Untethering the Social Network or What Happens to Social Networks in the Untethered Wild. Panel: Howard Rheingold, Mimi Ito, Scott Fisher, danah boyd, Joi Ito Wants to include a social science/research perspective. Starting with Howard Rheingold Users have a long history of appropriating technology for their own purposes, often in conflict with the purposes of the designers. Starting with the telephone. (Women drove this use of telephones, though they were discouraged for a long time.) [Mintel mentioned, but missed exact context] We are the beneficiaries of visionary leaders at ARPA et al. They recognized social potential. Adolescents drove SMS because of need for communication that parents/teachers couldn't "spy on." As technologies (phones, net, etc) merge, question becomes whether users can continue to hack/create new media? rheingold asserts that phone/mobile/pc/interne Mimi Ito: ethnographic detail on kids use of phones in Japan. Focused on mobile email and picture messaging. How is messaging changing the experience of social context and social presence? "Full time intimate community" being build with mobile phones - most mobile messages/call exchanged between an intimate group of 2~5 - more low profile, pervasive form of social contact - spans presence in different physical contextse.g. send a text before a phone call, to avoid the "rudeness of face-to-face interaction" shows transcript between a college girl and her boyfriend. can't have voice conversation swhen there are other passengers, so they use sms instead. (uses japanese emoticons -- (>_<) (;_;) ) subtle cues in how to end conversation. (change of subject, rather than explicit "i have to go") not unusual to have lengthy pauses "knock before entering" become rude to make a phone call without first checking via sms. [this is becoming more and more the case in europe also] "tabloid journalism" picture messaging. information that's newsworthy *within the intimate group* 'the new haircut shot' - a genre of its own social software in the pc/internet space is more about asynchronous, conversive presences with large groups; this is very different, it's intimate, pervasive, "you're never alone in urban space anymore" Users are able to take a very simple tool set and develop very complex practices. "you're never alone in urban space anymore" - m. ito Scott Fisher "information in places" placemaking with information worldboard project (1996) Apple? (I think he was with Xerox. not sure) shows some past location-based services. "unfortunately, the content is boring" but he shows an environmental media project at Keio/docomo. Authoring system that would allow authors to create layered information. take photos, sent to db, user could see photos based on location. "Chusaku-za" - annotation theatre. Then a screen with lots of spatial annotation programs. Cornell Campus Aware, Urban Tapestries, City Poems, Murmure Project, PDPAL, Locative Network What kind of data mining can we use to look at information based on more than time and location. danah boyd - social software tries to map social behavior into a technical space so that we can make sense of it. what does it mean to put your data out on a centralized system. different fears with small groups than large. Joi - "the peopel finding scott's work are the enemies of end-to-end." social hacking of the spaces has been in spite of/despite the carriers. the computer itself is not social, but it's a hackable tool so we've been able to make it social. how do we make the more inherently social devices like phones more hackable? huge number of blogs with small number of links (qualitatively different experience than in the middle of the curve, or at the "top" of it) Orkut is focused on (or at least rewards) behavior like Marc Canter's, not the "normal" user. "unfortunately most of the info is incredibly boring" (and commercial) chusaku-za (annotation theatre) - annotating space - urban tapestries gets a mention! data mining - look at the data on other vectors than time and s danah's point about social hacking as a parallel capability to technological hacking, which should be rewarded and allowed Joi mentions that mobile devices haven't been open to either technological or social hacking. "How do we make mobile devices more hackable?" Kevin Burton criticizes the insecurity of Orkut and friendster-he's stolen dozens of passwords off the wifi sitting in this room. Justin Hall says "who cares? what are we really exposing?" What did Kevin just ask? danah -- "We're playing at the same time that we're engaging." We don't take these systems seriously. We game Orkut and Friendster because it's not serious. Play is increasingly integrated into these spaces. Joi mentions that in Japan the big community systems are dating systems which have are used mostly for dating among anonymous people who can't satisfy their dating needs in their local social groups, which have led to illegal activity (teen prostitution, murders) and so sites like Friendster would be forbidden. Mimi mentions that SMS is ver different than blogs because of the scale of the news distribution which is possible. ------- References: Goopas - http://www.goopas.jp/confirmation_g.html WorldBoard: http://www.worldboard.org/pub/spohrer/wbconcept/default.html Murmure Project http://www.terminus1525.ca/misc/media_releases_pdf/rel_sept23_e.pdf Campus Away (Cornell) City Poems (Centrifugal forces) http://www.citypoems.co.uk/ Locative network http://www.locative.org/drupal/ PDPAL http://www.pdpal.com/ Urban Tapestries http://www.proboscis.org.uk/urbantapestries/ --------This document will be posted to: Specific post with notes: http://trevor.typepad.com/blog/2004/02/oreilly_emergin.html --------- Email addresses for mail-backs (separate by commas): matt (at) blackbeltjones.com, kmarks (at) epeus.com, trevorolio at mac dot com, phil@gyford.com,pbradley(at)clarity(dash)innovations(dot)com,, vizions@mac.com, jeff (at) icosystem.com, shrub@mac.com, ben (at) neuronwave.com, Andrew Donoho, awd (at) ddg (dot) com, tod (at) todbot.com,