Final Post, Unit Structures is moving on.
Posted 8/11/2008 02:51:00 PM |

This will serve as the last post for Unit Structures as hosted on Blogger. If you get a minute, please update your bookmarks from http://chimprawk.blogspot.com to http://fstutzman.com. Thanks to the magic of Feedburner, this change should be completely transparent to all subscribers.

As I shut down this blog Unit Structures, some quick stats. Over approximately four years, I wrote 614 posts, 311 of which were public, 303 were private. The private posts are largely book/paper reviews, stubs for ideas, and a few posts I pulled back after reflection. You left 1,307 comments - each one hand-vetted by me. I wish I had spent more time responding and hanging out in the comment threads - you've left some truly great, insightful comments (no worries, they've been migrated to the new blog). The most incredible stat is viewership. Since I started keeping track, Unit Structures has been viewed over 500,000 times. Considering most of the papers I write will be read only a few times, it is remarkable to think about this blog's impact in comparison.

A final note - I'm sure many of you have wondered about "chimprawk." Chimprawk (a derivative of Chimp Rock) has been one of my usernames for as long as I can remember - and was the one I decided to use when I created my blogger account. I had no idea of what the blog would become, and if I knew the blog would be part of my professional identity I might have chose a different name. But I'm glad I didn't, and I think my blog's name was a reminder not to take any of this too seriously. This is all an experiment - one I look forward to continuing over at http://fstutzman.com


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Leaving Blogger - Please update your links
Posted 8/02/2008 09:48:00 PM |

I've been meaning to leave Blogger for a while, but for whatever reason - Google juice, convenience, archives - I've stuck around. However, the other day I received notice from Blogger that Unit Structures was a spam blog, and that I was locked out of my blog. This proved to be a very useful catalyst, as I'm now in the process of moving my blog over to my own domain, http://fstutzman.com.

This is the first request for you to update your blogrolls, links, etc. Thanks to Feedburner the migration will be seamless for most of you, but if you run into any trouble don't hesitate to contact me. I plan to complete the transfer in a week or so. If you'd like a preview of my new blog, hop over to http://fstutzman.com - let me know what you think!


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Twitter, free-riders, and lived community
Posted 7/30/2008 08:30:00 AM |

Yesterday, Twitter introduced some changes to their privacy model. Previously, if you employed privacy (kept your Twitters private), allowing someone to follow you forced reciprocation. That is, in turn, you were forced to follow your followers. Personally, this situation has always been troublesome: I've wanted to keep my Twitters private, mostly to prevent Google from indexing them - not because I'm sharing anything particularly salacious. However, as allowing followers had costs, I was forced to be selective about who was allowed in.

The particular costs of "fame" in Twitter are interesting, not only for their anachronistic nature (direct costs of fame on the web?), but the way they shape the system and uses. I've been forced to think of my Twitter stream as a budget. I may like you, and allow you to follow me, but if you post 30 Twitters a day you blow my information budget, and I'm forced to close the connection. I've wondered how the distributed cognitive processes of community have shaped norms around posting in response to budgeting. Since fame implies costs, and there is mutual understanding of these costs, have we evolved practice that shapes discourse to our information budgets?

Now that Twitter allows asymmetrical private following, it is interesting to think about how the site changes. At one level, Twitter becomes more like the rest of the web: when you subscribe to my RSS feed, there is no expectation that I'm reading yours. I can now "allow" high-producing followers without worry of my information budget. At face value, all of these things seem "good" and "normal." It is also useful to think about the consequences of this change, as privacy practice has very literally shaped community in Twitter.

Dourish and Anderson, in the 2006 paper Collective Information Practice: Exploring Privacy and Security as a Social and Cultural Phenomena, describe privacy as a process, one "embedded in social and cultural contexts." The authors present models of privacy - and I find the particular model of privacy as discursive practice applicable in the case of Twitter. The (admittedly brute-force) nature of privacy in Twitter has shaped our relations to one another, forcing the development of particular practice and strategies of community management. As fame has costs, our information budgets directly enforce our notions of community.

Interestingly, the costs of fame may have beneficial effects on community. To allow in private followers meant reciprocal information disclosure, a social information processing transaction. Within SIP, we develop our own strategies of reading-in, filtering, and information management - that is, we get to know our community. Like it or not, this forms tight bonds, feelings of closeness, and a unique form of community unlike others on the web. I don't think that the privacy changes will disrupt community in a catastrophic way, but it is useful to think about how this reshaping of privacy to fit more "normal" patterns will shape the lived experience of those on Twitter. Our followers transform themselves from costs to free-riders, and privacy is reimagined from control of utterances and information budgets to simply control of utterances.

The point of this analysis is not to make value judgements about Twitter's privacy practice, but rather to highlight how decisions about privacy shape the experience of technology. Dourish and Anderson argue that we should explore "privacy and security as social products rather than natural facts." In this context, perhaps both the previous "forced reciprocal" and current "free-rider" approach to privacy in Twitter are equally arbitrary. Notably, the effects of either approaches on community will not be arbitrary, and this is the important takeaway for the interaction designer.

