Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink
Paul D. Fernhout
narrative (especially on how people share stories with each other). Based on
that understanding, she wrote an essay on what she feels is wrong with the
social model of Facebook, from which I took the title for this email:
"Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink"
http://www.storycoloredglasses.com/2010/01/water-water-everywhere-nor-any-drop-to.html
The titles of the main sections are:
* Wrestling with privacy issues
* Nobody has only one face
* Obligation without differentiation
* What's good for selection isn't good for commitment
* Context is key
It sounds like the "Aspects" system of Diaspora address some of those to
some extent. But there are still other things there to think about as far as
design issues, especially her social point on selection, mobilization and
commitment.
From her essay on that last point: "People who want to read this blog
regularly are just going to have to read this paper [by her at First Monday
http://bit.ly/8TSrTG ] (or Harrison White's Identity and Control) so that I
can stop explaining the difference between selection, mobilization and
commitment - because the distinction applies to lots of things, like
Facebook. (Selection interactions are those in which people make choices,
like which toaster to buy or which social group to join. Mobilization
interactions are those in which people gather support for causes or ideas,
like recycling batteries or buying Macs. Commitment interactions are those
in which people carry out tasks in teams with linked roles, like building a
car or raising children.) The original printed "face books" were
selection-only devices. They helped people remember the names of people they
saw around campus. But Facebook has moved far into the territories of
mobilization and commitment. The damage in mobilization is not large,
because there is still some degree of distance and presentation involved.
However, crossing the line into commitment, specifically that related to
families, neighborhoods, and close-knit groups of friends and co-workers,
requires different attention, especially to context, boundaries, coherence,
roles and rituals. Facebook works for finding people and for selecting new
acquaintanceships, though I'm not sure it works very well given the tiny
trickle of social information it affords compared to actually meeting people
or even talking on the phone. It does not work well for maintaining existing
relationships, especially the complex, long-standing, and deeply contextual
ones people have with family and friends."
Based on her own work with creating a narrative (story-based) FOSS social
networking platform (that has not gained traction) called Rakontu,
http://www.rakontu.org/ she the wrote up this other essay suggesting others
integrate the ideas she worked on but in other systems:
"Steal these ideas"
http://www.storycoloredglasses.com/2010/08/steal-these-ideas.html
These ideas perhaps apply somewhat less to Diaspora than the
Facebook-specific comments linked above, but they still might be of
interest. Section titles from there:
1. Support sharing over performing
2. Build a caf� in a library or a library in a caf�
3. Embody knowledge about narrative
4. Build for commitment
5. Decomplexify
6. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain
We talk about these things between us of course, and I have some technical
points to make myself about the Semantic Web and Diaspora that I'll post in
a subsequent email to the diaspora-dev list, both from thinking about her
Rakontu project and from thinking about other systems.
--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/
====
The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of
abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity.