Hadn’t seen this yet, recording for posterity.

I just read an excellent article called The Dark Side of Digital Backchannels in Shared Physical Spaces. I have nothing to really add to the analysis, except to say that these are circles I wish I traveled in. I should move to Silicon Valley and become a freelance philosopher. The article also references the Online Disinhibition Effect, which I had somehow forgotten to mention in my classes this semester, so I was grateful for the reminder. The Wikipedia entry for online inhibition effect lists six components: You Don’t Know Me (Dissociative anonymity) You Can’t See Me (Invisibility) See You Later (Asynchronicity) It’s All in My Head (Solipsistic Introjection) It’s Just a Game (Dissociative Imagination) We’re Equals (Minimizing Authority) However, when online tools are used in shared physical spaces, they transform them into what Adriana de Souza e Silva and others call hybrid spaces. In such spaces, the first four components are not as relevant or applicable, and so the hybrid inhibition effect may only involve the last two, and I think the one that best explains the Twittermobbing at conferences is the last one. Perhaps I am too deep into my research to see outside my own little world, but it strikes me that one might plausibly interpret Turing’s test as an endorsement of disinhibition in the last two senses: that we ought to treat our interactions with some machines as a game among equals, contrary to our normal biases against machines. In other words, although the online disinhibition effect is often discussed as a negative consequence of shared digital spaces (Wikipedia links its article to antisocial personality disorder, for instance), it is important to remember that sometimes disinhibition can be a virtue, especially when the norms that inhibit us are themselves negative and stifling.

This is old news but talk of Google’s Public DNS brought up this bit of data: Marissa ran an experiment where Google increased the number of search results to thirty. Traffic and revenue from Google searchers in the experimental group dropped by 20%. Ouch. Why? Why, when users had asked for this, did they seem to hate it? After a bit of looking, Marissa explained that they found an uncontrolled variable. The page with 10 results took .4 seconds to generate. The page with 30 results took .9 seconds. Half a second delay caused a 20% drop in traffic. Half a second delay killed user satisfaction. Just a friendly reminder that computers are not pure syntax manipulators; they are embodied systems with complex non-formal behavior to which we are highly sensitive.

artificial From Abstruse Goose. Thx, Cameron!

From a great interview with Ray Ozzie from Microsoft waxing philosophical about the Google Wave era technologies. RAY OZZIE: I think the answer is yes, it’s important and there are a lot of very interesting things. I think we don’t really know yet which ones are going to be sustainable killer app type usages versus not. It’s really hard to scale things that are at that real time level, and I frankly don’t think we’ve even scratched the surface of what real time means. When you’re Tweeting only once every, I don’t know, how often do you think the speediest people who Twitter are doing it over the course of their waking hours, if you averaged it out, once every — STEVE GILLMOR: Well, noisy — Scoble is 100 a day. RAY OZZIE: Is it 100? Okay. But that’s still not much in the grand scheme of things if you think of how many seconds he’s awake per day. It’s still only once every N seconds. What if your devices were Tweeting on your behalf to serve you? What if your phone, your car, your — I don’t know your glasses, but different things in your life were posting informational updates that went to services that were acting on your behalf? It’s a perfectly reasonable, realistic thing that could happen if you had an infrastructure that was a message switching infrastructure in real time. It’s a logical direction that things would go. Anyone who knows me knows that I’ve been talking about auto-Twitter for months now. STEVE GILLMOR: So, your concern about the overwhelming fire hose aspect of this that is just difficult to scale up to that kind of — RAY OZZIE: Well, there’s a technological aspect and a human aspect. From a technological aspect it’s just a hard […]

He envisions that people will turn to robots for the illusion of a living presence to satisfy their emotional needs. … One of those future products is the so called “Funktionide“. It is an amorph object whose intention is to provide the owner with an atmosphere of presence thus counteracting the feeling of loneliness. In the visions future people are lonely and with all the new dimensions products offer, humans will eventually turn to “robots” for emotional satisfaction. Link via Boing Boing

From Henry Jenkins Here we come closest to McLuhan’s core idea — “Here it is” is a function of Twitter; “Here I Am” may be its core “message” in so far as McLuhan saw the message as something that might not be articulated on any kind of conscious level but emerges from the ways that the medium impacts our experience of time and space. “Here it is” became “Here I am” and more importantly “Here we are.” “Here we are” is not only more important, it is also closer to the truth, since it hides whatever implicit subjectivity is present in “Here I am”. But where? Twitter is nonspatial; the internet is everywhere and nowhere. Twitter is nontemporal, or at least asynchronous; ‘we’ do not share time. Twitter is location without coordinates. “Being here” is the final reversal of the implicit subject-object distinction in dasein itself, setting context without any reference to the other. we are no longer dasein.