Thesis

For Clay Shrky's Social Facts class this week, we had to a selection from Small Groups as Complex Systems. For the most part, the selection talked about the formation of different kinds of groups in a non-technological context but I found the reading to have some interesting points that I wanted to reiterate here.

One point that I thought was particularly relevant when thinking of online social networks was this:

"Dyadic contacts among people who are linked in a social network will not generate a bounded, functionally coordinated group if context provides no opportunities or rewards for doing so. Instead interpersonal contact will simply lead to mor interpersonal contact."

Not only does this make logical sense but we can see it to be true in the analysis of large social networks that are visible, such as myspace, for instance. There is no reward or opportunity created by forming groups. However, there is a reward for identity production, namely self-promotion. One can do this in several ways, and these ways can be observed by viewing the profiles of different kinds of individuals. One can either friend request large numbers of people with limited and varied actual connections to those people outside the virtual realm, thus increasing the number of friends they possess to appear more popular. Or one can limit their friend list considerably to only those people they actually know so as to appear perhaps more 'real'. Both of these are functionally the same thing, developing, publishing and promoting one's own sense of identity.

In here essay, Friends, Friendsters, and Top 8: Writing community into being on social network sites, Danah Boyd states that egocentric networks replace groups. "Social network sites provide a new organizing mechanism for developing context. Instead of slicing interest first and people second, the Friending process allows people to choose people first and interests second. People define their community egocentrically. Their list of Friends defines the context and this, in turn, defines the audience that they believe they are addressing whenever they modify their Profile or post a bulletin. Combined with Profile content, Friends serve as a signal to all visitors about the relevant context."

Here is my perceived problem. If their are no groups, no rewards or opportunities to be gained by prolonged participation in such egocentric networks, short of reconnecting with old friends and perhaps having another way to maintain contact, how long will one's interest ultimately be sustained?

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I think it is easier for me to think of this project right now by splitting it up into smaller projects. So I have decided to make project number one for myself (due theoretically in the next two weeks). I want to gather up a bunch of ITP students (I have a couple of volunteers but I will hopefully get more through a nice email to the student list) to go out for a few hours of shotting in NYC. The people who choose to come must have two things, a camera (either digital or film...although digital is much easier...either point and shoot or SLR) and a camera phone with either an MMS plan that will allow them to send the pictures to an online space or bluetooth so they can send them directly to my computer. Ideally these people would also be interested in taking pictures, not trained photographers (although they can be) but not ambivalent to the whole process either. The plan is simply to go out and take pictures, shooting each image with the camera and the camera phone. I am not sure what exactly will come of this but I do believe that there is a fundamental difference somehow between the use of each, a difference that is physical, social and psychological...perhaps. I will post the results. Hopefully, I can make this happen next week.

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Last night's presentation in thesis class seems to be have been a turning point for me. No matter how many times you go over something in your head, once you say it out loud and commit your thought process to an audience, something fundamental about the way that process appears to you changes. Sometimes it is expected and in the direction you were thinking anyway, but quite often it isn't.

As I think I previously mentioned, a lot of this process of considering what my thesis is has been about going back to what I was before ITP, and more importantly, what I did, what I cared about and why I cared about it. Through that way of thinking I realized a couple of things. First, I realized that through my analysis of social networks and the websites that encourage them, through the analysis of mobile phones in relationship to these networks, social action, media creation etc., I had forgotten a few fundamental questions. The first being, what is my relationship to my environment and how does my personal experience, both of myself and of my surroundings inform how I document my surroundings? And, how does the ability to immediately publish my documentation change the way it functions in relation to myself, in relation to those who view it and in relation to the place? Is there a fundamental difference between a photograph taken with a digital camera and one taken with a mobile phone other then the difference in megapixels? Is there a difference in what I take pictures of with one or the other? Is there a difference in the way the pictures feel, communicate and what they signify?

Over the next week I want to try and explore these ideas. I realized that the intellectual thought and talk that has come out of working on a very technically oriented project for over a year has not fully allowed me to focus on the ideas that underly its significance to me. As I have thought more about what I am really interested in, I think that it starts with my relationship to place, my psychological, social and physical understanding of the spaces I inhabit and how my life intersects with the individual history of this place and who has been there before me. I am also interested in how the very documentation of a space can change mine or another's emotional connection to it. Obviously I am partly interested in these ideas as a starting point for conversation, interaction and community. But Iit seems that I need to spend some time investigating the differences. This is where I start....

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I crafted a first presentation for thesis class today to outline some of the thought process I have undergone thus far in thinking about this project.

