2 posts tagged “connections”
While I run the risk of sounding like a broken record…
I was fascinated to read in an article by Danah Michele Boyd, that “most users begin surfing Friendster by looking for people they already know, either currently or in the past.” To get a perspective on social technology’s generational fulcrum, when surfing Friendster for people who attended my high school during my four years of attendance (2000 potential users all born before the birth of disco) not one has a presence on the site (at least as defined in their profile pages.) And when searching for someone, anyone, who attended Boston University at the same time as me I get three results. This is a University in a large urban environment with an undergraduate population of 25,000 students. For most folks born before 1970 using a tool like Friendster has no appeal. You can argue we are not in their demographics (after all, Friendster is geared for dating, hookups and young adults), or that there is not enough of an over 35 population base to make it relevant to the community at large. But I find it significant that I get 3 hits out of a potential aggregate of nearly 30 thousand people. That puts the penetration base at .001% of my past community. Pathetic, to say the least.
Examining my woefuly underrepresented
demographic slice of humanity is going to compel me to look for research on how
many folks of color, how many folks at a lower standard of living, how many
urban poor and disenfranchised have a presence on a site like friendster? Is it
the playground of the entitled and educated white middle class? Looking
at the faces in the profiles I see a whole lot of honkies staring back at me.
It appears this is all about the affluent Gen Y folks. Or is that effluent Gen Y folks? The Pew data mentions that people of color are creating a larger presence on the web, then why are they not better represented on a site like Friendster?
But even broken records have two sides. While these tools may tilt heavily towards entitled middle class white folks, reading Nardi, Whittaker and Schwartz's article about personal social networks reminded me why we have all this technology in the first place… connections. I am pleased (or perhaps chagrined) that I have never been hired based solely on my merit. My skills and experience may get me considered, but to get hired I need to have a relationship with my client. I jokingly refer to my skills as an insurance policy. Sure there are many professionals out there with the technical chops to facilitate most any part of the work I do. But when the stakes are high, when someone’s colon is in a knot, you need to create a team of folks who will complete the task on time and within the budget. When a project needs to be both good and on time, the clients are willing to pay more and hire folks like me. My wife has a career that in no way intersects with mine. We work on opposite parts of planet Seattle. But at least once a week she comes home and announces that she met someone in her work that I know. It drives her crazy that we cannot go anywhere without bumping into someone I have worked with. The media industry is a fluid and entropic environment. You stay employed, you are afforded the opportunity to continue your craft, by nurturing your network. And you do it for a lifetime. You do it with technology (IM, e-mail, web pages, personal media) and you do it in person. You remember the birthdays, you ask about the ski vacation and the house in Mexico, and you find out how their kids are doing. You show a genuine and thoughtful interest in their life and most of all, you pay attention. As Nardi, et al point out, it is a network that is personal and "intensional".
It is nice to be back... Sort of.
The Video Blog Link
It is hard not to want to stay in Paris. After a while it all goes by in a blur. You have to ask yourself, did I really see that or was it only imagined? There have been so many marvelous moments on this journey. It has been written that we travel as a way to expand each moment. Time stands still as you look in wonder at a familiar site that you have only viewed in your mind’s eye. There have been so many special moments. So many familiar monuments that have not disappointed. The Arc de Triomphe, The Louvre, Versailles, Notre Dame, The Tour Eifel, Sacre-Coeur, even Paris neighborhoods too numerous to even remember. Paris is such a marvelous place that has captured the hearts and minds of millions for a millennia. You can add us to that incredibly long list. For once, a town lived up to the hype and exceeded it. It is such a magical, mysterious, marvelous place. We were blessed to visit. And now it is time to come home. The long awaited journey at last comes to an end. Bittersweet at its conclusion, but forever savored in our mind’s eye.
I have been really surprised by the response to the video blog of the trip. There have been so many positive comments and a bit of a landslide of hits on the site. Thank you for the kind words and support. It was an experiment that I think on the whole works. The process was really not as difficult as I expected. I created the web site before we left for Paris and then only had to populate the server with new files as I created them. Once again we shot little 320x240 QuickTime files on the Nikon still camera. The quality is rather crude, especially the audio and the footage in low light, certainly not what I get out of the HD camera we took. But the advantage of using a strictly file based production path far outweighed having to go through the hassle of capturing video into the computer in real time. All we had to do was move the CompactFlash card over to the PC, import the files into Avid and we were editing. I was able to bang out a finished piece in a little over an hour. Production value was not as important as being timely with the posting. We wanted each dispatch up on the server and ready for viewing on the same day we shot it. Shooting video with a still camera still has other liabilities besides the quality of the resultant footage. It would have been nice to have a tripod for the shots, but that went against the idea of being light and spontaneous. Besides, many of the venues we shot in would not allow a tripod so we were stuck with some insanely shaky footage. Again, I come back to the reason for creating these was to give a sense of the moment, not careful documentation of a location or essay on history. For that watch National Geo or Discovery.
One of the big problems was finding a good internet connection in Paris for moving rather large files. I did not have a connection as I wrote the individual pages and I could not check to see how the files played in the interface. As a consequence, some of the videos ended up odd sized, even though I compressed them in flash using the same settings. It was totally random and now that I am back I plan on taking a few minutes to drill into it and find out why.
If you have any comments or reactions please feel free to contact me directly. There is a link to my mail on the home page of the video blog. Let me know what you think. The feedback is always welcome.
