» Making Meaning Desert of My Real Life

{November 2, 2009} Differences in Media

I’ve been thinking lately about the differences between media types. This thinking was inspired by the new movie Disgrace based on J. M. Coetzee’s novel of the same name. I will definitely see this movie (if it is ever released throughout the US) but I’m worried about the choices that the filmmakers have made. I thought Coetzee’s novel was brilliant because it was told from the point of view of a character who is somewhat reprehensible. But, of course, his reprehensibility must only be hinted at since he himself wouldn’t think he was reprehensible. The subtlety of the novel is difficult to convey in a film. And so the filmmakers have made choices that reduce the brilliant ambiguity of the novel. And that makes me wonder whether I’m interested enough in the plot of the novel to enjoy the movie.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been watching Battlestar Galactica on DVD. The original series aired on television and so the commercial breaks are obvious on the DVD. In the most recent episode that I watched, a character is in a room with a spiritual advisor, discussing a recurring dream. At a dramatic moment in the telling of the dream, the screen goes black, clearly a commercial break. When we return to the story (without having to watch a commercial, which is why we like NetFlix), we enter the story at exactly the same point that we left it. We left the story at a tension point so that we would be sure to come back after the commercial. This technique works well in television.

The same technique does not work well at all in novels. I read and hated Dan Brown’s novel, The DaVinci Code. I really wanted to like this novel. Dan Brown, after all, is from New Hampshire, and the premise of the story is intriguing. But I couldn’t get past the poor craftsmanship of the novel. The characters were two-dimensional and indistinguishable from each other. I figured out the “secret” of the novel (which I won’t spoil here) about half-way through. But my biggest problem was the chapter breaks. Dan Brown writes really short chapters, some of which are a page long. And often it is completely unclear why these chapter breaks occur. Why have a chapter that is one page long and then have the next chapter start right where the action of that really short chapter ended? I felt as though Brown had thought about moving these two chapters around, away from each, in order to build tension, in much the same way that Battlestar Galactica’s breaks for commercials build tension. A good editor could have made sure these two chapters did not appear one right after the other, unlike the two scenes with the commercial break between them. These examples remind me that different media require different production techniques just as they require different analysis techniques.

On a side note, the use of the made-up word “fracking” on Battlestar Galactica is getting on my nerves.

{October 25, 2009} Making Sense of All Things Digital

For the last few years, I have been volunteering my time at a local senior center, teaching computing skills. One of the struggles is to explain the subtle cues that the computer provides to us as its users to let us know what we can do at that particular time. What do I mean by “cues”? This Friday, I talked about how you know when you can type text in a particular spot. Think about it. You look for your cursor to change to a straight vertical line that blinks. Wherever it blinks is where your text will appear if you press the keys on your keyboard. We all know this, right? The problem is that there are thousands of these items. Each appears to be a small thing, without much consequence. And yet, by paying attention to these small, visual cues, we all know what we can do and when we can do it. It’s challenging to teach people who aren’t used to paying attention to, much less deciphering, these subtle cues. I love it but I’m constantly struggling to explain why things are as they are on PCs, to help make sense of the virtual world.

One of the things I have never been able to explain is why sometimes you need to click and why sometimes you need to double-click. I would like to be able to articulate a rule about when to engage in each action but I have not yet been able to do so. Instead, I tell the students in this class that they should first try to click on something and if nothing happens, they should double-click. This explanation feels wholy unsatisfactory to me because I want to believe that computers are logical. But deep in my heart, I know they aren’t. They are just as subject to whims of culture-making as any other artifact of our culture. And now I have proof of that. Tim Berners-Lee (that’s SIR Berners-Lee to you) recently admitted that he regrets the double-slash.

Sir Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. The author of the article I linked to says he is considered a father of the Internet but that’s not true. There is much confusion about the difference between the Internet and the World Wide Web. In fact, most people consider them to be the same thing. But they are not. The Internet is the hardware that the World Wide Web (which is comprised of information) resides on. The Internet was created in the early 1970’s. The World Wide Web was conceived of by Berners-Lee in the early 1990’s. Berners-Lee’s achievement is monumental. We don’t have to give him credit for the entire Internet. He’s still an amazing guy.

