Posts
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Monday, February 23, 2009
E-Lekking: Playful Massage of Shared Space
This is the third of a series of journal posts articulating a multicast approach to online dating.
A rich assemblage of user-authored content--journals, forums, quizzes, questions, even wiki-edits--sets OkCupid apart from pay dating sites. Each modality allows individuals to evaluate and interact with potential partners and potential friends: without resorting to the false intimacy of the "Message into box. Message into box." approach that has been the defining metaphor of technology-facilitated dating since at least the 19th century.
Journals and forums, especially, recreate a sense of proprietary and public space, of place, inhabited by some unspecified number of others, some potential partners, some potential competitors, some neither or both. Quizzes, and to a lesser degree, questions and wiki-edits, provide an opportunity for closer inspection of the plumage of their authors (and, in the case of quizzes, their respondents), whether that display be in the form of humor, creativity, attitude, grammatical competence/arrogance or just shared interests.
In my previous post, a parenthetical aside raised the question of whether hair styles may be influenced by the increasing prevalence of static photographs as media of social interaction. We are certainly all quite familiar with the typographical conventions and explosion of abbreviations that are almost off-handedly interspersed in text to signal tone and stance, these icons having precedents in such pre-Internet notations as Ambrose Bierce's snigger point, and the various incarnations of “love and kisses” in Morse Code. (Such translations are by no means unidirectioinal, as Victor Borge's "Phonetic Punctuation" demonstrates.).
As McLuhan tells us, media create spaces, even media without content, and the horizons of those spaces--the possibilities of expression and understanding--are determined by the medium. Just as a light bulb creates a space articulated by its perimeter, so text and photos create spaces shaped and constrained by those media. Yet even a content-less media has a feel to it, a mood. A desk lit by a florescent ceiling fixture feels different from that of a work area illuminated by a banker's lamp. A party bulb tinted red casts a different ambiance than does a bulb engineered to give optimal wavelengths of light to indoor gardens.
In this sense each of us are, in a sense, media unto ourselves: we each give form to the mood and atmosphere of our own environs. We each are the subtle massage of our embodied shared space, working out the kinks and relaxing the knots as we feel our way. This is what makes journals and forums, spaces in which individuals gather to comment and respond to the comments of others, so powerful. Where the message-into-box model defaults to an awkward and uncertain dyad, with each new journal and forum post, a new negotiation of Gemeinschaft, and of place, opens up.
What's more, as we follow, or stalk, the comments of peers with whom we have found common interest, loose and flexible meshworks of social capital are woven. Our own expressivity acquires an exponent, being multiplied and amplified by the play, the lek, between ourselves and those we select into our peer relations. Rather than "sell" oneself through a profile, in the hope that someone will "buy" with a message, through commenting on journals and forums we exercise our being, riding the teeter totter of back-and-forth interactions, and in so doing, invite others to join in the play.
We have abandoned transaction in favor of transection, of evaluation of others not as profile-objects to approach or avoid, but as beings-being across both time and space, encountered as and when their presence and ours may co-occur.
Yet, there are so many other modalities of being than represented by public comments to journal and forum entries! How else might the power of social networking technology be expanded upon and opened up, so as to further embody and articulate the intricacies of lekking? In my next post, we shall examine one proposal for just such an application.
A rich assemblage of user-authored content--journals, forums, quizzes, questions, even wiki-edits--sets OkCupid apart from pay dating sites. Each modality allows individuals to evaluate and interact with potential partners and potential friends: without resorting to the false intimacy of the "Message into box. Message into box." approach that has been the defining metaphor of technology-facilitated dating since at least the 19th century.
Journals and forums, especially, recreate a sense of proprietary and public space, of place, inhabited by some unspecified number of others, some potential partners, some potential competitors, some neither or both. Quizzes, and to a lesser degree, questions and wiki-edits, provide an opportunity for closer inspection of the plumage of their authors (and, in the case of quizzes, their respondents), whether that display be in the form of humor, creativity, attitude, grammatical competence/arrogance or just shared interests.
