“I believe that making “nigger” the dirtiest word in America has had the perverse effect of legitimizing the racism it stands for.”
—John Perry Barlow, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Private communication
Social web anxiety
Social anxiety is “an experience of anxiety (emotional discomfort, fear, apprehension or worry) regarding social situations and being evaluated by other people”. Sounds familiar?
As popularity and use of social websites magnify, social anxiety is shifting to the social web. Wired’s how-to-wiki has even come up with a detailed set of Facebook etiquette rules. These include:
One should not friend another whom they have no association or connection with whatsoever.
When speaking with someone whom you have been casually ‘facebook stalking’, try to pretend you do not know everything about them.
Drunken facebooking can get you in trouble.
And this is just the beginning. I am finding it very interesting to ask people how they discriminate between facebook friends and non-friends, what friend requests they reject/accept and what techniques they use to painlessly remove unwanted friends [1]. The bottom line is that we are all getting slightly “socially-web anxious”.
1. Towards an ontology of facebook friends? Sad.
“Students exposed to subliminal Apple logos were found to answer questions more creatively than subjects exposed to subliminal IBM logos”
—Harper’s Magazine. Findings. June 2008. Originally from Fitzsimons et al., Journal of Consumer Research, Vol 35. 2008.
priority lines
“Ryanair operates an unassigned seating policy, so specific seats cannot be pre-booked. However, we operate a Priority Boarding system (fees apply unless using Online Check-In) which allows you to choose your own seat on board.”
The new Ryanair Priority Boarding system is creating novel dynamics of air travel. Most people check-in online so they get free priority boarding. I have also seen many people buy a last-minute priority boarding ticket (5 UK pounds) at the gates. Two lines form at the boarding gates, one with priority passengers, the other with “normal” passengers. I have seen people stand in line as early as 50-60 minutes before their flight time of departure, to make sure they get the “best seat”. Is the middle seat really that bad? Is it worth waiting one hour standing in line to get an aisle or window seat for a flight which probably takes - uhm!? - one hour?
“The knowledge society is not an immaterial society, but a new phase in the material reality of capitalism.”
—Christian Fuchs. Towards a Global Sustainable Information Society. tripleC. Vol. 4 No.1
TwitFlick is an interactive data visualization that pulls real time tweets from Twitter and matches them to Flickr images. WebbyFlick does the same thing for 5-word Webby Award acceptance speeches. The images go up. A story is born.
Mark Hansen, Lilly Nguyen, Sasank Reddy, Jeffrey Mascia and I worked on the concept and development of them. Digital Kitchen worked on the visualization. Full credits here.
treehugging RIP
My old website (treehugging.org) and my blogger (albertopepe.blogspot.com) now redirect here.
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