The World Wide Web is comprised of web pages and social networking sites and blogs and such rather than the actual machines that hold all of that information. When we browse the World Wide Web, we typically use a web browser like Internet Explorer or Firefox. If you look in the address box of the web browser you’re using, you will see that the address there contains a number of pieces. The first part of the address is the protocol that your computer is using to communicate with the computer that contains the information you want to see. A protocol is simply a set of rules that both computers agree to abide by in their communication. You can think of a protocol as a language that the computer agree to use in their communication. Typically, the protocol these days for web browsing is http (hypertext transfer protocol) or https (hypertext transfer protocol secure). Much of the text of the address of the web site you’re looking at specifies the name of a computer and the name of some space on that computer. The thing that Berners-Lee regrets is the set of characters he chose to separate the protocol from the rest of the address. He chose “://”. He doesn’t regret the :. It’s a piece of punctuation that represents a separation. He does regret the //. It’s superfluous, unnecessary. This whole conversation makes me feel better about teaching the senior citizens who choose to take my class. Some digital things are not logical. They are whims. Just ask Tim Berners-Lee.

{October 11, 2009} Corpus Libris

Interesting “ongoing photo essay on books and the bodies that love them” at Corpus Libris. I like this photo a lot.

{September 29, 2009} The Ambassador of Semiotics

I heard Madeleine Albright this morning on Morning Edition, the fifth or sixth interview I’ve heard with her since Sunday morning. Albright just released a new book and the ensuing media blitz has brought attention to the unusual tactics she used while pursuing her diplomatic duties in the Clinton administration. In the new book, called Read My Pins, Albright discusses her tactic of using costume jewelry, brooches in particular, to send messages about the state of negotiations in which she was involved. Albright’s articulation of her use of jewelry in this manner is an example of semiotics in action.

Semiotics is the study of signs and symbols in communication. Albright first began using her brooches to send messages in diplomatic meetings when Saddam Hussein called her a serpent. Consequently, whenever she dealt with Iraq, she would wear an antique snake pin on her left shoulder. She then wore all sorts of pins to signal how she was feeling about diplomatic negotiations.

Semiotics is concerned with signification, the process of using symbols to encode messages. Communication of a message requires a second step, the decoding of the message by the receiver. Albright’s audiences learned that they could gauge her feelings by looking at the brooch she was wearing. Vladimir Putin told Bill Clinton that he could tell what the tone of a meeting with Albright was going to be by looking at her left shoulder.

Semiotics doesn’t make it to the mainstream very often. Albright’s deliberate use of the field is a reminder that the safety of the world might in fact depend upon diplomats being good semioticians, being able to correctly read the symbols and signs in front of them.

{September 28, 2009} Human Pain

I’ve been watching Battlestar Galatica on DVD. One of the roles of science fiction, I think, is to raise controversial issues, to help us understand what it means to be human. Although the original 1970’s miniseries was cheesy and not very interesting, a few changes to the original idea makes the recent TV show one of the best when it comes to asking difficult questions and making us think about things in a new way.

The basic plot of the show is that humans created machines which then evolved into autonomous, intelligent beings called Cylons. Humans colonized twelve planets and after years of relative peace, the Cylons attacked the humans, destroying much of the human population of the colonies. The survivors, including those aboard a number of space ships, are now on the run from the Cylons, struggling to survive a war with a superior enemy.

One of the major changes from the miniseries to the TV show is in the look of the Cylons. In the miniseries, the Cylons were one of the cheesiest parts of the show, looking like robots made primarily of cardboard. In the new show, some of the Cylons look like machines but now they are computer-generated and sophisticated. But the most interesting change comes from the fact that Cylons can look and act just like humans. They bleed and sweat and some of them are even programmed to think that they are human, leading to what appear to be emotional responses such as love. Human-looking cylons allow the writers to raise questions about civil rights and justice and faith.

For example, season one of the show, which aired in 2004 and 2005, raised issues about terrorism and torture and justice at a time when the Abu Ghraib scandal was fresh in the news. The humans on the ship called Galactica discover a human-looking Cylon in their midst. Their instinct is to kill the Cylon by putting it into space (because human-looking Cylons breathe oxygen just as humans do) but the Cylon claims that there are several bombs planted throughout the fleet, scheduled to go off in a short amount of time. Sensing an opportunity to prevent these bomb attacks, the military commander sends the best human pilot, Starbuck, to question the Cylon (ok–so the plots are always completely logical). The Cylon messes with Starbuck’s head, telling her lies containing just enough truth to make her wonder what’s true and what isn’t. But he won’t tell her where the bombs are. Starbuck notices that the Cylon sweats and reasons that if he sweats, he must feel fear and pain. So she and her colleagues begin to torture the Cylon.

One of the most thought-provoking exchanges during this torture comes when Starbuck tells the Cylon that she recognizes the dilemma he is in. He wants to be human because being human is better than being a machine. But while he is being tortured, every instinct must be telling him to turn off his pain software. But if he turns it off, he won’t be human anymore because the defining characteristic of being human is the capacity to feel pain. I don’t know if I think that’s true or not but the conversation reminded me of research in machine learning that postulates that in order to really learn about the world, a robot must have a body.

The importance of embodiment to learning comes from the observation that human knowledge, especially that most basic knowledge that makes up our “common sense”, is gained through via perception, through the interaction of our bodies with the physical world. Not all AI researchers believe embodiment is necessary for learning. Cyc is probably the most famous example of an attempt to codify all of human knowledge without the use of embodied machines. The project was started in 1984 and has yet to be completed because of the difficulty of articulating all human knowledge. Imagine trying to put all human knowledge into a computer by writing statements such as “Bill Clinton was a President”, “All trees are plants” and “Abraham Lincoln is dead.” Each night, after spending the day coding statements like this, the researchers run some software (called an inference engine) which allows the computer to infer new statements about the world. Each mornin, the researchers look at what the computer has inferred. The inference process is somewhat flawed and the researchers find themselves having to correct some of the computer’s logic, encoding such bizarre facts as “If a person is dead, her left foot is also dead.” Because of the difficulty of encoding these kind of facts, many researchers now believe that embodiment and direct experience of the world is a more efficient way to teach a machine about common sense knowledge. So perhaps feeling pain is a necessary requirement for being human.

The same episode that contains this interesting conversation about the nature of humanity also contains a conversation about the purpose and effectiveness of torture. After many hours of torturing the Cylon, Starbuck and her colleagues are visited by the President of the colonies who asks Starbuck whether she knows where the bombs are yet. When Starbuck says no, the President asks why she has been torturing this man for eighteen hours, what makes her think she will get him to talk. Starbuck replies that the Cylon is not a man which she seems to think justifies the torture. The President orders that the torture be stopped since it has clearly not been effective. The President later shows that this is not a sentimental choice, one that has been made because she is soft on the Cylons. After getting the information she needs from the Cylon, she orders that he be placed in the airlock and sucked out into space so that he will no longer pose a threat. The implication is that she ordered that the torture be stopped so that the humans would remain human, that the torture was damaging to the torturers and their humanity.

Themes of faith and love and treatment of outsiders and many other of the most interesting, controversial debates in our society run throughout this series. I agree with Diane Winston, who said on Speaking of Faith that shows like Battlestar Galactica represent the great literature of our time, that people will come back to shows like this over and over, just as they read great books over and over.

{June 28, 2009} The Decision Engine

I’ve seen a couple of commercials on TV for Microsoft’s newest product, Bing. Microsoft claims that Bing is a “decision engine.” What exactly is a “decision engine”? According to a press release from Microsoft, a decision engine “goes beyond search to help customers deal with information overload.” In other words, information is no longer power. Products like Google (Microsoft’s competitor) present too much information in response to searches and humans now need help (more help than Google can give) to be able to make sense of it all. And Microsoft steps in with Bing.