In my previous post, a parenthetical aside raised the question of whether hair styles may be influenced by the increasing prevalence of static photographs as media of social interaction. We are certainly all quite familiar with the typographical conventions and explosion of abbreviations that are almost off-handedly interspersed in text to signal tone and stance, these icons having precedents in such pre-Internet notations as Ambrose Bierce's snigger point, and the various incarnations of “love and kisses” in Morse Code. (Such translations are by no means unidirectioinal, as Victor Borge's "Phonetic Punctuation" demonstrates.).
As McLuhan tells us, media create spaces, even media without content, and the horizons of those spaces--the possibilities of expression and understanding--are determined by the medium. Just as a light bulb creates a space articulated by its perimeter, so text and photos create spaces shaped and constrained by those media. Yet even a content-less media has a feel to it, a mood. A desk lit by a florescent ceiling fixture feels different from that of a work area illuminated by a banker's lamp. A party bulb tinted red casts a different ambiance than does a bulb engineered to give optimal wavelengths of light to indoor gardens.
In this sense each of us are, in a sense, media unto ourselves: we each give form to the mood and atmosphere of our own environs. We each are the subtle massage of our embodied shared space, working out the kinks and relaxing the knots as we feel our way. This is what makes journals and forums, spaces in which individuals gather to comment and respond to the comments of others, so powerful. Where the message-into-box model defaults to an awkward and uncertain dyad, with each new journal and forum post, a new negotiation of Gemeinschaft, and of place, opens up.
What's more, as we follow, or stalk, the comments of peers with whom we have found common interest, loose and flexible meshworks of social capital are woven. Our own expressivity acquires an exponent, being multiplied and amplified by the play, the lek, between ourselves and those we select into our peer relations. Rather than "sell" oneself through a profile, in the hope that someone will "buy" with a message, through commenting on journals and forums we exercise our being, riding the teeter totter of back-and-forth interactions, and in so doing, invite others to join in the play.
We have abandoned transaction in favor of transection, of evaluation of others not as profile-objects to approach or avoid, but as beings-being across both time and space, encountered as and when their presence and ours may co-occur.
Yet, there are so many other modalities of being than represented by public comments to journal and forum entries! How else might the power of social networking technology be expanded upon and opened up, so as to further embody and articulate the intricacies of lekking? In my next post, we shall examine one proposal for just such an application.
E-Lekking: Social Mediation of Social Behavior
This is the second in a series of journal posts exploring an alternative to the messaging model of online dating.
Recent research in the United Kingdom, published in an article entitled "Mobile Phones as Lekking Devices Among Human Males", suggests that there is a lot more to how human beings select and evaluate potential dating partners than the presently established unicast model embraced by online dating would indicate. The Swedish word lek, denoting play (in the sense, of say, Calvinball), is a term used by biologists to describe gregarious display behavior among males of a species.
Although normally invoked in discussions of a various birds, some insects (notably the glass-wing butterfly of South America), fish, and yes, mammals, also exhibit lekking. The key characteristic of lekking, for our purposes, is highlighted by the findings of the UK study: the incidence of cell phone display by (presumptively, heterosexual) males in Liverpool pubs increases as a function of the total number of other males present. The researchers' choice of title tells it all: this behavior is congruent with the display of plumage or other secondary sexual characteristics by males of a variety of species during lekking displays.
Other research points to other behaviors--among men, finding excuses to stretch and flex, with the effect of making oneself look bigger; among women, the stereotyped hair flip, which (subliminally, as verified by slow motion video playback) takes on a momentary appearance reminiscent of a male peacock's plumage--that, I suspect, were the research done, would also be found to increase as a function of the number of potential competitors for romantic attention present in the surrounding environment.
Okay, but what does any of this have to do with dating on the interwebs? You can't casually put your cellphone down on the counter of a virtual bar counter here, and the closest anyone is going to get to a hair flip in this context is an emo profile photo. (Aside: one wonders if the fashion of wearing one's hair in front of one's eyes has increased in recent years as a function of social interactions increasingly reliant on static photos.) Most of human non-verbal communication is simply not transmittable across the Internet, and we just have to live with it, right?
Perhaps. However, I would turn our focus not to specific behaviors, but the structure of relations in which those behaviors occur. The Liverpool study did not find that men engage in display behaviors more often if there are more women in the pub. Rather, this display behavior was correlated with the number of other men present. Again, assuming this was a predominantly heterosexual population, this indicates that how we present ourselves as potential partners in a given social environment is influenced by others in that environment with whom we would not seek partnership.
