variable C
• These users all individually require some utility value on a site, let’s call this V_required
• Then there’s a retention %, called R, which depends on two factors:
  • If the utility value for users is satisfied, that is, V > V_required, then R close to 100%
  • If the utility value drops under V_required, then R is crappy, closer to 0%
• And to borrow Metcalfe’s Law, the value of the network is calculated at V = N^2

So the scenario is that as the total users for the application reaches the carrying capacity, you basically hit a point of maximum saturation – this is defined by the ratio N/C. Sometimes this ratio can also be referred to as the “efficiency” of a user acquisition process, which relays how many people you actually acquire versus the universe of all users. (Obviously you want this to be as large as possible)

Once you hit the carrying capacity and acquire all possible users, N is at the highest point, and thus the network value is also at its highest point, V = N_max^2. Similarly, because the network value V is at its highest, the retention reaches its highest point as well.

The question in this scenario is, at any point during the growth of the network, does the network value V exceed the required value of the site, which we call V_required? Does the network break through the critical mass of value?

If so, retention should be great, as defined by the explanation above. In fact, maybe you reach V_required early on during the growth of the site, which makes the acquisition process much more efficient. Early on, maybe the userbase wasn’t sticking, but a critical mass threshold is met, and suddenly the entire userbase sticks, which creates a long-term creation of ad impressions and company value.

However, if you don’t reach the required value in the network, then you’re pretty much screwed. Then the retention sucks, since the users aren’t finding value, and some percentage of them will leave. This will then remove more value from the system, causing yet another round of users to leave. This continual loss of users is a death spiral that collapses your network in fine Eflactem’s Law style.

A very interesting variation of this is when you apply Metcalfe’s Law not to the entire network of users, but rather think of a social network as a loosely grouped set of connections. In that case, some local networks might have achieved critical mass, and if they are big enough, they will be retained. However, if the smaller networks around any given group start collapsing, then sometimes even the large networks will get pulled down with them.

This is an important story to read, for anyone who uses an online service. Steve Portigal had thousands of images, tags, and comments on his Flickr account, and they all got erased when his account was hacked.

That means that my 5000 photos are gone. Those I can upload. But all the people I’ve linked to are gone (I’ve spent a few hours trying to reconnect with those I can remember). Anyone who watched my photos via their contacts has lost me (and I’ve lost much of my audience). All the photos that were marked by others are gone. All the groups which I participated in by contributing illustrative images are gone. All the titles, tags, geotags, view counts and comments are gone. All the descriptions and stories and dialog with others in is gone.

My document, my story, my part of the community, is gone.

But the whole social media movement that we can’t ever stop hearing about is asking us to contribute content to their websites; we’re building the value for them. YouTube wouldn’t sell for $1.65 billion without our videos. Flickr has our photos. LiveJournal has our stories and pictures.

But is it ours? Do we know who owns it? If the data is on our hard drive, we know where it is, we may even take the trouble to back it up (I’ve got an external backup at work, at home, and online). But if the data is on someone else’s site, how can I keep a copy of it? It may be against the site rules for you to do that, in fact, as the high profile Scoble story demonstrated.

I’ve previously linked to danah boyd’s controversial essay about social class on MySpace and Facebook. A month later, boyd has taken the time to respond to her critics:

Qualitative research has data. Typically, written ethnographies and other qualitative-driven findings show that data through individual accounts, quotes by people that are contextualized, and detailed descriptions of people or situations. I have that data but I did not include it in my blog essay. I intentionally save data for my academic works so that I can flesh it out and situate it in the depth that needs to happen. The decision to not reveal data has to do with separating the academic writing from the blog writing, but it also has to do with what I’m trying to accomplish with each. Writing a case study of someone or using data requires a lot more fleshing out than I typically do in my blog. Thus, I didn’t show data in that essay but that is not because I don’t have it. This is another way in which this is not a formal article – leaps of faith are fine when you’re having a conversation, but not when you are trying to document something for posterity.

I’m mildly uneasy with “leaps of faith are fine when you’re having a conversation”. I know one thing my friends appreciate about me is my precision, and that when I quote something I often recall exactly where I read it. That is, I can offer cites. I think people are willing to tolerate uncited material in a conversation because none of us have the kind of memory that would allow us to remember where we learned every fact in our head. Nevertheless, I think it is the kind of thing that people indulge for the sake of friendship (and the knowledge that they will need to be indulged the same way, that is, reciprocity), but they are never really happy about it. And if you speak to someone who is not a friend of yours, and especially if they disagree with what you are saying, then assumptions of goodwill, indulgence and reciprocity cease to exist. Even among people I’ve known ten years, when we have a conversation where we disagree sharply about a political issues, they ask me to cite where I am getting my facts, and I’m often curious where they are getting theirs.

However, I have no reservations with anything boyd writes about the difficulty of defining social class in America. This is really one of the aspects of her writing that I enjoy most:

At the top of the essay, I snarkily wrote “I wish I could just put numbers in front of it all and be done with it, but instead, I’m going to face the stickiness…” The issue is not just that I don’t have quantitative data; it’s that quantitative data does not have the nuance to show what’s going on. It gets us part way there, but there are problems with it. Class is not simply a matter of what income bracket you’re at. When we use income level as a marker, we get the Marxist cafe worker and the immigrant janitor in the same bucket, but they are not living the same lifestyle at all. Another approximation that is often used for class is parental education. Post-graduate degrees are often helpful at pointing to upper class activity, but there’s still a huge difference between a Stanford Law degree and a master’s in special ed from the local night college. There’s also a big difference between dropping out of Harvard after 2 years and getting a 2-year community college degree. Surveys usually ask what the last degree one got was. Do we really put Bill Gates in the same bucket with other just-finished-HS individuals? (Gates was not just an average dropout… His parents were powerful and he dropped out of Harvard.) Marking teens’ class is even more sticky because we use their parents as proxies. Many children replicate their parents class norms, but not all. This is why parents complain that one kid is doing “OK” and the other is not; this means that one kid is living up to parental class expectations and the other is not.

Also:

I chose the term subaltern to refer to subculturally-identified and non-hegemonic teens because their expressions are often interpreted by hegemonic mass media in a way that they are always seen as failure. I wanted to choose a term that did not simply place them as second-tier citizens, but as powerful voices in discourse. Too many people who read my article assumed that the group that I talked about as subalterns are somehow inferior or less valuable than hegemonic teens. Perhaps that’s hegemony speaking, but I find it frustrating. I think that they are equally powerful forces in society (and they are certainly equally powerful in the market) but I think that they have different views on the construction and maintenance of society as we know it.

The terms are extremely problematic but I used them with a smile on my face because I thought that they would evoke an image and make people think. Many have been outraged that I appear biased towards one or the other (although no one seems to know which – I’ve been accused of being condescending towards subaltern teens and I’ve also been accused of fetishizing them). Perhaps I should’ve located myself. As a teen, I would’ve been caught in between – a smart kid whose friends and world were very much in the subaltern camps (geeks and burnouts primarily). As an adult, I have more privilege than I ever thought possible and my world is extremely hegemonic and I’m always trying to fight against that. Thus, I probably have more sympathy with subaltern teens but my friends are all raising hegemonic ones who I adore. Thus, I’m definitely caught in the middle.

It is amazing to me how many people will criticize an essay before they’ve read it:

Unfortunately, misinterpretations were made worse by the mainstream media, and namely the initial BBC article that talked about this essay as a formal report of a six month study. (The article was corrected a few days later.) I realized very quickly that people read the BBC article or the Slashdot coverage or their friends’ blog posts and decided to critique from there. I have been astonished at how lazy people have been. My article is not that inaccessible and it’s not even that long. What was even funnier was that when I wrote a response to the BBC article on my blog, people then took that to say that I saw the essay as based on no data and otherwise meaningless. The essay is based on data; it is rooted in a very long ethnographic study; but it is just not a formal report of my findings.

