@jowyang I would be very, very glad if at least some “brands” had the wit to think of us as women first, mommies second (or third). in reply to jowyang#
@nonstick anything that distracts you is good – keep on tweeting if you want to. Oh, & breathe. I think I remember something about that in reply to nonstick#
RT @tehduh: The Geography of Jobs from 2004 to Present: http://bit.ly/113Y7a OK. – only area to gain a few jobs recently is Austin #
Silvio Berlusconi: Yes, yes, yes, prime minister – Times Online http://bit.ly/r5hvy – gaaaahhhhhhh – #
Un Posto al Sole “SxSWi Report – Social Media: Connecting with Customers” http://bit.ly/uv5pq#
@SteveEdiger I benefited from a probably-never-repeated unschooling experiment at Woodstock my senior – had a blast, learned about research in reply to SteveEdiger#
@owyang re. http://bit.ly/13REh6 “people prefer to differentiate the between the facets” – I disagree. multiple online personas collapsing #
financial advisor “can’t recommend” that I invest in India. Let’s just say I take the long view on global development. #
@hemantmehta ah, isn’t teenage angst fun? I have enough trouble with just one kid – can’t imagine dealing with a classroom full in reply to hemantmehta#
@Padmasree no place on the form to say that I violently dislike the term “murderboarding”. sounds like an expose of CIA tortures in reply to Padmasree#
@Padmasree …so I gave her a completely different title that I think gets more at the core idea. But I haven’t read the book. in reply to Padmasree#
@nilofer no place on the form to say that I violently dislike the term “murderboarding”. sounds like an expose of CIA tortures #
must wind down & try to sleep enough before 3:30 am wakeup, 6 am flight to film the Crossbow team in MPK, then Indian dinner – fun! #
landed sfo. Never doing this early flight again. Can’t sleep the night before. Resent the people going on to Hawaii #
@miglsd apparently he already knew the vocabulary, since you didn’t mention it. ; ) in reply to miglsd#
@JulieScardina when I was a kid in Bangkok gibbons were fairly common pets (for foreigners), with mixed results. We preferred a python. in reply to JulieScardina#
@AmberCadabra sometimes what looks like arrogance is a culture difference. It’s too easy to have a gut reaction for the wrong reasons in reply to AmberCadabra#
@avinashkaushik yes, but there were other ways to be online much earlier. I was doing CompuServe chat in 1982, and DARPANET is even older in reply to avinashkaushik#
RT @dfugate: “it was hard to keep a straight face about “TACOs”…”JUGs” will indeed be the end of …” Someone has a sly sense of humor #
I got my beer & dim sum tho I had to go to another terminal & security for it! #
TSA guy stared at me repeatedly while writing in a binder. Am I now on a list of pink-haired terror suspects? #
looking forward to an interesting summer of travel. Time to get vaccinated! #
@lskrocki next Friday would be great, I should be in town all week . MPK and then Kansas City the following. Then things get REALLY crazy. in reply to lskrocki#
how do I unfriend someone in Facebook? he keeps sending me invitations for Milan-based things when I’ve told him I no longer live there! #
@jowyang re hand shaking, what will you do where the cheek kiss is de rigeur? Avoiding all germs just makes your immune system wimpy. in reply to jowyang#
So not crazy about Mother’s Day. There’s a big hole in that area of my life. I can comfort myself I’m doing better with my own daughter. #
Countries Beginning with I “SxSWi: Is Privacy Dead, or Just Very Confused? ” http://bit.ly/1194h9#
@JulieScardina friends in Thailand had a hugely fun pet otter. It play-fought VERY unfairly with their dogs. Talk about below the belt… in reply to JulieScardina#
just realized the YouTube videos of SxSWi sessions are only 6 minutes. I guess my recaps are useful after all. #
just saw last #Dollhouse. Hmm. Yes, I do want to know more. #
@missbhavens you are making me SO glad I had a very informal wedding. They all figured out where to sit, including my parents NOT together. in reply to missbhavens#
I took so many great pictures during our visit to the Sertoli Salis winery in Tirano (Valtellina) that I couldn’t use them all even in three pages, so here they are. Some are fuzzygraphs because I did not want to use flash on the interior frescoes, but I’ve included them anyway to give you at least a fuzzy idea what they look like.
We’ve visited this beautiful medieval abbey in northern Lake Como several times, but apparently I’ve never posted any of my photos. This set is from a visit in September, 2007.
On in-season weekends, you can reach Piona on the Lake Como ferry.
I attended this session because : danah boyd (one of my heroes) and Judith Donath of MIT Media Lab and Harvard’s Berkman Center (whom I happen to know personally) were speaking.
Also on the panel (and interesting in their own right):
Siva Vaidyanathan (author of the forthcoming “The Googleization of Everythingâ€), who said (among other things) that privacy is not the opposite of publicity. Privacy is not a substance. It means different things in different contexts.
Alice Marwick, doing her dissertation on the Effect of Social Media on Social Status
What follows is a transcription of my notes, with [my own thoughts and comments].
CEOs these days expect their staff to be familiar with social technology. [Yay! I can haz job!]
There is social value to online relationships – people get real emotional support online.
But the information we put online is valuable to marketers.
[D here: So what? I just wish they’d make it valuable to me. Personally, I would be happy to see advertising that I’m actually interested in.
Take car advertising. How often does any of us buy a car? Yet it seems that every other ad on TV or at the movies is for a car. I’d like to know which is larger: the number of cars sold in the US each year, or the number of car ads shown? For most people, buying a car is a relatively rare event. Much of that advertising must be a waste of car companies’ money, and it’s certainly a waste of my time and attention, which I resent.
I was intensely interested in information about cars for a few weeks last summer, and again this March when I was buying a first car for my daughter. For myself, I ended up leasing a Toyota Rav4. I knew I liked this car because I had driven it as a rental for several weeks, but I didn’t feel comfortable with the sticker price. Then I discovered (on the Toyota website) a great lease deal that I qualified for, so I was able to get my dream car. I only test-drove one other (a used Hyundai SUV). No doubt the fact that the Rav4 was available as a rental at that time and place was part of a marketing effort – in my case, a very effective one.
For Ross, I did a lot more research, entirely online, for a good “starter†car that would last a while. She drove only one model – the Honda Fit – and that’s what she now owns (or rather, what the bank owns and I’m now paying for). A key selling point was Consumer Reports’ safety rating on this model (a big concern for me as the mother of a new driver).
If I’ve ever noticed either of these cars advertised in print or media, I don’t remember it. I do remember examples of advertising that had a negative impact on me, e.g. the painfully obvious product placement of Lexus in Desperate Housewives and Fiat in Montalbano.
So all the money spent showing me car ads was wasted. As Judith Donath said, there should be rewards for accurate targeting. In fact, there would be: I would buy!]
Judith Donath is interested in visualization of online identity/history.
Is online identity meaningful? You have different public faces for different spheres. We try to maintain control of our various public personas, but the web is causing the collapse of personalities.
[Which is to say: It’s hard to be one kind of person in your private life and a very different kind of person in your professional life, if much of both is viewable online. Coincidentally, a woman at another session I attended described trying to juggle two identities in Second Life. She said: “I’m trying to live two lives. And it’s killing me!”
It’s hard to know how others see you. We need technology to show us a mirror of the trails we have left behind (an area of research interest for Judith right now).
SV: There was a movement towards privacy in the mid-70s which resulted in current laws, e.g., no branch of government can share information about you with any other branch.
danah boyd: Young people see privacy differently. They do not see their homes as private spaces because they do not have control there – their parents can invade their rooms at any time.
Young people are also very aware of the role of power imbalances in privacy, and they find ways to trick the system.
“Because she puts so many things online, people think that’s all that’s going on.†[Now there’s a topic I could write reams on. But not today.]
SV: personal information is a currency.
JD: Time is also a context.
Discussion on health insurance, privacy and employability [ a topic I’ve written about myself].
Privacy and personal presentations of the self:
Privacy is a historically recent concept. People used to live in small tribes/communities in which everyone knew everyone else’s business.
[Me again: If you’ve ever lived in a small town, you know exactly what this is like.
It seems to me that the solution is simply not to do anything that you would be ashamed to have held up to public scrutiny. Obviously, this requires a society in which very little is grounds for shame. And this may be exactly what is happening in America. As Judith said: “We are creating what may be the most open and accepting society [in history] because we can see so much [online] about people’s divergent behaviors.â€
The film “Milk†portrays how (some) young gay people living in middle America in the 1970s saw Harvey Milk – an openly gay man – on the news, and realized that they could go and be themselves in larger cities that had gay communities. For that to happen, Milk had to make enough of a stir to appear in the national news, and perhaps he died for it. Nowadays, all sorts of “differences†can be researched online, and anyone can find kindred spirits and support. (Yes, there are some cases in which this is worrying.)]
JD: In a society of millions of people trying to keep up with what their norms are, that’s the function of celebrity: to give us a basis for comparison/discussion. [D: I find this idea frightening. Paris Hilton and Britney Spears as social norms?]
We want people to pay attention to us. What is the value of that?