The traditional search engine does a good job of helping people find information, according to Microsoft’s press release, but the explosion of information means that people have difficulty actually using that information to make informed decisions. So Bing will actually help us make decisions! That seems like a bold claim to me especially since search engine optimization is typically incremental rather than revolutionary. Is Bing as revolutionary as the phrase “decision engine” implies? It’s difficult to say at this point but even Microsoft’s own promotional materials make me doubt it.

According to the press release, Microsoft did some research about the kinds of things that people search for and found that lots of people are interested in four areas when they search the web: “making a purchase decision, planning a trip, researching a health condition or finding a local business.” Ok, so there’s the first way that Bing is not really a “decision engine.” The tool will be optimized to deal with searches that are related to these four areas and the press release makes no mention of whether the tool will help me make other kinds of decisions.

The optimization strategy for dealing with these four areas also doesn’t seem particularly revolutionary to me. The press release gives a bit of detail about the focus of the strategy. In particular, Bing provides “great search results”, an “organized search experience”, and it simplifies tasks and provides insights. What do these things mean?

“Great search results” simply means that Microsoft’s research found that only 25% of searches provide information that satisfies the searcher. So in creating Bing, they tried to increase this percentage. No details about how they’ve done this, however. But don’t all search engine manufacturers try to provide results that are as relevant as possible? So this is not a revolutionary strategy.

Microsoft also did some research and found that people want the results of their searching to be organized. So they added some organizational features to Bing. These features include “Explore Pane, a dynamically relevant set of navigation and search tools on the left side of the page; Web Groups, which groups results in intuitive ways both on the Explore Pane and in the actual results; and Related Searches and Quick Tabs, which is essentially a table of contents for different categories of search results.” When Microsoft uses the words “relevant” and “intuitive”, I am skeptical. Remember “Clippy”, the paper clip cartoon character that was supposed to help us when we used Office? Or how about the fact that Microsoft claims that they changed the menu structure in the Office suite for Vista so that the menus would be more “intuitive”? There are too many examples that show that what Microsoft considers “relevant” and “intuitive” doesn’t match what most people consider “relevant” and “intuitive”. So this statement from the press release doesn’t convince me that the claims that Bing is a “decision engine” is anything more than hype.

Finally, Microsoft claims that they use the strategy of simplifying tasks and providing insight. Again, most search engine manufacturers probably want to do this so the strategy itself is probably not revolutionary. But the fact that Bing focuses only on four primary areas of searching might mean that the tool can be optimized to simplify tasks and provide insights into these four types of searches.

I haven’t yet used Bing. The only way to know whether it really is a “decision engine” that will revolutionize the way we use the information provided on the Web is to use the tool. Microsoft has had a search engine tool for a long time (quick–do you know what it’s called?). It was called Live Search before it was upgraded and renamed to Bing. But the fact that you probably didn’t know that name is an indication that the old tool was probably not very good, certainly not better than Google. Given Microsoft’s record with upgrades, I feel pretty sure that calling Bing a “decision engine” is nothing more than hype.

{May 22, 2009} NeMLA 2010

There have been quite a few stories that have captured my attention in the nearly six month break that I’ve taken from writing entries in this blog. I will be sharing several of those stories in the next few days. In the meantime, I recently had a panel proposal accepted for the Northeast Modern Language Association conference that will be held in Montreal in April 2010. Here’s the call for papers for my panel:

Playing Web 2.0: Intertextuality, Narrative and Identity in New Media

41st Anniversary Convention, Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)