You can download it here.

I also wrote out a beginning personal statement and abstract of the project.

The abstract is mostly sections taken out of this paper that I wrote for the Theoretical Perspectives in Interactivity class last semester.

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“To find out and elucidate the truth only through the tonalities existing between black and white”
- G.I. Gurdjieff All and Everything

“I have to stay with THAT until its done, and everything I have been taught my whole life is against doing that. To simply see what something looks like: the light, the space, the relationship between distances, the air, the tones, the rhythms, the texture, the constrasts, the shape of movement….the things themselves….not what they might mean later, not socially, not politically, not psychologically, not sexually (a cigar is not even a cigar). Not to name label, evaluate, like, hate; no memory or desire. Just to see. This is the hardest thing to do, but that’s all that can be photographed….A photograph is an idea manifested outside of time. It is an insight made visible”
- Philip Perkis Teaching Photography

“People are connecting one-on-one - they have their online social network or their cell phone with 250 people on speed dial - but do they feel part of a community? Do they feel responsibility to a set of shared political commitments? Do they feel a need to take responsibility for issues that would require that they act in concert rather than just connect? Recently, connectivity and statements of identity on places such as Facebook or MySpace have themselves become values. It is a concern when self-expression becomes more important than social action.”
- Excerpt from “Living online: I'll have to ask my friends”
September 20, 2006, from New Scientist Print Edition
by Liz Else and Sherry Turkle

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Some examples of my photography. These are some photographs from my final project entitled Obscurity or Obscure Demise from undergrad. They are monochrome C-prints, which basically means they are black and white negatives printed via color enlarger and color paper processing. They range in size from 11 by 17 to 16 by 20 and are mounted in plexi-glass. None of the pictures are digital or 'played' with in any way. They are mostly reflections in or through windows or views through doorways. They were taken in 2000 and 2001 in NYC and West Virginia.

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I have been working on freeFormed.org for a while, both in a programming sense and a thought process sense. As a group, we have been through two redesigns of the site, numerous new features and two graduate student symposiums. Find the papers we wrote for these symposiums here:

Identity in a Networked World Graduate Student Symposium in New York City Paper

KAIST Graduate Student Symposium in South Korea Paper

However, I never intended freeFormed itself to be my actual thesis. Rather, I wanted to be able to see exactly what would happen if it were used in a specific context. Due to the many changes we have had in the construction and functionality of the site, we have been unable to have a really large user-test beyond our own usage and testing. But beyond simply observing the use of freeFormed, I found recently that I am actually more interested in using the platform to test my hypothesis simply stating that mobile phones have the ability to change the character of the online conversation provided that the architecture of the posting platform makes it easy to control the nature of group creation and community. I want to see if this is true., if an established community of users will find the site beneficial for documentation.

Thanks to Marianne Petit, I will have the ability to directly observe a group of users who already have an interest in the potential of online documentation. As part of a grant for a Digital Media Lab and documentation project for Xavier University in New Orleans, I will be able to receive capable mobile phones and free sim cards to distribute to a group of undergraduate students from the University and observe how they use the site. The goal of their project is twofold. They are interested in learning the capability of new technologies but are also interested in using what they learn to advance the idea of self documentation of Home, partly inspired by the desire to give underrepresented communities a voice and partly inspired by the local tragedy of hurricane Katrina. I do not, however, want the thesis end of this project to be about the hurricane or even about New Orleans itself, but rather about the perceived need of this community and how that need could be fulfilled in an online space. More thoughts to come.

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Originally written for the Identity in a Networked World graduate student symposium:

FreeFormed.org is a web and mobile phone based project conceived by five master’s degree candidates in the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Collectively, we took notice of the trends in online social networking and media sharing and felt that there was a significant problem, not only in the structure and architecture of many of the more popular media based sites which often promote lack of searchability and connectivity, but also in the social networking world, which currently appeals to a very specific demographics and where emphasis is placed more often then not on the quantity of relationships rather then the quality or the significance. We also took note of the trends in mobile posting and mobile development and felt that while many sites were doing interesting things, there was still a gap between the technology and its function within the online community.

FreeFormed is an experiment aimed at bridging that gap by encouraging the use of mobile phones in the development of online circles of conversation, emphasizing media as the point of connection rather then arbitrary self-serving definitions of identity. We are not opposed to the current popular sites working in this vain, we use them ourselves. We simply think there may be other ways to facilitate connectivity and a sense of community online that have the potential to produce different results then what we see now.

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