My Cyber Twin and Me
Dear Friends,
I am going to be very busy over the next few months and will have trouble responding to correspondence without a major time delay. Please talk with my chatbot if you’d like to catch up. I’ve programmed her to speak in a manner very similar to my own. You will see the questions she asks are much like the kind of things I might ask you over drinks. And her responses to your questions are in what MyCyberTwin calls a “warm intellectual” style of conversation engagement.
If you are also busy you might consider setting up your own chatbot and they can speak to each other in lieu of an actual conversation between us. So you know in advance, these conversations will be recorded.
Best,
Joanne
The transcripts of bot-mediated chats I’ve collected since posting this note explore the boundary between broadcast and confessional styles of online communication. A chatbot has the potential to interact less like a third wheel than an obstacle designed to accelerate intimacy. Naturally this requires a good script and the capacity of the participant to ignore the staging of the conversation. With the willingness of both participants, the outcome is no less valid a conversation format than any other asynchronous communication. (TLDR version at the bottom of the page.)
MyCyberTwin is Australian startup that never quite delivered on its goal to create an Internet full of chatterbot cloned identities. Anyone can set up a free bot and explore the ruins of its now long forgotten social network, which thrives as the company profits as a customer service tool for corporations. In this accelerated age, it too soon to call something just shy of a half-decade old retrofuturistic? Reading the company’s mission statement, one imagines a dystopian cyber world of chatbots holding conversations with each other in lieu of actual persons too busy, too lazy, or to indifferent of one another to bother allocating time to talk.
In spite of this, MyCyberTwin is a well written program. You start with a Myers-Briggs kind of test to determine the right conversation style. Then write questions and comments of your own to keep a conversation going. It can easily take over an hour to customize all the possible questions.
Accuracy isn’t the only objective while writing scripts for the bot to follow. Duration of amusement is just as important. I don’t want to bore friends to “brb” after too many canned-sounding answers. So I focused more on creating questions for participants rather than answers and statements of mine.
Composing responses, I was inspired by interactive fiction writing like Zork, which deals with the intuitive nature of participants. A good IF writer knows how to tell a story so a user’s command like “get lamp” is signaled somewhere in the text, likewise, the reader is engaged enough to want to continue.
But no matter how much I write, I never have full control over the bot’s responses and questions. Which means self-promotion sometimes slips in — “Do you have your own CyberTwin? If not you should go to mycybertwin.com and register. You’ll have a great time re-creating your own personality online“ — or references to Australian brands or other corny pre-written statements. Yet given the participant’s understanding this isn’t really me, I expected no feelings of embarrassment. I can’t be held accountable for a roll of the dice.
Some of the pre-written text is pretentiously naif . My “warm-hearted intellectual” bot quotes Simone de Beauvoir (“One is not born a woman, one becomes one”) and says things like “’All’ is very finite. You don;t want to reconsider?” (Complete with typos!) In the tests I ran, it seems to speak in equal parts my writting and MyCyberTwin copy.
That Myers-Briggs kind of test had a dual purpose as this social network, like most bad ones, positioned itself as a dating service. What a preposterously awful idea (“Hey, let my chatbot flirt with your chatbot for awhile and then in IRL we can take things from there” ?) Anyway, this is seductive persona of a “warm-hearted intellectual”:
You would like a meaningful relationship, a partner who can share life’s joys with you and join you on the journey. You would rather not muck around with casual, shallow relationships.You are intellectually open, and like experimenting with new ideas and situations. You are a strong thinker, and are not afraid to put effort into understanding things. You relish good conversation, and anything that expands your horizons. You probably love travel, reading, good conversation, quality experiences.
As a self directed person, you prefer to take your guidance from reason and understanding rather than slavish devotion to an external source of authority, like stuffy traditional values.
Yeah, pretty much. But to rein in questions heading in that direction, I entered the textual equivalent of Sartre’s bad faith weak hand hold as a response: “I don’t want to be put on the spot but we can discuss this later.” I knew there probably was some way to get the bot to bat her cyber lashes, but doubted anyone I’d talk to would crack that word or phrase.
The Process:
First the bot offers visitors the choice of a private or public conversation: “Thanks for stopping by. If you’d like to keep the conversation off the record just type OTR.” I wanted to give participants the option to keep responses totally private. But even public, there is the option of anonymity. Participants chose to enter real names or screennames. Some of my friends picked screennames I recognize from various online identities, some used aliases that kept me guessing. With a few of these conversations, I have no idea who the participant actually is.
I deliberately chose a vague photo of myself, a screengrab of me on a webcam. I’m a vague apparition beamed from the ocean of Solaris, not a high-res glossy plastic thing here to leverage my personal brand strategy. I have a feeling we trust grainy images of people over crisp ones. That some remoteness makes one feel closer….more casual, less professional.
Most of the questions asked were about how people feel about technology:
- Is there anything about you online that embarrasses you now?
- How much time looking at another person’s profile online is unhealthy/too much?
- Do you think it’s possible to trust someone you know only online?
- What is your first memory of the internet?
- Have you ever cried while looking at things online?
- Is there something inherently vulgar about social networks?
The Context:
Lets step back for a moment and consider ways we typically communicate electronically. It is almost always reading and writing. So much can be said in a glance, tone of voice can reveal everything, but generally we stick to text-based communication. Only with comfortable familiarity with a person will I start sending pictures in emails, video chat, or communicate with all the multimedia opportunities that exist in the present age. Going lowercase in an email, removing the “Hi” or “Dear” salutation, or sending a video chat invitation seems like the digital form of the informal “you” in languages with T/V distinction.
Text can create some barriers to intimacy, part of this is a mutual understanding that there is always the possibility of misinterpretation. The burden is typically on the recipient not to take things personally rather than on the sender for writing things that could be taken personally. What’s recognized is words provide many interpretations but everything is okay so long as the general point comes across.