April 7-11, 2010

Montreal, Quebec – Hilton Bonaventure

A recent Facebook spoof of Hamlet by Sarah Schmelling illustrates the current proliferation of experiments in narrative form and intertextuality found in new media. Web 2.0 tools, such as wikis, blogs and social networking sites, allow the average web user to actively participate in online life. Given our societal bent toward postmodernism, it is not surprising that much of this online participation is characterized by a proclivity to challenge and play with traditional conventions. This panel will examine play, defined in the broadest sense by Salen and Zimmerman as “free movement within a more rigid structure”, using Web 2.0 tools and new media. Some questions of interest to the panel include: Are there particular attributes of new media technologies that encourage play? How is new media play different from/similar to play found elsewhere? What impact do new media technologies have on our notions of play? What are the motivations of those who engage in play via new media technologies? Some example topics for the panel include: experimentation with new literary forms using social networking conventions (such as the 140-character status update); creation of online identities using text-based tools such as blogs; development of fictional worlds by fans of popular culture narratives using wikis and blogging tools; the use of casual online games to influence attitudes and behaviors concerning issues of social importance.

Submit 250-word abstracts to cleblanc@plymouth.edu.

Deadline: September 30, 2009

Please include with your abstract:

Name and Affiliation

Email address

Postal address

Telephone number

A/V requirements (if any; $10 handling fee)

The 41^st Annual Convention will feature approximately 350 sessions, as well as dynamic speakers and cultural events. Details and the complete Call for Papers for the 2010 Convention will be posted in June: http://nemla.org/.

Interested participants may submit abstracts to more than one NeMLA session; however panelists can only present one paper (panel or seminar). Convention participants may present a paper at a panel and also present at a creative session or participate in a roundtable.

Travel to Canada now requires a passport for U.S. citizens. Please get your passport application in early.

{December 31, 2008} Failed Predictions

Predicting the future is a notoriously difficult endeavor and yet there is never a shortage of people willing to play the game, especially at the end of a year.

Many of the predictions for 2009 seem to involve world politics. For example, over at Psychic World, Craig and Jane Hamilton-Parker predict that an assassination attempt on Barack Obama will occur in 2009. They posted this prediction on October 9, 2008 and then updated the entry on October 27, 2008 (in red font, just so we know that it’s an important update). The update tells us (and I can almost hear the breathlessness with which this important information is stated) that this prediction already came true! Apparently, the vague assassination “plot” by two neo-Nazis thwarted by the ATF in October constitutes an assassination “attempt”. The fact that these men did not actually begin to implement the plot, which involved first shooting over 100 black people in Tennessee and following that spree up with the assassination of then-Senator Obama, doesn’t matter to the psychics who made this prediction. It still counts as a success for their ability to predict the future. An even bigger issue for me is the fact that they predicted the assassination attempt would take place in 2009. Clearly, this plot was discovered in 2008. The psychics never discuss how useful it is for a prediction to be that far off in its timing and details.

As amusing as I find the predictions of psychics who claim to be able to “foresee” the future, the predictions that I’m most interested in are the ones made by those who examine trends and then predict where those trends will take us. People who make these kinds of predictions are called “futurists” or “futurologists” and, unlike psychics, claim no mysticism in coming to their predictions. Instead, according to Wikipedia, futurologists study “yesterday’s and today’s changes, and aggregating and analyzing both lay and professional strategies, and opinions with respect to tomorrow. It includes analyzing the sources, patterns, and causes of change and stability in the attempt to develop foresight and to map possible futures.” Although futurologists make predictions about many different fields, I’m particularly interested in the area of technology, especially because technological change is very rapid and vast. I think technology shows despite their claims to scientific methodologies, the predictions of futurologists are typically as wrong as the predictions made by those claiming to have a mystical insight into the future.

The technological futurologist that has gotten the most attention in the US in recent years is Ray Kurzweil, the author of a number of books that have captured the popular imagination. Kurzweil is a computer scientist from a time when computer scientists were rare. When he was just a teenager, long before computers were widespread and common, he created computer software that wrote impressive musical compostions using the patterns it discovered analyzing great masterworks. He also developed the first optical character recognition software which led to his invention, in 1976, of The Reading Machine, which read written text out loud for blind people. Since that time, he’s invented musical synthesizers, speech recognition devices, computer technology for use in education, and a whole host of other useful tools. He’s obviously a smart, creative guy who knows a lot about technology and how to use it to benefit humans. Kurzweil’s faith in technology is so great that he considers himself to be a transhumanist, advocating the use of technology to “overcome what it regards as undesirable and unnecessary aspects of the human condition, such as disability, suffering, disease, aging, and involuntary death,” according to Wikipedia. It is in this area that many of his predictions fail.

