208B: Blog Assignment 3

I forgot I still had a Tribe account (I had my Orkut account deleted a while back). I'll talk about Tribe.

Presentation of self on Tribe.net: A Picture is worth a thousand words, true... but things like smell, taste and feeling are such a big part of our RL social networks that I don't see what YASNS really provide. Of course, all YASNS are necessarily limited... to get an experience even a tenth as rich as a f2f meeting, many technological, political and infrastructural changes would have to be made to Tribe.

'People' on Tribe are consistent of their profile, their friends and any listings or testamonials.

Profile: Profiles on Tribe consist of a picture (or lack thereof), basic demographic information, interests, etc. ... this is the most Goffman-like of pieces to the dramaturgy of Tribe. People don't say things like, "I often smell funny" or "I've got a weight problem" or "I'm a goddamn alcoholic". This is because they don't want to put forward anything that they aren't comfortable looking at... or that they aren't comfortable having others look at.

The image chosen is quite important... more can be said with this single thumbnail than in the entire profile. However, this can be the most deceiving part, I can imagine... as people will choose only a picture that they're comfortable with. It takes a unique person to put up a picture that isn't all that flattering.

friends: After digesting someone's profile, the Tribe surfer inevitably will look at the profile's (err, "person's") friends... which can be either direct connections or members of the person's tribes. For example, there is a "UC Berkeley - SIMS" Tribe... I don't know all the people in it, even having been at SIMS for a little while, but I do know some and those are friends.

Listings: Are probably the least interesting thing on Tribe... it seems to be a classified advertising-sort of thing... with the classification not being what the ad is for but who is putting it forth.

Testamonials: This part of a Tribe "person" is actually quite interesting. This consists of things that others say about you... with your approval, of course. Naturally, most people don't approve of things that they don't want others to see... for any number of reasons (risqueness, meanness, etc.).

Now I'm going to explore a little more of the classes blogs and add to the above...

• Dave makes some good points... notably that while an occasional friend of a friend could be interesting, most aren't... as well, that there are certain friends that must be kept at a distance from each other... YASNS don't allow you to have different articulations of your friends to accomplish what you might have in real life (like, if this person is looking at my profile, show them this).

• Shane talks about that last bit too:

  It would be an interesting experiement to allow users to configure every aspect of their profile to appear differenly to each potential audience, and be configurable not just in terms of degrees of distances (friend vs friend of friend) but also in terms of categories of friends (professional, personal, romantic, platonic, close friend, acquaintance).

• And Margaret hits home with:

  I realize that you can never know what another person thinks about you, but I put a lot of weight on the grey area of trust and shared experience. Hell, I'm a huge proponent of social networks and find analyses of them to be fascinating. I'm just not, personally, comfortable in the ones online. [...] The whole things seems somewhere between a MMORPG with real people and going to a party where you have to wear a sign on your chest saying your hobbies and interests. [...] I don't see the appeal. Despite not being a blog reader before this class, I would much rather read people's blogs.
  Which brings up a good point about blogs... the context is usually already there for blog readers... none of this listing-of-traits crap... in that sense, it's closer to RL interaction, I suppose.

• Denise talks about the whole notion of Identity...:

  Peter said in class the other day that there's no such thing as identity. I'm not sure I believe that. And neither do my other personalities....

• Josh talks about the possible flakieness of fakesters (flakesters?):

  I don't know who, exactly, is controlling the city presentation; and while I might like Amsterdam because of its beautiful canals and Dutch art museums, the controller of the profile might one day decide to change the presentation to be pot and hookers. And thus, my presentation is instantly skewed (because of the contents of my friends list). I feel like a city is just too broad an entity to be able to be accurately represented... On the other hand, I could probably make the same argument about a person.

• Dan points out how limited these services are in terms of interaction:

  Furthermore, these social network sites seem much more passive that Donath's usenet groups and Turkle's MUD. In my different social circles, there is much less interactivity between people on Friendster as there would be in Turkle's MUD examples.

• Carolyn points out how frustrating it can be when the spectrum of presentation-of-self up and changes on your damn profile:

  I have heard similar stories from my friends, and so clearly being forced to categorize ones self in the range of choices provided by these sites causes some considerable stress. I am interested to go into friendster now and discover more relationship choices, including open relationship. But since I have not edited my profile in ages, I was still down as in a relationship. With the addition of the new option, of course, this description takes on new meaning. Suddenly, the implications of "in a relationship" has changed, and friendster has recast my online identity without my even realizing it. Interesting. (Jesse says: "You might have been missing out on so much ass!")

Posted by joebeone at Abril 17, 2004 01:11 PM | TrackBack