Cited:
Dourish, P. and Anderson, K. (2006). Collective Information Practice: Exploring Privacy and Security as Social and Cultural Phenomena. Human-Computer Interaction, 21(3), 319--342.


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BarCampRDU is this Saturday!
Posted 7/28/2008 10:56:00 AM |

Dave Johnson, Wayne Sutton and a cast of supporters have been doing heroic work preparing for 2008's BarCampRDU. The conference will go down this Saturday, August 2. I'm really looking forward to attending - this is the first time I'm not wearing the organizer hat, so it means I may actually get to attend and enjoy some of the amazing sessions. Dave's posted some last-minute information about BarCampRDU, which is worth checking out if you're interested in attending.

BarCamp RDU 2008 is one week from today and it's shaping up the be the biggest and I hope the best BarCamp RDU so far.

Here are a couple of notes for attendees:

Check the attendee list! On July 21, we decided we had budget and space to register everybody on the waiting list. If you were on the waiting list you are now registered to attend.

Remove yourself if you can't attend. If you registered but cannot make it, please remove your name from the list. For planning purposes, we need to have as accurate a count as is possible.

Propose sessions in advance. If you are interested in initiating or attending a session on a specific topic, then go right ahead and add your topic to the Proposed Sessions list.


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Thinking about socio-technical
Posted 7/16/2008 11:44:00 AM |

In a few days I'll be heading off to the Research Institute for the Science of Socio-Technical Systems in Ann Arbor, MI. This is the inaugural institute, and from the looks of things it is going to be great. In preparing for the event, we've been asked to think about what socio-technical means to us. I've actually found this to be a challenging experience; not because I haven't thought about socio-technical, but rather because it is simply built-in to my research paradigm.

When I arrived in the program at UNC's School of Information and Library Science, I already knew that I would study a socio-technical interaction. Social software's trajectory clearly pointed towards increased mediation, and the past few years have validated that bet. My long-term research goals now involve studying the social/informational aspects of this mediation; how are our informational processes changing as we offload elements of social management to the network?

The concept of a socio-technical system was developed decades ago, and largely used in industry where technology mediated work processes, management and organizational capacities. In fact, mediating technologies played a crucial role in the birth of the modern organization (see Standage, Ch. 6). As technology got smaller, as it proliferated, as we started hacking and repurposing it, as some technologies were successes and others failures, we sought to understand the construction of socio-technical systems.

I've often just accepted that uses of technology are socially constructed. Growing up on the web, and now studying it, how could one feel any other way? Taking a historical view (see Adas), one can see that it took a leap to understand that the uses of advanced machines could be subjective and socially constructed (Turkle, 1984 and 1996). Applying such thought to a different domain - say biotechnology or genetic sciences - is instructive. Perhaps in 20 or 50 years genetic manipulation will be common, but at this time it is hard to imagine normative relations to such science as anything other than objective.

Back to the social web. Rob Kling (1992, others), the father of social informatics, argued that socio-technical systems have trajectories, paths through which the uses and applications of technologies are contested and negotiated. This approach fits the spaces I study well; the networked publics (boyd, 2007) frequented by youth are hotly contested grounds, with parents, legislators and users attempting to shape use and practice.

Rather than focusing on explicit actors (legislation, interfaces), I attempt to explore the contestation of trajectory in terms of process. I've found both cultural and spatial studies particularly useful in my work. These "networks" are better understood as spaces of discourse, with unique processes of representation and production. This only becomes more evident as we move away from explicit, first-gen social networks, to spaces where identity is imagined.

Critical to socio-technical studies are the roles values play in the evolution of technologies. This is particularly important for social networks, and any other mediated space of discourse. What values are being inscribed into an increasingly global, but diffuse, network? We can also ask these question of Web 2.0: When Google sends its street-view cars through bad neighborhoods on Sunday mornings, what kind of representations are being created?

I look forward to exploring these issues in greater depth in Ann Arbor. As it looks like we're going to have very busy days, blogging will probably be light, but I'll attempt to update as the week progresses. In the meanwhile, if anyone has any don't-miss recommendations for Ann Arbor, leave them in the comments!

Works Cited:
Adas, M. (1989). Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Boyd, D. (2007). Why Youth (heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life. In Buckingham, D. (Ed.), The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning (pp. 119-142). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Kling, R. (1992). . In Cotterman, W. and Senn, J. (Eds.), Behind the Terminal: The Critical Role of Computing Infrastructure In Effective Information Systems' Development and Use (pp. 153--201). John Wiley and Sons, Inc.

Standage, T. (1998). The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's Online Pioneers. New York: Berkley Trade.

Turkle, S. (1984). The second self: computers and the human spirit. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Turkle, S. (1995). Life on The Screen. New York: Simon and Schuster.


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