In his 1999 book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, about the impact of artifcial intelligence on human consciousness, Ray Kurzweil made a number of predictions about technology at the end of 2009, 2019, 2029, and 2099. Since we are just about to begin the year 2009, I thought it might be interesting to consider how likely it is that Kurzweil’s predictions can come true in the next year. Chapter 9 of the book, which makes predictions for 2009, can be read online here.

The chapter is divided into sections called The Computer Itself, Education, Disabilities, Communication, Business and Economics, Politics and Society, The Arts, Warfare, Health and Medicine, and Philosophy. Although some of Kurzweil’s predictions have indeed come to be reality, the vast majority of them are still far off into the future. In fact, some involve technological tangents that seemed interesting in 1999 but that our society has chosen not to pursue.

Kurzweil predicted that the computer itself would be much more ubiquitous than it actually is and that they would be smaller than they actually are. Because computers are so ubiquitous and small today, it’s difficult to imagine how someone might have overestimated these trends just ten years ago. But that’s the problem with Kurzweil. He is such a technology evangelist that he tends to go too far. In the case of the computer itself, he predicted that the average person would have a dozen computers on and around her body which would communicate with each other using a wireless body local area network (LAN). These computers would monitor bodily functions and provide automated identity verification for financial transactions and for entry into secure areas. The technology he describes is nearly available now in the form of radio frequency identification (RFID) chips which are common in some warehouses and which are now part of every US passport. Most of these RFID chips are passive devices, however, which means that they can only be read by an external device and do not provide computing power themselves. In addition, there has been something of an uproar over the increased use of these chips. For example, I recently received a new ATM/credit card from my bank that had an RFID chip embedded in it to make using the card easier. I would no longer need to swipe the card to use it. Instead, I could simply tap it against any reader. But because it doesn’t have to be swiped, anyone who got close enough to me with a reader could read the chip. I didn’t see the advantage of having such a chip in my credit card and saw many disadvantages and so I returned it, making a special request to get a card without the chip. I suspect there are others out there who have similar concerns. Kurzweil did predict that privacy issues would be a concern in 2009 but I’ll talk about that later.

Some of the other things about the computer itself that Kurzweil got seriously wrong involve the way in which we interact with our computers. He predicted that most text would be created using continuous speech recognition software–in other words, we would speak to our computers and they would transcribe our speech into text. This is clearly not going to become the norm in the next year and I’m not sure we would want it to become the norm. As I sit typing this blog entry, for example, I have the television on (because multi-tasking is the prevalent way of interacting with the world–something that Kurzweil does not mention) and Evelyn is sitting next to me interacting with her own computer. Neither of us would want the other to be talking to her computer at this moment. This might be an example of a place where a cool technology would actually be an obstacle to the way most users interact with their computers. But Kurzweil did not stop there. He also predicted that we would wear glasses that allowed us to see the regular visual world in front of us but with a virtual world superimposed on it using tiny lasers. Such glasses do exist but they are novelties, used only in experimental situations. And I think most people would find such a superimposition to be a distraction. Until some benefit can be shown for this technology and how it allows us to interact with the world, I think it will remain a novelty.

Another area where Kurzweil predictions have not come to fruition (yet) is the area of disability. It is in this area that Kurzweil betrays his transhuman biases. He predicted that by the end of 2009, disabilities such as blindness and deafness could be dealt with using computing technologies to the extent that such disabilities are no longer considered handicaps but are instead mere inconveniences. Although significant progress has been made in the area of augmenting such situations using computing technologies, we are nowhere close to where Kurzweil predicted we would be. Kurzweil’s zeal in the advancement of technology once again led him to overestimate the progress that we would be able to make in ten years. The history of technology is filled with such zeal and overestimation.