Yet, the unicast messaging model does not take this into account. Where in real life, human beings are constantly (and non-consciously) evaluating not only potential partners, but also potential competitors for those partners, and subtly altering their behavior accordingly, before any one individual even makes a move to approach any one other individual, in our 19th century "personals" model, the entire dense fabric of social interaction is distilled down to a generic and reified approach behavior. Message into box. Message into box. Message into box.
Of course, this is where the money is.
Except, on OkCupid, that isn't where the money is, because OkC doesn't monetize messaging. This has allowed OkC a lot more freedom in design than traditional pay dating sites. User authored quizzes and questions, journals, forums: each promotes interactions in ways that would be impossible were OkC trying to derive revenue from messaging. Why pay to send a message to someone who might not respond, or to receive a message (C.O.D., as it were) from someone you might not be interested in knowing, if you can just as easily post a message to a public forum that dozens or hundreds might read, author a quiz that will give you data about any number of people who answer in accordance with your own preferences, without paying a red cent?
Yet, these tools, while they provide alternatives to unicast messaging, only begin to approach the true potential of e-lekking. More on that in my next post.
Recent research in the United Kingdom, published in an article entitled "Mobile Phones as Lekking Devices Among Human Males", suggests that there is a lot more to how human beings select and evaluate potential dating partners than the presently established unicast model embraced by online dating would indicate. The Swedish word lek, denoting play (in the sense, of say, Calvinball), is a term used by biologists to describe gregarious display behavior among males of a species.
Although normally invoked in discussions of a various birds, some insects (notably the glass-wing butterfly of South America), fish, and yes, mammals, also exhibit lekking. The key characteristic of lekking, for our purposes, is highlighted by the findings of the UK study: the incidence of cell phone display by (presumptively, heterosexual) males in Liverpool pubs increases as a function of the total number of other males present. The researchers' choice of title tells it all: this behavior is congruent with the display of plumage or other secondary sexual characteristics by males of a variety of species during lekking displays.
Other research points to other behaviors--among men, finding excuses to stretch and flex, with the effect of making oneself look bigger; among women, the stereotyped hair flip, which (subliminally, as verified by slow motion video playback) takes on a momentary appearance reminiscent of a male peacock's plumage--that, I suspect, were the research done, would also be found to increase as a function of the number of potential competitors for romantic attention present in the surrounding environment.
Okay, but what does any of this have to do with dating on the interwebs? You can't casually put your cellphone down on the counter of a virtual bar counter here, and the closest anyone is going to get to a hair flip in this context is an emo profile photo. (Aside: one wonders if the fashion of wearing one's hair in front of one's eyes has increased in recent years as a function of social interactions increasingly reliant on static photos.) Most of human non-verbal communication is simply not transmittable across the Internet, and we just have to live with it, right?
Perhaps. However, I would turn our focus not to specific behaviors, but the structure of relations in which those behaviors occur. The Liverpool study did not find that men engage in display behaviors more often if there are more women in the pub. Rather, this display behavior was correlated with the number of other men present. Again, assuming this was a predominantly heterosexual population, this indicates that how we present ourselves as potential partners in a given social environment is influenced by others in that environment with whom we would not seek partnership.
Yet, the unicast messaging model does not take this into account. Where in real life, human beings are constantly (and non-consciously) evaluating not only potential partners, but also potential competitors for those partners, and subtly altering their behavior accordingly, before any one individual even makes a move to approach any one other individual, in our 19th century "personals" model, the entire dense fabric of social interaction is distilled down to a generic and reified approach behavior. Message into box. Message into box. Message into box.
Of course, this is where the money is.
Except, on OkCupid, that isn't where the money is, because OkC doesn't monetize messaging. This has allowed OkC a lot more freedom in design than traditional pay dating sites. User authored quizzes and questions, journals, forums: each promotes interactions in ways that would be impossible were OkC trying to derive revenue from messaging. Why pay to send a message to someone who might not respond, or to receive a message (C.O.D., as it were) from someone you might not be interested in knowing, if you can just as easily post a message to a public forum that dozens or hundreds might read, author a quiz that will give you data about any number of people who answer in accordance with your own preferences, without paying a red cent?
Yet, these tools, while they provide alternatives to unicast messaging, only begin to approach the true potential of e-lekking. More on that in my next post.
Sunday, February 22, 2009
E-Lekking: The Limits of the Messaging Model
I've been comment stalking about this for a while now, and decided that it finally deserved its own post.
Recent new feature changes on OkCupid have brought into sharp relief a profound weakness of the current implementation of online dating and matchmaking Web sites. Specifically, the traffic light system (which marks each user's profile and search listing in accordance with some unfathomable formula that determines whether said user replies "often", "selectively" or "very selectively") and a default notice (replacing, it would seem, the traffic light) identifying and bringing attention to users who have not received any messages through OkC in a seven day period.
Although some users have expressed appreciation for these bells and whistles, both features have been openly criticized by users as unwarranted and stigmatizing (with said stigma attaching not only to the "no messages" flag, but also to both red lights and green lights, for different reasons). These widgets have also been indicted on grounds of their being implemented in a manner that exposes personal information about user's messaging behavior, to anyone willing to view the underlying HTML.
My own criticism of these features is that they recapitulate a model of personals advertising inherited from print newspapers, carried through to telephone-based dating services, and adopted essentially unchanged by Internet dating sites. Namely, an architecture of communication consisting of a box into whichmessages are delivered. (I shall leave the potential erotic undertones of this, especially in light of the historicity of gender relations it articulates, for others to develop.)
Here, social interactions are atomized into dyadic transactions, between a lone sender and a lone receiver. Where more than one message may be delivered to a box, each sender is isolated from and essentially oblivious to peers. Likewise, each recipient is conceived of as a self-sufficient rational actor, without any need for or recourse to the feedback or prospective judgments that peers might provide. Rather than leverage evolving technology to extend the capacities of human beings as denizens of dynamic social groups, instead these systems thrust individuals into an awkward and facile intimacy.
Now, it is not terribly surprising that this one-to-one (i.e., unicast) communication protocol would have been established in the first place, nor that it has survived as long as it has across changing media technologies. It is, after all, a structural scheme very amenable to monetizing. If you have any doubts of this, take a look at any professional matchmaking service, with its spiral bound notebooks of photos and profiles, or even a modern speed-dating event. For each, profitably facilitating one-to-onerendezvous is their raison d'être.
However, OkCupid is not deriving money from arranging these message-to-box interactions. There are neither fees to maintain a mailbox, nor charges associated with sending messages or reading them upon their receipt. One might even argue that the newest site design is sub-optimal for driving advertising revenue as a function of messaging. One's home screen has an advertisement in the center right of the page, an eye-catching position hard to miss when reviewing and toggling through event feeds immediately to its left. On the other hand, when reading a message in one's mailbox, the advertising banner is at the top of the page, lost to scroll before it even loads properly, when reviewing any but the most brief of threaded exchanges.
Why, then, are the OkCupid boffins installing traffic control signals and neon vacancy signs to encourage messaging? Why are they focusing on an aspect of technology-facilitated dating that hasn't changed since the 19th century?
Perhaps it is merely that we as a culture have been doing this for so long, we find it difficult to imagine doing it any other way?
In my next journal post, I will explore an alternative approach to thinking about this issue, and begin presenting ideas for what OkCupid (or that which comes after OkC) might do to take Internet dating, and social networking, more generally, in an entirely different direction.
Recent new feature changes on OkCupid have brought into sharp relief a profound weakness of the current implementation of online dating and matchmaking Web sites. Specifically, the traffic light system (which marks each user's profile and search listing in accordance with some unfathomable formula that determines whether said user replies "often", "selectively" or "very selectively") and a default notice (replacing, it would seem, the traffic light) identifying and bringing attention to users who have not received any messages through OkC in a seven day period.
Although some users have expressed appreciation for these bells and whistles, both features have been openly criticized by users as unwarranted and stigmatizing (with said stigma attaching not only to the "no messages" flag, but also to both red lights and green lights, for different reasons). These widgets have also been indicted on grounds of their being implemented in a manner that exposes personal information about user's messaging behavior, to anyone willing to view the underlying HTML.
