Andrew Miller

In an opinion piece in yesterday’s New York Times, psychologist Sherry Turkle condensed her recent book “Alone Together” into one central thesis: that we are always communicating, but we have sacrificed conversation for connection. She observes that we spend increasing amounts of our lives ‘alone together.’ Turkle’s charge is a serious one: in the age of the smart-phone, mobile communication technologies “change not only what we do, but also who we are.” That’s quite an assertion, especially coming from someone whose work inspired many people (including myself) to pursue social computing research. But both the book and this opinion piece left me conflicted and sad, and it’s taken me a long time to understand just why: Turkle never actually makes the argument. [Read more →]

Beatrice Kay — Mention My Name in Sheboygan

Mention my name in Sheboygan, and you might hear that I have some bulldog puppies for sale, or that I’m a reverend on the lam. If you believe my inbox, I also have a mother who keeps goats, run a B&B in Wales, book bands for my bar in Savannah, and promised to bring a keg to that one party.

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Just over a week ago, I got engaged. My boyfriend of almost eight years and I were visiting Scotland, where my extended family lives and where my parents were born, grew up together and got married. Our last full day was a bright and breezy one, and we spent it walking the streets of Edinburgh. That afternoon, atop a hill I hadn’t climbed since before we met, Robert proposed and handed me a ring and I said yes and we cried and everything was wonderful. I can sort of reconstruct the order of events retroactively, but while it was all happening I experienced the jumbled long-now I’d only ever felt in moments of extreme fear or pain. Among the many feelings that washed through me then and for the dazed half-hour or so we spent looking down on the Scottish capitol, the most insistent one was an intense desire to get to a computer. And about an hour and a half later, when we reached the flat, I pulled up Facebook on my iPad and changed my relationship status to “engaged.”
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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.

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Evernote is a service that lets people take notes, clip webpages, and make lists.  In this respect, it is quite an ordinary service, and it joins the legion of student design projects and lukewarm startups trying to help people “get things done.” But its true worth is as a study of the future of software: multi-platform, mobile, and constantly updated.

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I have never been a particularly assiduous or insightful blogger. I blogged a bit when I studied abroad, mainly as an alternative to group e-mails, and I had a blog a few years ago where I posted links and items of interest.  Since that time, a host of ways for me to share tidbits has supplanted those efforts: twitter for status updates, flickr for photos, Google Reader for shared links, last.fm for music… It’s even got to the point where I now use a status aggregator (SocialThing) to publish and keep track of my friends’ activities across all these services. I’ve also gotten an iPhone, which lets me consume and produce these social data with a volume and voracity that would certainly shock previous generations, and indeed many of the less hyper-connected in my own. [Read more →]