I won’t detail every area that Kurzweil gets things wrong but I do want to touch on the area of politics and society. The Obama campaign rode its unprecedented use of technology to a presidential victory but in ways that were not predicted by Kurzweil. Kurzweil predicted that privacy issues would be a primary political issue and although there are groups of people who are very concerned with privacy in our society today (both because of technical issues and because of political issues involved with the War on Terror), I don’t think too many people would say that privacy is a primary political issue in our society, although I, for one, wish it was a bigger issue for most people.

I’m curious to see which of Kurzweil’s predictions do eventually come to pass. My guess is that anyone who pays close attention to technological issues could attain the same level of accuracy that he does. At least he doesn’t claim to have some mystical connection to what the future will bring.

{September 7, 2008} We ARE Telling Stories

As I suggested in a previous post I don’t understand why FaceBook calls each status update a story. I said that if we were to consider each update a plot point in a longer story, then I could understand the use of the word story. Clive Thompson, in a New York Times article, explains that part of the reason these status updates (no matter how banal they might seem individually) are compelling is precisely because taken together, they tell us a story of our friends’ daily lives that we wouldn’t otherwise have. It’s a fascinating article. Thanks to Liz for pointing it out to me.

I can now be found on Twitter. I look forward to reading 140-character installments of your life story there.

{August 10, 2008} FaceBook Revisited

In honor of the recent release of the remake of Brideshead Revisited, I thought it might be interesting to revisit FaceBook. I’ve been using FaceBook for nearly a month now and my feelings about it have evolved just as Charles Ryder’s feelings about Brideshead evolved. (Don’t think too much about the analogy between Brideshead and FaceBook–it doesn’t really fit very well.)

You may recall that my initial reactions to FaceBook were all about freaking out. I was especially overwhelmed by the amount of information that FaceBook was sending me via email. I knew that I had the option to turn some of those emails off but as a new user, I was unsure about which ones it made sense to turn off. I ended up turning them all off. So I no longer receive any notifications about FaceBook in my email inbox. Instead, I just receive the notifications of various updates within FaceBook itself. I guess as a new user I had been worried about missing something but I realized that I wouldn’t miss anything if I got notified within FaceBook. Since I visit FaceBook less often than I check my email, my notification of FaceBook happenings is not as immediate as if I were getting email updates. But I don’t want immediate notification of what’s going on in FaceBook. Instead, I want to be able to control when I receive those notifications. In other words, I want to receive them when I’m interested in knowing what’s going on in FaceBook. That is, I want to know what’s happening in FaceBook when I visit FaceBook! Perfect.

Although I do visit FaceBook less often than I check my email, I have been visiting FaceBook several times per week. This surprises me because my initial reaction to the social environment was not a particularly positive one. But now that I am not being overwhelmed by information from FaceBook, I have mostly enjoyed using it. In fact, I find it to be somewhat addicting. I’ve been thinking a lot about why and although I don’t have any answers about that question, I do have some observations.

I currently have 43 “friends” on FaceBook. Of these, there are probably 20 who are quite active, posting something or interacting with me several times a week. I am most interested in the activities and communications of about 8 of these 20 active friends. I think it’s because of these 8 that I visit FaceBook as often as I do. What do these people have in common? These are all people that I actually am good friends with in real life or that I could imagine being good friends with if our real life circumstances were to change. Even though I still find the use of the word “friend” problematic in FaceBook, the way we understand the word in real life is similar to the way it actually plays out in my use of FaceBook.

One of the most interesting aspects of FaceBook so far has been the way in which I “communicate” with most of my friends. Very little of our interaction is directly targeted at each other. That is, most of my friends do not post communications that are meant for me in particular. Instead, they update some part of their FaceBook profile (such as their status) to tell all of their friends what they are currently doing. I then read that information and find it interesting because I then know a little bit more about their daily lives. It’s a way of touching base that would not happen without FaceBook and as a result, we get to know each other a little bit better. And because I already like them in real life, I want to get to know them a little bit better. In other words, the immediacy (the focus on “now”) of FaceBook, which felt so problematic when I first joined, is actually something I enjoy and look forward to. What’s different between when I first joined and now that makes me enjoy the immediacy? I think the main difference is that I have now gotten my FaceBook life “caught up” with my real life. What do I mean by “caught up”?