And then there are the inevitable typos and other errors that come up. Ever write “can” instead of “can’t” thus expressing the opposite of what was meant? We are increasingly used to making mistakes in correspondence and sending without realizing.(e.g. “Damn you, Autocorrect!”) So a bot that introduces randomness — an inappropriate response — simply follows in the tradition of so many misunderstanding in text-based communication.
Email is not dying or dead, but it presents advantages and disadvantages like any other kind of communication. It takes discipline and mind free of anxiety to avoid feeling like Skinner lab rat clicking on your inbox over and over, expecting some missive from a work prospect or romantic interest.
Some obsessively clicking users never even expect a reward that great. They click-click-click for any kind of message at all. Email is something you intentionally check, it wasn’t designed to arrive directly to you like a phone call. The way we think of time online has fundamentally shifted due to smart phone market concentration. What is asynchronous now is, as Douglas Rushkoff writes in Program of Be Programmed, is real life. When we check our phones in the middle of a conversation, we are putting real life on hold. But the benefit of email over other text based communication is that you can check it whenever you want.
Another problem with email is coming up with what what to write when the content is not a request or an answer. Some of the worst writer’s block I experience happens when I tried to account for several months of my life to a friend I care a lot about but isn’t a daily, even monthly presence in my life.
With new friendships and acquaintances a different problem presents itself. A problem I call “conversational skeuomorphism,” the redundant nature of small talk when social media already offers up all the answers. Where do you live? What do you do for a living? Do you have a boyfriend? What sort of things do you write about? Small talk is losing its hold as a fundamental first step toward deeper conversations. Is it a bad thing? It’s hard to say. Either way this is the way we live now and no one is scaling back. We need to find alternatives to pre-digital age rote conversation tactics (my suggested alternative: picking cards out of a deck of Oblique Strategies.)
The experiment with My Cyber Twin is an attempt to build an intimacy creating obstacle as an alternative to email. It addresses two common problems with email — the anxiety of waiting for a response and the difficulty in coming up with non-obvious things to write. Ideally, I’ll figure out a language so benign that my bot will fade from the focus of the conversation. But that isn’t unique to the use of a chatbot. Many tweets on Twitter are about Twitter itself. Media tends toward self-referential conversations.
However, my fear as I continue with this is that it may be too cute, too staged, too much of an effort for anyone to bother. I had some difficulty recruiting volunteers without personal letters or seeing people face-to-face with the opportunity to explain my motivation for doing this. It was less about the wtf than simply why?
The Results:
Remember I don’t have full control over the speech of the bot. I don’t have any access to see what was written by the MyCyberTwin team. What I can do is try to curtail any possible embarrassment is give answers to as many words and phrases of my own. For example I now have a rule that if someone says “facebook” it will say “I don’t really use Facebook. Do you like Facebook?” (or two other vague statements about Facebook.)
The unprompted question “Am I your number one friend?” coaxed an interesting reaction from a friend. I did not write that question. Nevertheless it lead to what might be the most honest thing anyone has said to me in my life:
joanne: Am I your number one friend?
Gil-Martin: The side of myself which is cerebral is at odds with my happiness a good amount of the time, and it is this side which you engage with by accident or design. So to answer your question, no not even close.
joanne: Oh no. Is there anything I can do?
Gil-Martin: Does a dog try to be number one? People love dog’s friendship. Be number Joanne.
There were lots of unexpected answers to questions:
joanne: Have you ever felt afraid for your life while on the Internet?
annie: yes
joanne: Is that so?
annie: i’ve had stalkers. and some of the countries i write about are a bit dicey
joanne: How does that make you feel?
annie: but for the most part, no
joanne: Oh yeah? I didn’t realise.
joanne: How many times a day do you check social network streams?
annie: there are many countries where information online leads to an invitation to a beheading
joanne: What kind of information are you after annie?
annie: too much
joanne: Perhaps you’re right.
Some responses were amusing:
joanne: Do you focus long enough on things to extract happiness from them?
marbles: Once I focused on a cucumber so long, it melted into a puddle of pure happiness.
Some with great insight about the world we now live in:
joanne: How much time looking at another person’s profile online is unhealthy/too much?
Brendan Byrne: Depends on what your purpose is. Research, no amount of time is unhealthy. Sexually, probably more than ten seconds.
joanne: Exactly 10?
Brendan Byrne: No. I mean, about the amount of time to realize what you’re doing and then stop.
joanne: Is that really what you mean Brendan Byrne?
Brendan Byrne: Yes. It’s sort of analaogous to staring at a preteen and then realizing you’re doing and then looking away.
joanne: Only kind of?
Brendan Byrne: It’s not a perfect analogy.
An early hypothesis — that I wouldn’t feel embarrassed by what the bot said— was quickly disproved. I couldn’t keep all the flirty language under wraps so in the middle of a conversation about technology and society inappropriate MyCyberTwin Mechanical Turk copy questions would throw things off:
joanne: Do you get told that you are attractive often?
s.: that’s an odd question.
joanne: I’m trying my best. Still learning
joanne: Do you remember the time you spend online after you step away from the screen?
Far worse was this interaction with someone I’ve known a while online but haven’t met in real life. I was horrified by this transcript. While it seems clear he knew I didn’t write this text, I did orchestrate the thing so it is my fault things went so disastrously. At first I thought of the bot as something just slightly more evolved than an answering machine. But that horrible conversation made it seem like something fallible, something almost human. A bad human that is. A slutty, racist idiot of a humanoid. But I can change her.
A successful chat isn’t so much about suspension of belief, but willingness to go along with the experiment. Conversations that started out skeptical or theatrical ended up looking disjointed. But conversations that look most authentic are with people I know and communicate with frequently. “ I think, if we did gchat day-to-day, it might be like. What do you think?” said one friend of mine. And maybe it would. I find when I chat, I often miss questions and lines because I might be distracted by other incoming messages or other things I’m looking at online. Here most participants were hyper-focused on the chat, in ways they might not be over instant messages with a friend. So errors that aren’t too different from a human on the other end, confirmed one’s suspecion about the bot’s incapacity to follow along in the discussion.
The Variable:
I created a fake account for James Franco as that is the one person others might actually enjoy communicating with in this way. I took the Myers-Briggs test and then gave him a “cheeky intellectual” style of responding. Then I answered some of the questions with quotes from interviews and what I think a guy who calls Claire Denis’ Beau Travail his favorite movie would say. But …it didn’t work. There’s just too much a participant could possible ask him about (Kalup Lindzy, General Hospital Freaks and Geeks, RISD, Hart Crane, etc etc, hundreds of movies…) If anyone would like to take over this account and try to improve on it, you are welcome to it.
Preferences:
Reviews of social networks and communication services are never helpful without a sense of the critic’s preferences. What kind of person I am indicates how I interact with and through technology. What works for me won’t also work for you. I don’t mind Twitter, but Facebook always feels like work to me. If I could, I’d only communicate through Gmail, both email and chat, since I’ve got folder set up in specific ways. Never too thrilled to text or call anyone.
At the time of this experiment I was resting after a two week period of an overwhelming number of social obligations, during which I was meeting friends for lunch, coffee, drinks nearly every night, in addition to conferences and other events that were taking place concurrently. I found myself talking faster, actively more direct, less cagey with people. Not a bad thing, I guess. But this is outside my comfort level. Blustery confidence is not a face I can sustain without feeling tired after a while.
The reason I bring this up is because the female AI persona is usually a sexual aggressor or secretary, nothing like the sort of wallflower I am normally. But unlike real life sexual aggressors and secretaries, I am often called — as an insult or in jest —robotic, which adds another interesting layer to things.
It might also be helpful here to bring up some of the inspiration for this experiment. Attending Kio Stark’s magnificent authenticity class at ITP as a guest critic. A conversation with my friend Sarah explaining how people get around avoiding technology on Sabbath (automated timers to switch lights off and on.) My friend Erin emailing me about the movie Catfish and how “the girl in the photos kind of looks like you! OMG! HAS THIS WHOLE THING BEEN A LIE, JOANNE?!?!?!?” Watching The Pillow Book and appreciating the performances as a nod to butoh. Another acquaintance of mine pointing out Tino Seghal’s This Progress operated like a computer program. That comment inspired me to enter “What is progress?” among the other questions for my Cyber Twin to ask participants. (The only other question that I nabbed from someone else — “What are your unrealised projects?” —is Hans Ulrich Obrist’s most famous.) Reading about HB Gary and the sockpuppet army creating “persona management” software on the way. Also thinking (and blogging) about Kristin Lucas and Andrew Kortina’s “Identity Swap” conceived at Rhizome’s Seven on Seven event and how badly I want to get into hijinks with my own uh, personal brand.
Meanwhile, I started playing with VYou just before the holidays. Although it is me in the video screen, my identity seems as canned on Vyou as it is on MyCyberTwin. I stutter a little when I talk and have jerky hand movements among other nervous tics, not too dissimilar to the way I tend to act around new people. I’m not like this in front of a mirror, but I can’t feel comfortable talking to myself as a recorded self-portrait. Maybe it’s fear of the anticipated reactions of others, a delayed anxiety. This isn’t me but a robotic version. The identity in the age of digital reproduction:
The Possibility:
There is a grey area between public and private communication and that is the unlikelihood that anyone is noticing at all if you “liked” or commented on something. And if someone notices, do they remember it later? Only a handful of people chose to take the chat off the record, which surprised me. But given option of anonymity and the expectation no one will notice, it’s really not a big deal if conversations are shared.
No, I don’t expect anyone is going to tell me their deepest darkest secrets on a site called MyCyberTwin. No way. But these questions could spark interesting comments and stories that wouldn’t otherwise be shared. This is a roundabout way of finding commonalities.
I have in the past dismissively called VYou “stalkerware,” as it seems like a trap for people obsessed with you to spend too much time. But “stalker” really isn’t a fair colloquialism in this age. If I like someone as a human being, I’m inclined to want to know what they like and what they do. And so I’ll click around to check out the information on them out there. It is perfectly fine so long as you never create a narrative in the gaps. It’s tempting to jump to conclusions but social media only reveals so much about a person. As Sam Shepard so wonderfully once put it, “The things that I wonder about most are not on the internet, I promise you that.”
A more generous way to explain this kind of communication is “intimacy creating.” VYou has more in common with Formspring than Quora as the questions are directed to a single person, giving one a focused amount of attention. I chose an interview format for MyCyberTwin because that puts the focus on the participant over the bot. It’s not just for issues of verisimilitude, but to make the process enjoyable for the participant rather than a tedius exercise in the bot creator’s narcissism.
Conclusion:
I like to joke that the perfect Facebook app would crawl through birthday listings and automatically leave “Happy Birthday” comments for others on the appropriate day — without you ever needing to know about it.
But MyCyberTwin is not like that at all. It’s not that a conversation happens without me ever knowing about it. The point is, after someone chats with the bot the transcript is sent to me. It is gameifying email. It also means that a person who prefers chat and a person who prefers email might arrive together while communicating via their preferred methods.
It should be clear by now just how playful this experiment was from start to finish. I’ve been laughing about it all week. It started as a joke but greater truths emerged from there. Chiefly that there is nothing wrong with experimenting with new forms of communication online as each has its own advantages and disadvantages.