I especially like this, utopia is dead:

We used to have this utopian view that the Internet would solve all of our societal divisions. On the Internet, no one would know you’re a dog, right? The reality is that all of society’s issues are simply perpetuated online. And that’s frustrating. I liked the utopian dream better, even if it’s not real. But if we accept the reality – that the Internet mirrors and magnifies offline values and views – we must start to think of what the implications of this are. Society is in a dangerous position when people who are different do not interact. This is how intolerance breeds and we definitely have enough of that in this country.

boyd describes the criticism of her as absolutely brutal:

I couldn’t help but wonder if the academics I know could’ve handled some of what I received this month. Not all of it was what we would call a review. I’ve had to practice deep breathing as I went through detailed discussions of whether or not I was cute enough to fuck or look through bulletins that had decided to gather photos of me for analysis (they concluded that my arm bracelets prove that I’m a cutter). I know the Slashdot/Metafilter community well enough to not take the personal threats on my life or body seriously, but that doesn’t mean they don’t suck. Emails from parents accusing me of destroying their children’s lives suck. PR campaigns to discredit me suck. In general, being mocked isn’t any fun. Many of my dearest friends can’t stand even the slightest personal attack online; I’ve learned to take it for granted while being continuously disappointed by it. If online peer review is going to be this personal, few are going to be masochistic enough to want it.

For all that was written about Kathy Sierra and the attempts to silence women online, this strikes me as a more common example of the forces at work that might limit women’s careers, especially careers that depend on some kind of online presence.

When I log into MySpace, I’m told that I’m part of my extended network:

This is idiotic. I’m me, my friends are my network, and their friends are my extended network. Yes, because I am one of my friend’s friends, I can see why the code might initially think of me as part of my own extended network. However, it is confusing, and it speaks to really poor programming. After all these years, with all their money, can’t they get something so obvious fixed?

A very interesting take on the Facebook platform:

Translation: unless you already have, or are prepared to quickly procure, a 100-500+ server infrastructure and everything associated with it — networking gear, storage gear, ISP interconnetions, monitoring systems, firewalls, load balancers, provisioning systems, etc. — and a killer operations team, launching a successful Facebook application may well be a self-defeating proposition.

This is a “success kills” scenario — the good news is you’re successful, the bad news is you’re flat on your back from what amounts to a self-inflicted denial of service attack, unless you have the money and time and knowledge to tackle the resulting scale challenges.

Will every Facebook application go through this?

No, of course not. The ones that nobody uses will not have this problem.

But the successful ones all will.

The implication is, in my view, quite clear — the Facebook Platform is primarily for use by either big companies, or venture-backed startups with the funding and capability to handle the slightly insane scale requirements. Individual developers are going to have a very hard time taking advantage of it in useful ways.

Last year I signed up for an account on Couchsurfing.com. Mostly the people who’ve come to visit have been friends of mine from outside of the network. But sometimes someone comes through who knows me only from reading my profile. Some of the folks are unforgetably interesting, like Phil Erner, a grad student studying physics, who stopped by and explained to me exactly why dark matter is needed to explain observed anomalies in the rotation of galaxies. Some of the visitors seem sent by mysterious but caring forces, just to help me out. For instance, last month I was wrestling with the issue of how to proceed with a very large web client of mine. I asked myself, should I write their software from scratch, or should I take an existing CMS like WordPress or Joomla and customize it? Just then some fellow named Andy called up. He said he was biking across America, and he was wondering if he could crash at my place for a night. Turned out it was Andy Skelton, who is on the core team of WordPress. So he stopped by and we spent some time talking about the client and talking about how to customize WordPress. What are the chances of such a thing?

danah boyd has a new essay about class dynamics and how they divide the people who use MySpace from the people who use Facebook. Everyone has linked to this essay, including such major media outlets as the BBC. One thing that jumped out at me was her idea that even the design of the site, the look and feel, were reflecting cultural values that arose from class divisions. (In the following excerpt, she uses the word “hegemonic” when referring to culturally middle class people, and “subaltern” when referring to culturally working class people.)

