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Blog wrap-up: Giving thanks for moments passed and speculating on what's to come
In the spirit of holiday decompression, here are a few tidbits to mull over as you recover from turkey food coma and awkward moments with extended family.
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Obama's appointees: Lessons learned from science?
Over the last week, we’ve learned that the Obama administration will be largely comprised of superstar members of Washington’s elite sphere. Could Obama’s choice of seasoned insiders be the perfect complement to his outside the beltway form of strength?
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Blog Wrap Up: Death, Post-Election, and Conceptual Art
On Gnovis: Halloween arrives three weeks late
The CSCW conference inspired Jed to write about user death (both voluntary and involuntary, physical and digital) and the implications this has for Social Networking Sites (SNS). Jess Vitak responds with her own take on why users don’t delete their profiles: "the costs are too high and the incentives are too low." What do you think?
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Productive Monsters: the up-side of Hollywood's most destructive characters
With finals coming and PhD applications looming for many of us, it is no
wonder WIRED’s retrospective “The Creatures that Ate Hollywood” delighted me.
King Kong Vs. Godzilla, 1962
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Death of a User: The Overlooked Use-Case
For all the time we spend detailing use cases for ever imaginable "happy path", when was the last time we stopped to create a use case that accounts for the "death" of a user? Are we good/humble enough developers to handle the potential that our users might want to, well… leave?
"User death" was a topic that I kept running into at CSCW this year. Not in any papers or presentations, instead the topic was relegated to quiet conversations where people dared challenge the impenetrable user/technology dyad. During one of the first nights at CSCW, I spent a good deal of time speaking with Mike Massimi, a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto. He was kind enough to share some recent theoretical work he submitted to SIGCHI about what he calls "thanatosensitive design." Quoting one his professors, “It’s an odd feeling seeing a recent e-mail in your inbox from someone who is no longer here to receive the reply.” Massimi suggests that we need to reconsider user-centered design to account for our inevitable deaths.
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Blog Wrap Up
On Gnovis:
A sermon in her family’s church, frames an ethical and moral
wrestling match in Sarah Thompson’s first (hopefully of many) blog for gnovis. She
asks:“Rights…how do we draw a line between what constitutes a
right and what does not, while respecting peoples’ differences? ….When is culture
itself a right, and when does culture stand in the way of rights?”Category: The Gnovis Blog
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War Veterans, the American Bureaucratic Machine, and the Continuing Cultural Exclusion of Affect
Watching CNN yesterday morning I got very sad and angry thinking about the affectless, bureaucratic nightmare that physically and psychologically injured or disabled living American vets frequently have to endure, in return for having put their lives on the line; or that surviving dependent families of veterans who have to endure on top of having lost their loved one. While there is a decent amount of visibility about the challenges of the return and transition home for the visibly or invisibly injured veterans, the inadequacy in care is glaring.
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Culture and Social Media: The Issue of Privacy
This morning at the ICCT intercultural coffee hour, the Yahoo! Fellows presented some interesting data and analysis about how users in the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) countries are using social networking. A significant aspect of their research is on privacy, both how users choose exercise their privacy online, but also how it is used by social network sites to market to new users (e.g . Facebook with stricter privacy settings, MySpace with looser ones.)
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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When Wrestling With Rights, Thanks Be To Blogs!
In a session of Adult Sunday School in the church of a Midwestern town, a local leader of the Lakota Sioux Tribe passed around slips of paper. He told those in attendance to write down, in ranking order, the things in life that were most important. Once the lists were complete, the leader asked participants to name the items that topped their lists, and share why these items were so meaningful. After some minutes of discussion, the leader instructed that all must tear off one of the items, and relinquish those scraps of paper to him.
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Blog wrapup: Election!, online behavior, and justifications
at gnovis, election!
Before November 4th @ 8PM PST:
The election left us netizens awash with technical ways in which to observe, participate and predict the outcomes of this election. I wrote about a grass-roots initiative to detect voting problems via Twitter at TwitterVote. Ashley, talked about the proliferation of poll-watching websites, but reminded "everyone that no matter what all the projection polls say, the only poll that really matters is the last one… Isn’t it time for us to get to call elections like the talking heads on TV? Yes. It. Is."
Category: The Gnovis Blog