Letters to Phillip

Re: Facebook

No I’m not bored! But there are only so many times you can listen to a Dudley Benson song on repeat before you start to think maybe you should do something else with your day…

I was amazed at a Tori Amos concert last week when a guy sitting on my right was texting someone on his phone for the first 4 songs and the two girls on my left were yelling at people in front of them to sit down during the encore and when people ignored them they just started having a loud conversation with each other over the music!

And that’s what concerns me about lifestreaming: it encourages people to place value on attendance (checking in) over awareness, and for people to document proof (like taking camera phone shots) instead of just enjoying the situation. I think I’ve heard someone describe this as “living your life as an observer”.

I’m worried that I’m sounding like a snob, and to be honest I don’t mind what other people do, and I’m not upset or distracted by people doing this but I just find it curious.

Actually, at the Tori Amos concert there was a different example that made me really happy. A girl sitting in front of me was streaming the concert to her friend via facetime. I could see her friend at home listening to the concert and she was getting all emotional and crying. I thought that was beautiful.

You’re right how people seem to be attracted to apps that produce social content faster and faster. I think photo apps have the wow factor because (unlike you) most people aren’t great photographers. I hope you’re also right about things eventually balancing out and people moving towards slower (and more reflective) experiences.

Facebook

Dear Phillip, I know you’re not a huge fan of Facebook, but I’ve never asked why. Do you have any specific reasons or just a general disinterest? I know some people have quit because of privacy concerns or because it takes up a lot of time, but why are you not an active user?

Doesn’t “user” sound sort of ominous in that context? Like you’re a drug addict?! I guess in a way Facebook can be addictive. Are all addictions unhealthy?

I’m interested because I’ve been having doubts lately about my use of Facebook. The idea is that it helps to keep friends keep in contact with each other right? But I’m starting to think that the type of interactions that Facebook promotes are basically superficial, and dont’ really do anything to strengthen friendships at all.

On one hand I think it’s really cool that you have this portable network of friends, so that for instance I can head over to words-with-friends and sign in with Facebook and see right away who’s already playing so I don’t feel like I’m spamming people, but at the same time there is something about updates, comments, and likes all being semi-public (or public if you’ve not tightened your privacy settings!).

When you update your status you’re not talking to friends you’re broadcasting. It’s a subtle difference but I think it’s important because in the act of writing to an individual there is a sort of value in the fact that I took the time and effort to do that. But on the other hand if I’m just sending it to anyone I think it looses value.

As an example I was eating a Wendy’s combo yesterday and sent some iMessages showing my before and after photos of my meal to a friend in Switzerland because we used to have a weekend ritual of getting Wendy combos then driving up Mt Eden listening to ABBA to eat them at the top. Anyway, the point is that I felt closer to her with that little private exchange of messages than anything I’ve experienced on Facebook recently.

Sociologists must have thought about this problem before (or maybe not since the technology that supports it is fairly new) I wonder what they call that value.

Anyway, I can see why Facebook would want to promote this: the more updates you produce and the more connections you have the more content they have to deliver and the more opportunities they have for advertising revenue. I think that might be a fundamental challenge for Facebook: their model is based around growth. More people. More connections. More updates. When actually what people want is to nurture their friendships. To me Facebook is starting to feel a bit like an implied competition: who has the most friends? who is going on the best holidays? the craziest parties? Anyway, maybe I’ll feel completely different in another six months.

What do you think? Write me back, I’m going to go eat cherry ice cream and watch a kung fu movie!

Activity Streams

Dear Phillip,

Don’t you think social networks are amazing? In all of history we’ve never had information on such a mass scale about the social groups that people form.

There must be some amazing questions that could be answered with this information. I think it’s sad that the best we’ve managed so far is “hey: what are you doing right now?”

Re: Biking Home

Is this spam or are you high on coconut oil?

It’s neither! it’s the start of a long and rewarding correspondence!

Biking Home

Dear Phillip,

Boston is starting to get chilly again… it snowed last weekend.

After the gym (do you remember?) there was a wind and it was so cold! I wasn’t looking forward to crossing the Charles because I didn’t take a jacket with me.

But the wind was blowing at exactly the same direction as the bridge, so all I had to do was bike at the same speed as the wind and everything became still. It was very odd to be moving quickly but not having the wind in your face. Quite eerie.

The Clock

Dear Phillip,

I saw an amazing video installation at the MFA last night called “The Clock”.

It’s a 24 hour mashup of scenes from different movies. Every scene shows either shows someone looking at their watch, or asking the time or maybe just showing a clock in the background. But the time shown in that scene matches the time in real life, so as well as being a film about clocks, the film is a funcional clock itself (so meta!)

That might not sound very exciting, but the scenes were really carefully edited together often with some sort of pun (like similar or contrasting scenes from different films and eras being tied together) and also it was just fun to watch the clips and figure out which ones you recognized (ghostbusters was the most obvious).

I went along at 10pm (the museum opened for 24 hours to show it) and it was great being able to walk through the museum with most of the lights off and almost no one around. At the actual showing it was surprisingly crowded and I had to sit on the floor.

The funniest thing that happened was after I’d been there a while I wondered to myself what time it was before realizing that I was watching a giant clock…

I only stayed for 40 minutes because I hadn’t eaten anything, but decided to go back at midnight because I thought they would have lots of great clips from horror movies etc, but I guess everyone else had the same idea because it was so packed that I couldn’t even get in the door.

I think you would have liked it a lot!

the biographer’s art

“everyone’s life is a subject worthy of the biographer’s art”

That’s a really cool idea. It made me think about the different classes of biography that exist:

• you life told by yourself = autobiography
• you life told by someone else = biography
• your life told by your friends = sociobiography

At first I started to think that this is what Facebook is: an account of your life as told by your friends (and yourself) but then I realized that it’s nothing like that at all because although we’re collecting all this data about what people are doing every day; it will never make an adequate biography because browsing through an archive of updates and tweets doesn’t provide any context and hasn’t been edited to tell a story or give any meaning.

I used to be a little annoyed at how difficult it was to browse your Twitter history but now I can’t think why because these updates loose most of their value after a short time. Interesting that Facebook seems to be taking a different approach by providing more tools to browse explore your history of updates.

Nerd Night

Dear Phillip.

I went to a monthly event called “Nerd Night Boston”. It was a lot of fun, the first speaker talked about a film genre called ‘mumblecore’ which are low budget films that don’t really have a specific plot but instead focus on telling the story of relationships between everyday people. It reminded me a lot about the biography that Alain de Botton wrote about his girlfriend because he believed that “everyone’s life is a subject worthy of the biographer’s art”.

Do you think that a talk about the topic of “design and time” would be interesting? I was thinking about asking if I could present a talk about that at a Nerd Night.

I think it would be interesting to talk about time from the perspective of design with aspects from just how we represent it (e.g. static dates “August 29” vs. relative “2 days ago”) to trends (e.g. like how we’ve progressed from websites being static timeless information, to blogs that popularized reverse-chronological ordering, to where we are today with so much emphasis on what’s happening “right now”).

Of course it would really just be an opportunity to make some great Dr Who references. What do you think?