The rhetoric of FaceBook assumes that life begins when you join the social network. So you are “now” friends with someone you’ve known for a long time simply because FaceBook “now” knows about that relationship. Each time you add some detail about your life to FaceBook, the rhetoric reminds you that your life has “now” begun, that everything before either didn’t exist or was somehow not quite “real”. The feeling that your FaceBook life is more “real” than your BFB (Before FaceBook) life is disconcerting. But once you get the details in to your profile, FaceBook has “caught up” to your actual life and so the things that you do in FaceBook really are happening “now”. So for me, the rhetoric no longer feels like a mismatch with my “reality”. Now that my FaceBook life is more closely aligned with my real life, I appreciate the “nowness” of FaceBook. The “nowness” means I’m learning current tidbits about these friends of mine.

Although most of my friends and I interact in this indirect manner, reading each other’s general updates, there is one friend with whom I have had an ongoing direct conversation. This friend is an ex-partner of mine with whom I have maintained inconsistent email contact for the past 15+ years (since our break-up). Now that we are both on FaceBook, we have been using its messaging system to engage in a long, intimate conversation. The messaging system is similar to email but because it is embedded in FaceBook, I also get to see the frequent (or infrequent, depending on the friend) updates that my friends make to their profiles. And so when a friend posts a new photo or a link she finds interesting, I can see those things which contextualizes our FaceBook messages in a way that isn’t easily accomplished via email. So far, this long conversation with my ex has been the most surprising aspect of FaceBook for me. Until I experienced how different this kind of direct contextualized communication via FaceBook is compared to regular email, I wouldn’t have believed that it would matter so much. The other interesting thing about this aspect of FaceBook is that although I’ve enjoyed our online communication, I am not tempted to meet in real life for a face-to-face conversation about the break-up or about our current lives (both of which are topics in our online conversation). FaceBook provides a useful buffer, or maybe it’s a cover, without which I’m not sure I would be comfortable enough to keep the conversation going.

Another thing that I’ve been thinking about is why FaceBook has captured my attention in a way that the other social networking environments I’ve joined (MySpace and LinkedIn, for example) have not. My nephew is on MySpace and so I’ve spent some time communicating with him there. But I find these other environments far less compelling than FaceBook. One reason, I’m sure, is because most of my friends, the ones I’m interested in communicating with, are using FaceBook rather than these other environments. But I think the main reason is that FaceBook makes it extraordinarily easy to find and communicate with people you know. When I joined FaceBook, it immediately suggested some people that I might know. Once I was friends with some of those people, it used their friends to suggest other people I might know. In contrast, on MySpace, I had to think about who I might know there, coming up with their names out of the blue. In addition, when I tried to find my nephew on MySpace, I had to weed through several pages of people with the same name, despite the fact that his friends are mostly from Goffstown NH (where he lives) and the fact that I went to Goffstown High School. It seems like it would be a simple matter to do some sort of matching to determine which Kyle LeBlanc I might be interested in connecting with. This is actually somewhat of a problem in FaceBook as well although my nephew was at least on the first page of many pages of Kyle LeBlancs. He should, I think, have been the first Kyle LeBlanc shown to me in both MySpace and FaceBook.

I also think it’s easier to communicate with your friends in a way that feels most comfortable and appropriate on FaceBook than it is on the other social networks. For example, my nephew and I were both on MySpace at the same time last night. I wanted to chat with him but in order to do so, I had to install a separate application (MySpace IM with Skype). On the other hand, the chat facility is built into the basic FaceBook interface so there’s no extra installation required. I appreciate that extra ease of use in FaceBook.

I still think there are some interesting problems with FaceBook but overall, I have been happy with my experience there. Time will tell whether it’s the newness of the tool that keeps me going back or whether it will become something I will wonder how I could have ever lived without.

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