Andrew Miller

You’ve probably noticed the ‘lifestream’ section on this site. (If not, have a look and come back when you’re done. I’ll still be here.) It’s mainly an attempt to inject some fresh content into my otherwise extremely static website – a mishmash of twitter updates, recommended blog entries, and photos I’ve taken. But it’s also a conscious effort to project a personal/professional identity in a way that a ‘hobbies’ page (or any other GeoCities anachronism) just couldn’t. The idea is that at any given time, the snapshot of my thoughts/music tastes/etc. will provide a representative sampling of ‘me’ – or at least what it would be like to be Facebook friends with me. All of this is made possible, of course, by the increasing amount of social data we generate and consume online. If you’re like me (in this small regard at least), you’ve been gradually accumulating a collection of online activities that generate their own RSS feeds, all pumping out this information to nobody in particular.  We’re fast approaching an inflection point – if any given activity, online or otherwise, can painlessly be converted into a ’stream’ and broadcast to anyone who cares to subscribe, it falls to us to decide what gets broadcast and to whom.

This age of social data presents us with a new set of tools for self-presentation and peripheral awareness, and countless new ways to be awkward. For example, a former colleague used to update twitter so comprehensively that he even tweeted his bathroom breaks. But such early-stage hiccups are not the big story here – every electronic medium has its own specific “reply all” potential. The real change is the new computational layer mediating our interactions with each other and our environment. Using FourSquare on my iPhone, I can tell people when I’m at a bar (or when I’m actually in the office for a change!). Using Google Reader I can share blog entries or newspaper articles I find interesting, and attach a short note (especially important if irony is involved). Using Last.fm I can share what music I’m listening to right now, and anyone who clicks through to my profile can get a pretty good picture of my music-listening preferences. Facebook lets me share all of the above, as well as update my status and comment on any of my friends’ actions. And of course, there’s Twitter, which I use mainly as a way to stay in touch with techie friends in academia and industry, but which often veers into in-jokes and gossipmongering anyway.

In fact I create so much social data every day, that when setting up my ‘lifestream’ I found myself selecting a subset of all the possible data I could push. I told myself at the time that this was to avoid the andrewmiller.net visitor from feeling overwhelmed, but really it was an exercise in self-curation – the selection of information about myself that I wanted to represent me as if it were my real-time CV. I chose to make this a service-level decision, excluding FaceBook (which is where I discuss emotional, political, and other semi-private topics). But I have on occasion gone in and removed certain tweets that for one reason or another I felt were not appropriate for andrewmiller.net but I didn’t feel like removing from Twitter.

I admit I’m an early test-case, but I think we’re months, not years away from my generation having to deal with these issues. As services like FaceBook open up our homepages to the public (or at least allow us to do so) and as services like Twitter, with a culture of public sharing, reach mass adoption, our virtual and physical identities are going to have to merge. This is one of the central issues I’m trying to unpack in the Human-Centered Computing program here at Georgia Tech, and I’d be interested to hear your thoughts. Comment, shoot me an email, send me a tweet @andrewmiller or whatever other channel you’d like.