It was probably heard Merlin Mann who said that you should never apologize on your blog for not having updated your blog.
I love ol’ hotdogsladies, but I think we do owe a bit of an explanation.
If you’re not already following Datachondria on Twitter, you can do so here. And if you want to get really personal with us datachondrians, you can do that too.
Now, the excuses:
I am a happy new daddy who just started a new job.
Ryan, daddy of a toddler, has more going on at work than I care to consider without a drink in me
We’re not sure about Foursquare; who’s it for and why would they use it?
We’ve tried (and failed at) conducting our weekly meeting on Google Wave
I suspect my family still resents me pushing them to Twitter for updates on the birth of The Boy
We’re just about ready to post our first podcast.
That’s to say nothing at all of electronic reading, parenting and mobile apps, job transitioning with social media, digital guidance to analog pleasures, and however serendipity leads us to those moments of palpable transition that we’ll forever try to capture and share with you.
Itzbeen 10 days since I last slept 3 consecutive hours
Apologies to readers and fellow Datachondrians for my lack of posts last month. I have a great excuse.
Over on my wife’s blog you’ll find a review of Itzbeen, a gadget that over the last 10 days has become vital to our sanity.
It’s basically four non-lapping mm:hh stopwatches kluged together with a backlight & nightlight. There’s a L/R breastfeeding switch at the bottom that’s not connected to anything electronic, basically a binary abacus. That feature doesn’t get used because wifey’s got a solution she likes better. The display is as it appears. There’s no counter. You’re not accumulating hours slept or counting poops: you’re just gauging the chronological distance from now back to the last occurrence of event X.
Change a diaper: punch the diaper button to reset that clock. Feeding: punch the bottle. Etc. The wildcard “*” button worked well for timing doses of post c-section pain meds.
Couldn’t be simpler. Lost the manual minutes after unboxing.
When you’re sleep-deprived and not yet attuned to the signs your baby’s giving you for his various needs (there aren’t many, but what baby wants he wants very much and very soon) you have a hard time remembering much of anything, let alone when the last time was that you successfully satisfied any of your offspring’s needs. These needs are steadily recurrent, which is nice, but then not remembering the most recent time you guessed right means you also don’t know which need is likely the next one due for serving.
On top of that, if you’re stuck in a hospital you’re going to be talking to a lot of nurses just after your baby’s born and they’re going to want to know things like the last time he ate and how long he’s been wearing that diaper and even though that’s an unreasonable type of question to ask someone in your state you’re going to feel terrible if you don’t know.
Before I had a kid I could estimate the last time something happened reasonably well. If there was a technique to it, it went something like this: first I’d eliminate a third of the day because nothing could have happened while I was sleeping, then depending on what kind of thing you’re asking about I could narrow it down to a likely span of only a few hours.
When did you check the mail?
About 10. (It was before lunch but late enough that there would have been mail to take in.)
Brilliant. Chronological estimation by triangulation. That I ever had this skill now amazes me. And I’m in awe of you who now possess it.
This little device’s greatest value is the confidence it gives a new parent. When you’re sleeping 2 hours at a time all over the clock and eating whenever you’re hungry and able you literally lose your gut feel for time. And you can’t rely on higher faculties while you’re not getting enough sleep. But even a lab rat can punch a button to mark an event. With this thing you’re suddenly the sleep-deprived halfwit who knows to a minute’s precisionhow long baby’s been sleeping.
Yes, there’s an app for that. But the thing with babies is, usually there are at least 2 people who have to look after them. So one person gives up their main communications device so that diaper changes and feedings can be tracked? Does it sync with both of your phones, regardless of make? What if it’s docked for charging? What if you need to use the phone? What if it gets peed on?
Sometimes you really do want a device to do just one thing very simply and very well so you can free your mind to do other things. I’ll have a more properly Datachondrian post later on how we used Twitter to keep all interested parties up to date from the first labour pains. For now I wanted to give praise to this single-purpose device and single-purpose devices in general — scales, measuring cups, watches — that yield only the data you want exactly how you want it and in a way you can understand even when your capacity for understanding is stretched to its limit.
post@posterous.com would be a perfect user experience if it weren’t for the layers of complexity we’ve grown accustomed to and are frustrated in trying to locate in it.
When Mark said to me the other day that Posterous’ unique take on the sign-up process was that there wasn’t one, I thought he was being glib for the sake of argument. Apparently not. And I didn’t dream that that non-existent process was carried through the entire user experience.
One email and you’re blogging. Another email and you’re still blogging. Carry on forever if you like and never set a password or edit a profile.
When has the link between intention and action in written communication for public consumption ever been this direct? Even Luther had to let the ink dry before leaving his house with a hammer and nail.
Though I’m still not sure what I’ll do with it, I’m giving it a go (Posterous, not Lutheranism — I remain a staunch former-Catholic). I’ve never had the motivation to set up a blog and I can take no technical credit for administering the one you’re reading. I’m not saying it ever looked exactly difficult to sign up for a WordPress or Blogger account, but it was always more trouble than I was willing to take.
It’s not unlike the difference between very cheap and free and I wonder where else we’re going to see invisible inconveniences like sign-ups rendered visible by their abolition.
If social networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter were ever digital dorm parties, those days are long over. Everyone who knows you — your mom, your boss, the guy you were hoping would call, that pain-in-the-ass client — knows about Facebook, Twitter, and the next big thing. And when they find you on one of them they’ll expect that they’ve found the you that they know, and you’ll expect the same from them. But that’s not who you or they really are, is it?
At any given moment we perceive our social circle to be divided into segments. What divides them is usually a combination of circumstances largely beyond our control, but for the most part the divisions are organic in nature and not rigid. Who’s my colleague? Who’s my friend? Who’s family? While Facebook presents the language of social segmentation in checkboxes, implying that every 1-1 human relationship can be captured in a word, in normal practice the language of relationships and social segmentation is actually highly elastic, depending on who’s asking how I know so-and-so.
Social networking offers the illusion of social segment control. Facebook lets you give varying levels of access to different contacts and Twitter lets you hide from would-be followers while letting you brush off the ones you wish you hadn’t picked up. These features have in common the basic function of filtering. The trouble is, you only filter when you’ve got something to say that you’d rather not everyone heard. Shielding someone entirely from certain types of information hardly fits the bill as a means to acting naturally before each member of your social circle in the manner closest to your nature as they know it. It might not be your aim to make your mom think you have no social life, but that’s a typical effect of contact filtering.
One idea I’m hearing brought up with increasing frequency is to employ multiple accounts, one for each social segment (usually dividing work from family from friends). I don’t think I’ve seen anyone actually do it, but then if it were done well I wouldn’t perceive it, would I?
Let’s say I were to set up multiple Facebook/Twitter accounts for each of my social segments, letting alone for now the inevitable overlap of friends who are also coworkers and cousins I invite to parties, as well as the possibility that some of my contacts are are themselves running multiple accounts for each of their social segments, including me on some but not others.
Even if I managed to sort out each of the people in my life into the appropriate bucket, how would I decide which of my identities to speak through at any given moment? That is, if each account is a filter to the world, how can I effectively filter the data of my life into the appropriate account? Is a work-safe life event also parent-safe? How can I spin one event so everyone can hear about it in the most appropriate way?
Looks to me like a mug’s game. At some point I’m going to say something through one identity that I probably should have said through another, thereby degrading the integrity of each. Or everything I say is going to run together, leading to a situation indistinguishable from the one that the creation of multiple identities was supposed to depart from, ie. “real life.”
If anyone is successfully employing multiple accounts to deal with multiple social segments, I bet they’re having a hard time being anywhere near as interesting there as they are in person.
Social networking doesn’t facilitate the creation of different identities, or the rigid differentiation between segments of one’s social circle. You don’t actually have multiple faces. You never really did.
These platforms just let each segment hear what you’re saying to the others, and in turn show you what goes on when people step out of your life to get on with their own.
Remember how it felt to run into your teacher at the mall on summer vacation? I think we’re going to start getting used to that feeling.
By now you’ve probably seen this video. If not, I think it’s worth the 5 minutes. Go ahead.
Cute, isn’t it? And given the 11M views so far it seems that’s a majority opinion.
Eleven million views. At a running time of just over 5 minutes, that’s about 100 years of human attention dedicated so far to this video in the week or so that it’s been on YouTube.
Was that the plan? I think it sort of was.
When you share a video on YouTube, you’re sharing it with 3 groups of people. In ascending order of size (and decreasing order of social proximity to you in the context of the video) these groups consist of:
people you know who were there
people you know who weren’t there
people you don’t know who weren’t there
At this point, views of this video by groups 1 & 2 combined as a % of the total are probably small enough to be swallowed by a rounding error.
From the time it started showing up in linkblogs over the weekend it belonged to group #3. It’s us who’ve seen to it that this video was played for a century over a matter of days.
That happened because this video was made for us to watch. We didn’t need to be there to get it. The wedding procession is a story we all know. This one’s amusing because of the thousands of videos of other wedding processions that aren’t amusing at all. Those other videos were made for group #1 alone (and a small subset of it at that). We don’t want to watch these videos but invariably we occasionally do, knowing our attention is being wasted.
If 99% of everything is crap, then the emergence of a new category of crap — in this case the YouTube wedding procession video – comes with an opportunity for those with the right kind of talent to seize attention on a scale previously unimaginable.
So let’s enjoy the 1% and be grateful for the tools and channels that let the tiny amusing minority cut through the crap like never before.
Yes, most social media is crap. But some of it is the Best. Crap. Ever.
Sorry -- I thought you were going to say something
I more or less stopped writing fiction and poetry after grad school. It was probably a combination of factors that put me off it in the end — among them my lack of output in the absence of deadlines and my complete ignorance of the basic mechanics of narrative — but especially effective was the indifference of literary magazines to the work I sent them.
Sometime between now and when I gave up on becoming a writer, the definition of the word got blurry.
Writing used to be a job that writers got paid to do by institutions such as book publishers and newspapers. Being a writer wasn’t about writing per se; it was about being published. And it was my failure to be published that convinced me that I wasn’t really a writer.
Today it’s often sufficient for a writer to be able to say that he writes and is read. “Writers write” was once the refrain of creative writing professors instilling in their students the value of constant practice in the pursuit of craft. Now it’s literally true.
As newspapers die away, it’s going to be increasingly important for writers to establish credibility based not on the publications they’ve written for but on the quality of their thought. Writers will find themselves associated with certain topics because they have something to say, not because they’ve been paid to say something.
By way of blogging, we’ve all been granted universal access to the upside of self-publishing without the garage full of butt-ugly books.
What got me thinking about this was a book coming out soon. It’s about a technology company whose devices have attained near-ubiquity in the last half-decade or so. It’s the first book-length study of this company from a major publisher and I’m eager to read it, so last week I looked up the author to see what else he’d written and what he was about as a writer. I wanted to know if the book was going to read like Fast Company or The Financial Post.
I was so disappointed with the results I decided that I needed to write this post, and that it would be unkind to disclose either his name or the title or subject of his book.
Here’s what I found:
The author’s blog goes back less than 2 years and hasn’t been updated for 2 months. Did I mention he’s supposed to have written about a technology company? And that his book is out soon?
The blog contains little more than abridged press releases from the company he’s written about. No idea what he thinks about the company’s direction or their latest offerings.
Even though he appears to have written his own Wikipedia page, there’s nothing in his bibliography suggesting he’s the right guy to be writing this book.
Where’s the passion? The obsession? Where’s the writing? Where is a reason for anyone to pay $30 for a hardcover book written by him on a subject to which he appears to be less familiar than his potential readers?
On the area of an author’s purported expertise (what is authorship of a book but a declaration of authority?) what are we, the market of his potential readers, to make of his silence?
Time for a recap of sorts as we hit our 50th post. We’ve written a great deal about books, but also about other media from film and album cover art right through to the humble business card. With more than six months under the bridge, a number of themes have emerged.
Human relationships in the 20th century were, in delicate and subtle ways, managed in part by the values we grafted onto objects produced and distributed by traditional — industrial — processes. These personal metadata were ’stowaways’. We didn’t necessarily mean to tell people about ourselves by reading Infinite Jest on the subway — but glances were stolen and judgments were made nonetheless.