My own criticism of these features is that they recapitulate a model of personals advertising inherited from print newspapers, carried through to telephone-based dating services, and adopted essentially unchanged by Internet dating sites. Namely, an architecture of communication consisting of a box into whichmessages are delivered. (I shall leave the potential erotic undertones of this, especially in light of the historicity of gender relations it articulates, for others to develop.)
Here, social interactions are atomized into dyadic transactions, between a lone sender and a lone receiver. Where more than one message may be delivered to a box, each sender is isolated from and essentially oblivious to peers. Likewise, each recipient is conceived of as a self-sufficient rational actor, without any need for or recourse to the feedback or prospective judgments that peers might provide. Rather than leverage evolving technology to extend the capacities of human beings as denizens of dynamic social groups, instead these systems thrust individuals into an awkward and facile intimacy.
Now, it is not terribly surprising that this one-to-one (i.e., unicast) communication protocol would have been established in the first place, nor that it has survived as long as it has across changing media technologies. It is, after all, a structural scheme very amenable to monetizing. If you have any doubts of this, take a look at any professional matchmaking service, with its spiral bound notebooks of photos and profiles, or even a modern speed-dating event. For each, profitably facilitating one-to-onerendezvous is their raison d'être.
However, OkCupid is not deriving money from arranging these message-to-box interactions. There are neither fees to maintain a mailbox, nor charges associated with sending messages or reading them upon their receipt. One might even argue that the newest site design is sub-optimal for driving advertising revenue as a function of messaging. One's home screen has an advertisement in the center right of the page, an eye-catching position hard to miss when reviewing and toggling through event feeds immediately to its left. On the other hand, when reading a message in one's mailbox, the advertising banner is at the top of the page, lost to scroll before it even loads properly, when reviewing any but the most brief of threaded exchanges.
Why, then, are the OkCupid boffins installing traffic control signals and neon vacancy signs to encourage messaging? Why are they focusing on an aspect of technology-facilitated dating that hasn't changed since the 19th century?
Perhaps it is merely that we as a culture have been doing this for so long, we find it difficult to imagine doing it any other way?
In my next journal post, I will explore an alternative approach to thinking about this issue, and begin presenting ideas for what OkCupid (or that which comes after OkC) might do to take Internet dating, and social networking, more generally, in an entirely different direction.
Monday, February 2, 2009
Wikified Governance
I'm currently listening to a talk by Lawrence Lessig he gave at Harvard's Berkman Center in November, where he discusses the Change Congress project. ChangeCongress.org, together with MorePerfect.org, is a start to cobbling together a new technology of civic engagement.
The limitation of these projects is that the focus on national (or in the case of MorePerfect, national and state) issues. Mind you, ChangeCongress.org is at least focusing its attention on legislative districts, so it gets local by the mechanics of it, despite its focus on Congress.
I really want to resume work on the Transpartisan Meshworks project--the focus here being on local governance (village, town, city, county; school, water, fire, and other special districts). Plan on cracking open my Nolo guide to starting a non-profit this week. Anyone have any advice on cobbling together a board of directors?
(Okay, that's spooky. Not two minutes after I posted this, Lessig responded to a question by saying that Change Congress doesn't yet have a board--or didn't as of November when the talk was recorded.)
The limitation of these projects is that the focus on national (or in the case of MorePerfect, national and state) issues. Mind you, ChangeCongress.org is at least focusing its attention on legislative districts, so it gets local by the mechanics of it, despite its focus on Congress.
I really want to resume work on the Transpartisan Meshworks project--the focus here being on local governance (village, town, city, county; school, water, fire, and other special districts). Plan on cracking open my Nolo guide to starting a non-profit this week. Anyone have any advice on cobbling together a board of directors?
(Okay, that's spooky. Not two minutes after I posted this, Lessig responded to a question by saying that Change Congress doesn't yet have a board--or didn't as of November when the talk was recorded.)
While listening to Speaking of Faith (American Public Media), I was startled to hear guest Pankaj Mishra, journalist and author, speculated that the Buddha, if confronted with the modern centralized state, would advocate a devolution to governance at the level of community, such that individuals would be better able to effect control over their own experience of the world.
This is not at all in keeping with what I expect most American Buddhists would have to say on the matter, but it certainly reinforces my own conceptualization of elegant empowerment through local civic engagement.
There's a certain synchronicity in having heard these two podcasts one following the other.
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