Most teens who exclusively use Facebook are familiar with and have an opinion about MySpace. These teens are very aware of MySpace and they often have a negative opinion about it. They see it as gaudy, immature, and “so middle school.” They prefer the “clean” look of Facebook, noting that it is more mature and that MySpace is “so lame.” What hegemonic teens call gaudy can also be labeled as “glitzy” or “bling” or “fly” (or what my generation would call “phat”) by subaltern teens. Terms like “bling” come out of hip-hop culture where showy, sparkly, brash visual displays are acceptable and valued. The look and feel of MySpace resonates far better with subaltern communities than it does with the upwardly mobile hegemonic teens. This is even clear in the blogosphere where people talk about how gauche MySpace is while commending Facebook on its aesthetics. I’m sure that a visual analyst would be able to explain how classed aesthetics are, but aesthetics are more than simply the “eye of the beholder” – they are culturally narrated and replicated. That “clean” or “modern” look of Facebook is akin to West Elm or Pottery Barn or any poshy Scandinavian design house (that I admit I’m drawn to) while the more flashy look of MySpace resembles the Las Vegas imagery that attracts millions every year. I suspect that lifestyles have aesthetic values and that these are being reproduced on MySpace and Facebook.

I should note here that aesthetics do divide MySpace users. The look and feel that is acceptable amongst average Latino users is quite different from what you see the subculturally-identified outcasts using. Amongst the emo teens, there’s a push for simple black/white/grey backgrounds and simplistic layouts. While I’m using the term “subaltern teens” to lump together non-hegemonic teens, the lifestyle divisions amongst the subalterns are quite visible on MySpace through the aesthetic choices of the backgrounds. The aesthetics issue is also one of the forces that drives some longer-term users away from MySpace.

In their book “Aggression, Antisocial Behavior, and Violence Among Girls”, the researchers Putallaz and Bierman argue that females avoid physical aggression but instead use social aggression as their outlet for rage. Deborah Giorgi-Guarnieri summarizes the argument as “boys are good at physical aggression and girls prefer social aggression. Social aggression means, ‘acts intended to inflict damage on a victim’s social relationships or social status,’ (p 15) such as gossip.”

Ten years ago, when a lot of this gossip was still verbal, and offline, it was difficult for outsiders to see these kinds of attacks. Gossip, after all, could be delivered to specific audiences, and anyone outside of that audience might only hear a garbled version of the attack. If you were inclined to think of the aggressor as kind, and if the gossip was especially vicious, then you were free to believe that the aggressor never really said the things that 3rd parties might later tell you that she did indeed say.

MySpace, and other online social networking sites, helps make the gossip visible. This, for instance, was recently posted by a woman that I know, and it is about another woman that I know:

A Message to Older Women: This has been a long time coming…

Dear Older Women (in the +30 range),

DON’T HATE.

Stop reminding me that I’m younger than you, I can SEE the difference and I’m quite pleased with the view.

One day I’ll be as old as you and I know that I certainly won’t be as (if at all) bitter- There are plenty of other women who are not that way who are your age and are mature about it. You may be older, but grow the fuck up and be proud your dents, wrinkles, and knowledge. Stop being so fucking vain. Don’t blame the young ones for your inadequacies in life or your inadequacies in your relationships.

Thank you.

Love,

26 year old, unsagging, virgin uterus & stomach, and well rested.

(The “virgin uterus” bit is potentially confusing – it is meant to say “I have not had a baby”, not that she is a virgin.)

There is a certain irony to a post so full of venom starting off with the words “Don’t Hate”.

The advantage, I think, to posting this on MySpace, is that the poster gets to potentially shame her target in front of a much larger audience than if the communication was done verbally.

A lot of articles have focused on how MySpace is changing relations among teenagers. Yet, with little effort, I could find a dozen such incidents occurring in my adult social network.