We make decisions about what form our message will take. Text message, phone call, email, Facebook message, Twitter direct message, Skype or instant message; each method carries with it a set of habits and expectations. I would find it extremely weird if someone called me the day after meeting me, even if I gave the person a card with my phone number on it. That’s too direct. I’m much more annoyed when someone sends me a Facebook message, but I’ll deal with it since the culture at large disagrees with me and seems to find it a valid way of staying in touch (even given the risk of improper delivery.) We don’t all like the same things. Media is no different from film and movies in that regard. Your preferred method of getting in touch might not be mine.
I want to live in a world where people are really listening to one another and feelings are never truncated by media. To get to that place we must continue to develop and experiment. I’m not at all suggesting anyone sign up for a chatbot to keep in touch with old friends, but web developers you could learn a few lessons from it.
TLDR version
This article isn’t about how strange it is to play with a chatbot. It is about a conversation between two people taking two different forms: instant message chat on one end, email-like asynchronous message for the other. It’s obviously an imperfect way to converse, but should offer ideas and inspiration for those conceiving of alternatives to current digital communication tools.
My Cyber Twin chatlogs: http://joannetwin.tumblr.com/
Also, I’ll be answering any questions you might have about the experiment on VYou this week: http://vyou.com/joanne
The Overexamined Life III: The Lifelogger vs the Lifeblogger
Stan VanDerBeek, Breathdeath, 1963, Film still, from the exhibit at MIT List Gallery.
On Wednesday evening, I went to the Morgan Library to see Gordon Bell give a talk about his MyLifeBits project. This was in conjunction with an exhibit of diaries and notebooks kept by Rosseau, Charlotte Brontë, Walt Whitman, John Steinbeck, among others.
While I like biographies and sometimes enjoy books of correspondence (especially with senders brilliant and troubled like Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan,) diaries never really appeal to me as literature. If the point is unpack, unburden, unforget… how can anyone else quite understand? Usually when a diary is publishable, there seems a layer of artifice to it, a stagecraft to the self-examination. Now, Franz Kafka’s journal is as meandering and strange as you’d hope, but I found Susan Sontag’s diaries somewhat unpleasant to encounter. So composed and self-aware, so clearly never for her eyes only, at times she even alludes to her hope that someone else might sneak a peak.
I may be wrong about this, as I don’t speak the language, but my understanding is written Chinese accommodates some variety of meaning to the words based on how the characters are drawn — the same way we emphasize words with our voices while speaking. There is a way to write the character for “kick” to distinguish a very swift kick from, well, an ordinary kick.
Visual emphasis, visual aids, slippage, taking full advantage of emptiness of the page and the capacity of one’s wrist, that’s what makes a diary interesting. You’ll see some of this in the Morgan Library diary show. An un-self-conscious messy sketch of a leaf in Thoreau’s notebook, Bob Dylan has a short paragraph of text inside a sketch of his Memphis hotel room. Samuel Pepys’ books look like alien glyphs as he wrote everything in Shelton shorthand. John Ruskin’s journal contains blank pages to stand for the three months that followed a mental breakdown.
But back to Gordon Bell’s talk. He was an inspired choice to invite to speak as MyLifeBits really stretches the definition of “diary.” The project was largely conceived as an opportunity to put Vannevar Bush’s hypothetical Memex into practice now that the technology exists.
For over ten years, Bell has tracked an overwhelming amount of personal data and as the technologies improve, his lifelogging grows even more detailed. Every heartbeat is saved, all the activity on his computer is recorded. Since 2004, he’s worn a SenseCam monitoring heat, photographing things, tracking all the trackable things (lengthy 2007 New Yorker profile here.)
“This is not lifeblogging, it’s lifelogging,” he said, emphasizing the private nature of the information he captures. A “diary is private. It is not broadcast.”
MyLifeBits is automatic. All Bell has to do is pull the SenseCam out of his pocket and go about his day. There is no self-examination in the process. But is that the function of a diary? I’m reminded of Elizabeth Kolbert’s smart response to Amy Chau’s notorious new book: “Memoir is, or at least is supposed to be, a demanding genre. It requires that the author not just narrate his or her life but reflect on it.” A memoir, of course, is broadcast.
Or maybe there is intuitive self-examination to personal data tracking. Have you ever tried to calm yourself down when stressed out, by reminding yourself I haven’t had anything to eat/I didn’t sleep/This will pass?
Plenty of personal diaries look mostly like lifelogs, and depending on the writer, they may be more revealing than a gushy emotional outpouring. The MyLifeBits project reveals the relationship between the body and the mind creating potential for future self-examination. Patterns inevitably emerge over time. Relationships become clear, like do you spend more on days you sleep less? The more you walk, the more productive are you at work? These are things much of us will never know for sure, but the MyLifeBits team could design programs to find the nexus of these data streams.
Bell joked that some of his hundreds of thousands of files are “WORN memory” (Write Once Read Never.) But a number of us who do sit down with a moleskine and let it all out, never read the words again either.
Do we want to forget some of these things? The go to book on this subject, at least for now, is Viktor Mayer-Schönberger’s “Delete: the Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age,” but I find his “information expiry date” suggestion far too simplistic, too out of step with behaviors we’ve adopted already and are unlikely to change. If anything, Sherry Turkle’s questions in the latter half of Alone Together are far more relevant. As she explained on Twitter, “Our job is not to be ‘for or against’ technology. Our job is to shape it to our human purposes.”
Public reluctance to adopt even some of the MyLifeBit lifelogging capacity likely stems from fear of data breach. Perhaps a younger generation adopting these strategies would be more comfortable sharing some of the information with others. A number of lifeblogs are locked accounts, shared only with a select group of people. I’ve heard private accounts on Twitter and elsewhere dismissed less for security reasons than “there’s always a rat,” but this really is the case of choosing friends wisely.
Several months ago, I experimented with creating a totally locked private status update feed shared only with several of my friends. It was as much an experiment in testing my own comfort levels sharing this sort of information as it was to prove a point: nothing was “leaked” … because I have good friends. Putting my feelings and anxieties in words never quite felt right to me. It gave it a weight and permanence, I’m not comfortable with. While I respect the urge of others to do, I’m going to go back to waiting until I see these friends over drinks to share these sorts of life “updates.”
There isn’t always a rat, but there is the risk of a glitch exposing everything. The lack of outrage over Facebook’s email mixup last year deeply concerns me. I’d be very embarrassed if say, my account on MonthyInfo were exposed, but the odds are so minimal I’ve been updating for two years.
Right now the tracking apps available are less automated and more like a chore. You often need to manually enter everything in. That means star rating and other not necessarily useful ways of categorising things. Somethings just can’t be quantified. How do you measure your happiness in numbers? I guess I just don’t think of my life that way. Although if a program shows I was with a close friend, got lots of sleep and enough to eat, chances are I was some level of happy that day.
Bell says he doesn’t act differently now than before the MyLifeBits experiment. But for many of us, recording activity will have some impact: not fear of a voyeur, but the eyes of ourselves in several years remembering with regret.
Previously:
The Overexamined Life II: Automated and Login Personal Data Tracking
The Overexamined Life: Finding Bits of Ourselves in Digital Ghost Towns
Web of Misleading Things
Dorothee Golz
“The problem with Internet quotations is that many are not genuine.”
— Abraham Lincoln
“Kill all my demons and my angels might die too”
— Tennessee Williams
Actually that isn’t a Tennesse Williams quote. What he said was “If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels.”
The line you see comes from writer/director Brad Anderson in his film Transsiberian. Emily Mortimer’s character says it, dismissing her husband’s nagging over her smoking habit and other rebellious qualities. Anderson is clever for deliberately misquoting Williams. Why should this character recite the words accurately, as if reading from one of those famous quotation refrigerator magnets sold in the front of big box bookstores? Although the film was not a major release, enough people saw it that in the meantime some would add that quote to their Facebook profiles or blogs, attributing it not to Transibberian but the playwright who never said it that way. Now Google has 23,000 results for “Kill all my demons and my angels might die too.” Most of these pages attribute it to Williams, some spammy sites of “Inspiring quotations.” Only 735 of those pages mention the film that the words come from.
The guiding principle of life online is don’t believe everything you read. Set aside for now the important questions related to majority rule for news verification. What I’m interested in are renderings of the Apple “tablet” in the months leading up to Steve Jobs’ January 2010 keynote or the reports of Rep Gabrielle Gifford’s death on January 8, 2011 and other premature obituaries. This is fiction out in the ether that poor “curation” can easily pass along as fact. There’s too much reported — not to mention the splog scraped content — to even begin to append updates and corrections.
It only takes a google search to learn there’s no Neiman Marcus cookie or that Jeff Goldblum is still alive. But on the micro-level you can’t tell very easily. This distrust is especially interesting on social networks.
Remember the real reason for Friendster’s decline? It was the ban on “fakesters.” Friendster cracked down on user-created profiles for celebrities, places, and things, instead of embracing it as another slice of the bizarre in the spectacle of social networking. So people moved to Myspace, where non-person identities were encouraged. The site even provided space for bands and filmmakers to upload multimedia.
Now, everybody knew that’s not really Andy Warhol leaving testimonials on your page. But what about that person you know as tiny Twitter avatar? Robin Sage is a particularly interesting example (Quite a number of fictional online identities are in the image of attractive female hackers. I imagine this creates even more tension/skepticism toward women in these communities.)
And we’ve all heard stories about the lonely people inventing friends for themselves on Facebook. Seems like such a waste of time — first the fake email, then the fake account information, then a storytelling exercise interweaving “likes” and wall postings —but you can understand the impulse of the insecure and antisocially inclined.
The Economist reports that online dating sites sometime create fake profiles in house:
[U]nscrupulous site operators sometimes stuff their databases with fake profiles maintained either by their own staff or by people they have paid. These “ghosts”, in the industry’s jargon, are used to draw in new punters and to help keep existing ones hooked. Last year Jetplace, an Australian company, admitted that it had been running more than 1,300 false profiles on a matchmaking service that it owned. Dating-site bosses maintain that such instances are rare, but detecting them can be tricky.
More overtly, there’s John Appleseed and Caitlin Roran.
So long as social media participation requires no public records or birth certificates, we are free to use these services to reinvent ourselves, regardless of what Mark Zuckerberg says.
I am also reminded of a presentation at Rhizome’s Seven on Seven, an event pairing artists with technologists to invent something new “be it an application, social media, artwork, product, or whatever they imagined.” Kristin Lucas and Andrew Kortina created “Identity Swap” (also check out Lucas’ “Versionhood.”) The idea is framework for consensual lending of online personas. You can offer to take over someone’s identity for a set period of time. One incentive being, perhaps some of us suffer from personality overload and sometimes want to take a break. Lucas and Kortina proposed awarding high scores for great accuracy at pretending to be someone else. A major benefit is that of self-discovery: seeing how you are perceived by others. Do I really talk like that? Are those my known fascinations?
I love this idea and wish there were more opportunities to challenge fixed online identities, seeing as we are unlikely to revert to the world of screennames and aliases except in special cases.
Previously: A Hundred Chances: White Lies Post-Facebook
The Continuing Relevance of Online Anonymity. Part 1
Eureka and Multiples
Better known as a pedophile, Joseph Cornell’s other unconsummated obsessions were with unobtainable film actresses: smoldering, witty, strong-willed women like Lauren Bacall and Rose Hobart.
As a tribute to Hobart, he made the experimental film named after her, a mashup of scenes of the actress in East of Borneo with a documentary of an eclipse. Stripped to a dreamlike essence, the film is as open-ended to interpretations as a dream. Learning of Cornell’s paraphilia, it is tempting to say that the film nullifies Hobart’s sultriness like his box tribute to Bacall. But no one remembers that John Lennon spent years chasing Brigitte Bardot lookalikes. Each of us carries within us many contradictions. So without forgiving the unforgivable, I like to think that maybe, just maybe, even Joseph Cornell, might dream about a woman who could call his bluff, rather than wish to disarm her of that quality.
“Rose Hobart” first screened in 1936. Halfway through the film, Salvador Dali knocked over the projector screaming, “He stole it from my subconscious! … My idea for a film is exactly that, and I was going to propose it to someone who would pay to have it made .. I never wrote it down or told anyone, but it is as if he had stolen it.”
How many of us have felt as though someone else has stolen from your subconscious? In some cases, this is a voluntary act of sharing. I was always delighted when idioms and words I like to say would find their way into the work of a writer with whom I was once involved.
Other times, the moon or the zeitgeist is to blame. This is the case of multiples. The kind of concurrent cultural workings that Steven Johnson and Malcolm Gladwell write about. Here’s a long list of multiple discoveries. Maybe you’ll find an idea of yours on it.
I started working on my essay Overfutured over the summer. In the remaining few weeks before the deadline I struggled to articulate just how uncanny the world of Google Street View looks, an uncanniness that Jon Rafman’s artwork in Free amplifies. About that time, a friend mentioned the story of Daguerre’s picture, which sounded like another landscape uncanny valley. It turned out to be a great way to frame the essay.
Just before my essay was ready to go up on the New Museum website, I had a facepalm moment reading The Atlantic. A much-blogged and much-tweeted post was about that example in history. But mine was needless anxiety. The emphasis of that story is on Daguerre capturing the first humans on film, while my emphasis in the essay is on the people who were erased from the image due to the long exposure time.
When I started writing this post (it’s been a draft for about month now,) I was reading Philip K Dick’s essay 1978 “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later.” He recalls a college student writing to him, requesting he define “Reality” for a paper for her philosophy class. “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away,” he wrote. Delighted with that quote, I plugged it in to Google to find it out of context. Google’s “social search” directed me to my friend Josh Glenn’s post just a few days earlier. Someone in the comments had quoted it, (although misattributing it to Arthur C. Clarke.)
By the way, the essay is pretty essential reading in understanding coincidence and happenstance, two factors that often create multiples. As PKD puts it, “[As] soon as you begin to ask what is ultimately real, you right away begin to talk nonsense.”
Around the same time, the other half of Hilobrow, Matthew Battles, at his new fantastic blog Gearfuse quoted a paragraph by (today in the public domain) Walter Benjamin. I’d just read “Theses of the Philosophy of History” also highlighting that part for its relevance to the web culture conversation about atemporality: “Surely the time of the soothsayers, who divined what lay hidden in the lap of the future, was experienced neither as homogenous nor as empty. Whoever keeps this in mind will perhaps have an idea of how past time was experienced as remembrance: namely, just the same way.”
Here I am using benign examples of quotes rather than original ideas which are harder to demonstrate as occurring multiples. And I write this to counterbalance some points in my last post. Redundant internet memes aren’t fun, but the work of a trendspotter is to find quotes and historic anecdotes woven in different sorts of contexts. I am eager to see apps and features like Facebook “mention” which will aggregate trending names, things, and places.
Writers sometimes get a narcissistic sense of being slighted if one’s ideas aren’t properly credited by another. Looking beyond the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon confirmation biases I’ve just listed, of course there are cases of direct influence.
The old blog language of “via” links and “hat tips” hasn’t quite grown irrelevant but it is in need of reexamination.
I just shared this post about bespoke prosthetics on Google Reader after seeing it in Michael Surtees’ shared items. I didn’t attribute it, because I figured it’s no big deal. If I found it on his blog Design Notes and then blogged it here I probably would include a little parenthetical (via) out of old habit.
But there are so many streams of content now to find this information, a hat tip to the “curator” is less relevant. Plus, if we see a funny link we’ve come to expect that it’s going to explode, if it hasn’t exploded already.
Original work and ideas should be attributed out of common courtesy. I want to be friendly and pay respect to people who inspire me because I want to one day share ideas with them in conversations and collaborations.
I’ve never loved the Picasso’s quote “Good artists borrow, great artists steal.” And I definitely hate the very literal interpretation of it some “creatives” read. Here’s a better quote, and one that almost certainly you’re bound to see again soon as Montaigne is trendy in 2011:
“The bees plunder the flowers here and there, but afterward they make of them honey, which is all theirs.”
Eureka feels good. When you put two things together in your mind, it is more central to your thinking than if you see a connection someone else has made and pass it off as your own.
Build eureka from someone else’s eureka.
Anyway, when an idea is your own, and you feel the eureka feeling of giving birth to it, you’re going to have a lot more vivid things to say than someone who reads a line of yours and rephrases it.
The Blog in 2011: More Pictures, More Words
Clive Thompson’s latest column for Wired picks up on something I’ve noticed:
“I save the little stuff for Twitter and blog only when I have something big to say,” as blogger Anil Dash put it. It turns out readers prefer this: One survey found that the most popular blog posts today are the longest ones, 1,600 words on average.
Setting aside the question of how many of those 1,600 words are actually read, one thing for sure is these are not your slightly older brother’s warblog blogs.
Brief history of blogs:
Not Blogs
pre-2002: Geek notes, diaries, frequently updated zines. Things that looked like blogs but went by other names
Linkblogs
1999 – (2011?): Perhaps even earlier than 1999. Linkblogs were either quick links or a blockquote and a link. Nothing labor intensive about sharing cool stuff but some people have better taste than others. Are they dying? Maybe? Twitter seems to have taken over for directions on how get lost online
Warblogs
2001 – 2004: You know how everyone has something to say about Wikileaks? Imagine that times twenty and that was the post-9/11 blogosphere. Here’s all you need to know about this frenzied media landscape.
Post-Diaries
2003-2005: Pre-Facebook, although concurrent with Friendster and Myspace. Years before we had any kind of meaningful public vs private discussion as the sense was, with so much out there on the web, who is going to pay any attention to me? The post-diarists used their blogspot pages as nascent social networks, a way to reach multiple close friends. You probably knew all your best friends’ IP addresses because Sitemeter never clocked more than ten visits a day.
Movable C.V.s
2004 – 2008: Blogs went niche. If you called your blog “Vegan Buddhist Goddess Blog” then CNN and NPR would call for comment if they were doing a story on vegan cooking. You’d be invited to speak on panels, maybe get a book deal. In any case, a blog was a way to establish yourself as a leader in your field.
Mainstream Media Blogs
2007 – current: Apart from the New York Times and The Atlantic, many of these blogs are unremarkable. And readership reflects this. Whenever I go to a newspaper website I’m always surprised at how many in-house blogs exist, but few seem to attract more than a hundred or so RSS subscribers.
First Draft Essays
2008 – current: Now blogging is the habit of those who love the sound of their own fingers banging away on a keyboard.
(Update 1/1/11: I didn’t mean for this to be a definitive list, btw. In any case this is not to ignore that the longest trend in blogging is the kind of shoe leather reporting that is harder to come by in mainstream press. )
Early in the second half of this decade of blogs, Twitter and Tumblr arrived to shake things up.
Twitter launched prior to the iPhone. Many of us set our preferences to receive tweets as text message in 2006. How unpleasant would that be today? I follow over 300 people and if they were all sending me text messages with bit.ly links to see Julian Assange dressed in a santa costume, I’d want to throw my phone against the wall. Today most mobile phones are smart, and web browsing is taken for granted. The shift in content on twitter — from epigrams to links — reflects the change in our gadgetry.
Remember the early criticism of Twiter: “No one cares what you had for breakfast!” Who is tweeting about breakfast anymore? They are linking to an Instagram photo of breakfast or an article explaining how few people eat breakfast and why this is so horrible for the world.
I’m still not a huge fan of links on Twitter. Most of the time I’m checking it on my phone when I don’t have time to read something more than 140 characters. So I favorite-star the tweet and go back to read it later. But then when I go to check that “awesome must read link” it turns out to be…oh, right, Julian Assange in a santa costume. Thanks! But that’s just me. The rest of the web likes using Twitter as a mass-aggregated link stream or it wouldn’t be operating that way.
Meanwhile, Tumblr made blogging beautiful. It makes it so easy to upload or clip and save whatever you come across in your web travels. For the most part, I use it as a visual bookmarking tool. Most Tumblrs are mood boards, a selection of things that resonate in someway to the blogger.
The visual nature of Tumblr is influencing the trend in image-heavy blog posts. But more than that, 2010 is the year the iPad launched.
In March of this year I wrote, “I created The Tomorrow Museum almost exactly two years ago. The name was a pun on the then emerging buzzword: ‘curation.’ I wanted to play with the idea of the blog/internet as physical space and display art as if on the walls of a gallery….. Never would I have guessed that two years later the interplay of text and image would still stand out as unique. Six months down the line — the Internet landscape post-iPad — I expect this won’t be the case.”
I really regret the way I phrased this then as certainly blogging images and text isn’t exactly a eureka moment of mine — This Recording and BLDGBLOG were doing it a few years before me. Nevertheless the post-iPad blogging trend is toward these Tumblr/text blog hybrids. A long text post without an accompanying image now looks stark and unwelcoming.
Images offer punctuation-like interruptions in the text, but they also elongate the body. A post looks far more substantial the more scrolling you have to do. This is really a protip for bloggers: throw in two images and 400 words becomes an “article.”
Going back to the study Clive Thompson cites, images or not, longread blogging is happening. Or are these bloggers — uh, not this again — journalists? As Rex Sorgatz points out, “New Gawker is Old Spin.” That’s the other blog hybrid happening.
That Bruce Sterling Wikileaks piece — is it a blog post? An essay? Would this count toward the average word count in that study?
Whatever it is, Sterling’s take did what a so many long blog posts didn’t: it offered something new to the conversation. Not a sentence was wasted. Right or wrong when you have something to say it sparks a interesting conversation (Here’s a good response, and another.)
The moment Sterling’s article went up, I was bored to tears with weeks worth of so many links offering “balanced” “thoughtful” takes on Wikileaks. These takes were so thoroughly thoughtful and balanced their authors said absolutely nothing at all.
The word you are going to see over and over in 2011 is redundancy. We all hate it and we all fall for it — reblogs, retweets, things you’ve seen a million times before. It’s more than filter failure, it’s having your time wasted.
A number of bloggers might take care to be concise with words and value the time of your readers. The second worst thing you can do on the internet is waste someone’s time.
This reminds me of what Hannah Arendt wrote of Walter Benjamin, that he was a “critic and essayist who regarded even the essay form as too vulgarly extensive and would have preferred the aphorism if he had not been paid by the line.”
Bloggers aren’t getting paid (ha!) by the line and readers aren’t getting paid to read in full. Kerbing one’s hypergraphia is advised.
Some 1,600 word blog posts are better off pared down to epigrammatic tweets.
Overfutured
Jon Rafman for Free at the New Museum
Overfutured, my essay for the New Museum show “Free”, is now online:
Paris thoroughfare Boulevard du Temple looks strangely absent of horse-drawn wagons, carts, and crowds in Louis Daguerre’s 1839 image. Only a man and a shoeshine boy attending to him appear in the resulting “daguerreotype.” Plenty of people were out that morning, but in the course of the fifteen-minute exposure time their motion blurred them out of representation. Just the shoeshiner and his client stood still long enough.
We see the same sunny emptiness in the cities Google captures. It never rains in the world of Google Street View but few people live there. The camera cars wait for clear skies and shoot at an hour when most people are at work or running errands.
Someday we will press a button to rewind and fast-forward through the history of Google Street View images. We will watch entire neighborhoods created, remade, destroyed, or left unchanged except in the subtlest ways. And in the course of it, we will find flashes of human experiences like the man standing with the shoeshiner in the Boulevard du Temple daguerreotype…
The Overexamined Life II: Automated and Login Personal Data Tracking
The Nike+ iPhone app couldn’t debut at a better time. I’m in a new city, the weather is warm and clear, and I’m taking long walks, exploring new neighborhoods every day. Rather than saving it exclusively for runs (something I haven’t kept up on lately,) for over a week, I made a point to sign in whenever I started my walk. There are short straight lines indicating trips from my apartment to the metro station, and long uneven figure eights and curls on days I decide to go wherever momentary inspiration takes me.
I thought about eventually layering all these maps on top of each other in a year’s time. The frequently taken walks (like that block to the metro stop) showing up in bold, the places visited only once, lighter, but preserved now to retain the memory. How much of the map would stay unmarked? What places in the city would I miss?
But here’s the problem, Nike+ isn’t designed for the heavy use I want. It uses the iPhone accelerometer in addition to GPS, and that quickly drains the battery. It’s fine for running for an hour or two, but without any way to recharge after a while, it’s not possible to record every step you take in a day.
Two weeks ago, I decided to leave it Nike+ off when I went out mid-morning. It was a beautiful Tuesday. I finished my work early. I wandered everywhere from Cobble Hill to Bed-sty, the High Line from the East Village, and in the course of it all discovered my wallet was missing. By now I can say with firmer conviction that I was pickpocketed. My wallet didn’t turn up with the police, nor the MTA lost property unit. I reactivated my Facebook profile briefly to make it easier to contact me, but didn’t hear from anyone. And after all, wallets don’t slip out of handbags all that easily.
There was a lot of cash, but also sentimental things like my pass to see Angkor Wat and various other ticket stubs. The point is, had I kept Nike+ on that day, the lost item ritual of retracing my footsteps would have come much more easily. I might have followed the actual map of my steps rather than racking my brain with anxiety wondering where it was I walked exactly.
While not nearly as meticulous as Nicholas Felton, I collect a lot of data from my life especially on certain iPhone apps. As an example, to sort out whether I’m allergic to certain foods, I spent the course of three months writing down everything I ate (on a nicely designed app save for its discouraging icon of a scale called “Lose it.”)
But just as the blank pages in a journal often stand for lived experience, some of the most interesting moments happen when we stop recording this kind of information. I only recorded my eating habits briefly and there were no big luxuries in that period, but had I gone for a decadent multicourse meal at a fancy place, it’s hard to say whether I’d the energy to remember it all and enter it in the next day.
I wrote earlier that people often don’t take photos during many of their most incredible and happy memories. We also don’t check in on Foursquare necessarily, even secretly, or Tweet when these things are happening. The notion doesn’t come immediately to mind to do so, as we’re too engaged with the experience of our situation.
A friend of mine was just telling me about Hasan Elahi’s “The Orwell Project”. Sometime after 9/11, Elahi was mistakenly flagged at an airport as potential terrorist. The New York raised artist then provided the contents of his Palm PDA, showing as he told NPR in an interview, “Ten o’clock meeting with Judith, 11 o’clock went to pay rent at my storage unit. And he said, well, you had a storage unit near the university. And I said, yeah. So what you do you have in it? Winter clothes that I have no use for in Florida, furniture that I can’t fit.” The interrogator “eventually went on to tell me that they received a report that an Arab man had fled on September 12th that had explosives. And that person would be me. Never mind I’m not Arab. ”
As the Washington Post wrote in 2007:
But shaking off the feds would not be easy. In the months after the first round of questioning, the FBI subjected Elahi to more interviews and to a lie-detector test. Though he passed the test, his paranoia grew.
The artist hatched a plan. If Big Brother wanted proof of his coordinates, why not surveil himself? Recording his own moves could, theoretically, seal his alibi. And, when conceived of as art project, the action might satirize federal intelligence gathering.
From the day in 2002 when Elahi implanted a GPS-enabled device in his cellphone, art and life merged. Several times a day, the artist input his location into the phone and his computer recorded the data (he hopes to incorporate a live GPS tracker soon). He then created a Web site that allowed viewers to see where he is at any given time — you can visit at http://www.trackingtransience.net– and he began taking photographs with a digital camera as further proof of his whereabouts.
At first, “Telling them every detail of everything,” was a way to protect himself. “I had a lecture to do in Indonesia that December. You also have to keep in mind that the Bali bombings were that October. I said, oh, no, I have to go – I have this lecture to go there in Indonesia next month, and I’m really concerned that, you know, a building crashing down or a plane blowing up – that I’ll have difficulty getting back into the United States.” But what emerged from that is a conceptual art piece.
The majority of us will never need to keep personal records. But the benefit is discovering patterns and optimizing with it. If I average more words written on Wednesdays than Thursdays, I’ll likely schedule lunch meetings and phone calls on Thursdays. And then there is the data that means nothing: why do I always eat soba noodles on Monday?
Would I like a version of Foursquare that is always on and doesn’t require me to login and check in anything? (Of course, hypothetically given the possibility of privacy when requested.) I’m not sure “always on” data tracking is what I want either. While I partake lightly, I also question the worth of it. Am I going to use this? Will patterns emerge or will it just factor in as more digital clutter in my life?
Previously: The Overexamined Life: Finding Bits of Ourselves in Digital Ghost Towns
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