These communications were essential to enable some basic interactions. Flirting. Dating. Partying. Business networking. With these incidental transmission channels closing down as we consume content in new ways, we’re going to have to renegotiate, collectively, experimentally, how we communicate. Cultural objects — business cards, book covers, shared music experiences — no longer function in the same way. What does it mean for our relationships? Will we, now, be bowling together — or bowling aloner?
And so we’ve been thinking and writing about the conversations we are now beginning to have — about how to converse.
We’ve also made at least two Lebowski references. This seems shockingly low. We promise to redress over the next 50 posts. Thanks for sticking with us.
I’ve written elsewhere of my love for the Nike+ and its exemplary use of technology as a bridge between a solitary leisure pursuit and the support offered by a network.
But I find — as I increase my workout times — that there are some significant feature gaps. While I like the ‘powersong’ feature to deliver a boost when I find myself flagging, it doesn’t quite take it to the next step. For example, if I want to change music to something more appropriate to a warm-up or a warm-down, I have to pause the workout and change the playlist.
But these things have a fairly predictable place in my routine. It should be possible for the technology to anticipate them. Just like bookclubs (real or virtual) will set landmarks for progress, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to set playlist markers. Get me to x bpm after y minutes, keep me there for z minutes, then give me a warmdown. These landmarks could be used to manage a random selection of music within nonetheless predetermined parameters.
This kind of landmarking could be helpful in all kinds of situations — workouts, parties, coitus.
But that’s really only the first step. I’d ideally want the ability to tailor my listening dynamically to my pace, location, mood, heartrate, or any number of other parameters which would increase its utility. Music at parties could change depending on the volume of the conversation, the number of participants, and the amount of alcohol thus far consumed. Think of the public safety implications.
The same is true of reading — I’m more inclined to read business books and articles on the way to work, but a novel or entertainment news on the way home (particularly on Fridays). An electronic reading device should be able to push content to me on the basis of my habits, mood, place, location, activities. In this context, having to remember to pick up a different magazine or different section of a newspaper seems just ridiculously inefficient.
In short, we’re talking about having our devices present content to us on the basis of mood, not just an aggregated taste history, or the ratings we have assigned to things.
Suppose that our interfaces could isolate trends in your reading, listening, or leisure pursuits. Suppose that iTunes Genuis or Amazon’s recommendations algorithm could give you some options:
It looks like you’ve been listening to a lot of indie guitar noise merchants recently. Would you like these kinds of recommendations to be weighted higher in your results?
You’ve rather gone off James Patterson of late. Even though you own his entire published output, would you like recommendations based on this to be fact to be downplayed?
Better yet — imagine that these engines could talk to one another.
You recently started reading a novel by Cormac McCarthy. You usually read those with folk-inflected ambient music. Perhaps you’d like to try Inland by Mark Templeton to accompany this one?
* Note: not all of these scenarios are based on personal experience.
These are, of course, exactly the kinds of things that happen in day-to-day conversations with friends. Which is why social networking stands to enrich our exposure to culture and events so significantly. In the meantime, how do shuffle and recommendations engines acquire more precise sensitivities to our desires? Landmarks, trending, and complements would be good first steps.
Why do we think we need a phone at all? It’s a vestige of a nineeenth century technology that we’ve been progressively adapting to do more and more things — take and store photos, browse the internet, store and play music. This is the anxiety that some feel about an eBook reader — where would it fit? Wouldn’t the ideal eBook reader be larger than the iPhone? When Apple’s iTablet Touch finally materializes, will it be yet another device to carry around?
How about this: the tablet lives in your bag. A bluetooth headset — working off voice navigation like an iPod shuffle — tends to your urgent phone and audio needs. If you need to do anything more complex — read a book, browse the internet, work — you reach for the tablet.
The phone is now a classic example of technology inertia. Why should anyone have to communicate by holding something next to their head?
It’s a fish/barrel/shotgun scenario, really, but a couple more examples of minor irritants that are troubling in the context of the customer expectations that digital distribution enables.
First up, this scenario became inevitable in the same moment that the “partial album” was brought into being:
It was probably heard Merlin Mann who said that you should never apologize on your blog for not having updated your blog.
