2 posts tagged “persona”
I hate raking leaves, I always want
the neighbor kid to do it for me. The only problem is he doesn't do that great
of a job. He doesn't get under the rhododendron, and that one section by the
blackberry brambles is always "forgotten" because sifting through the
mess is not easy. But that is the price I have to pay for letting someone else
rake my leaves.
If meta tags on the web are like
leaves, what price do I pay by having the critical masses (or not-so-critical)
filter what I see? What do I give up by following the herd? When it comes to
organizing, I have always been a bit of a “pile” guy. I have piles of stuff
scattered around the rooms of my life (bedroom, office at work, kitchen table,
basement) and the thing that drives my wife crazy is I know where stuff is. I
know because each pile serves a different purpose. I can spot the pile I need
to dig through based on the category I have assigned in my head. I can
categorize my life faster and I can retrieve things with great speed (I would
argue I do it faster than my wife and her OC system.) But if something gets
moved (by whom I won’t mention, but she says over and over that where I put
stuff doesn’t make sense to her) I am lost. In essence, if someone categorizes
my data for me, it is useless. That is because what I call puce they may
call brown or purple.
What you name something matters when
organizing. The taxonomy of calling a chair a chair is easy, but is it a
lounge? Is it a settee? Is it a rocker? Tagging the web works the same for me.
How do I know what someone intended when they attached a category or descriptor
to the object? Certainly the big search sites do a great job. Well at least
most do, I am still frustrated with MSN’s results but that is a different
essay. I really appreciate the alchemy that happens when they generate results
from my query. But I want more. I want another layer that takes into account
how I sort the piles of leaves, a persistence of persona when I am on the web.
I would be comfortable (from a privacy standpoint) with a widget, or cookie, or
thing-a-ma-bob on my browser that engages an additional layer of filtering on
my search, sorting the results into piles that make unique sense to me, not
just the masses. Leveraging a taxonomy that makes the most sense to me.
Perhaps the piles of leaves in my life are reflective of my visual organizational style. I am certain that is why the light bulb in my head shone so brightly the first time I saw a tag cloud. Here was a way to visualize data (tags) that so closely resembled the piles of information scattered around my life. I rarely do a traditional linear search on the web. Instead I poke around and wander from site to site on a journey of discovery. The tag cloud was a wondrous barometer measuring the importance and interest in a site’s topics. Here was a way to not just search for the facts, but to search for the voices of a community. I could see the weight of interest reflected in this measurement of social and cultural change. It was cool.
And as I began to understand the importance of reputation systems and the responsibility members have to be accountable for the data they create, I felt a corresponding responsibility to create data that aggregated appropriately with the whole. A sort of intellectual expectation to “fit in” to the norms of each web community. I will admit I was surprised the first time a stranger tagged content that I own on the web. It was a odd mix of feeling proprietary about my media and fear that I had done something wrong. Over time I came to see that these folks were not passively encountering the media I posted, but engaging it, processing it, and using it as another leaf in their own personal pile. It was fun to think of myself as a tree dropping leaves, and not just a faceless guy raking piles around his house.
When asked recently how many news groups or online associations would currently include me as a member my answer was one. If asked how many I have participated in over the past 15 years you could multiply that number by 100. To be honest, I don’t have the patience for the wannabes, the trolls, the flamers and every other meatball looking for some sort of self actualization with outrageous posts on the web. When a community becomes noxious I pull the plug. The internet is enough of a time sink as it is.
Certainly everyday human interaction is rife with people who get their jollies by attracting attention to themselves. From the grocery store to the sidewalk there are some interesting characters out there. Judith Donath describes the one online community I actively participate in; a technical news group that is closely moderated by a respected member. I trust that he will keep the discussions on point and target the miscreants who are only interested in the negative attention.
But I am concerned about those personas on the web that have nefarious intentions. How much different is it to spoof a website by phishing for dupes than a 45-year-old guy chatting with my 9 year old sons as they play with their PSPs online? They are playing on the same gullible nature of the uninformed and uninitiated. These are creeps, and it makes me nauseous to think of the messages my kids get when all they wanted was to play ATV. Sure I modify the settings on the game connection, and yes that curtails it for a while, but some of these folks are really scummy.
When they were little, my daughters played dress-up. They could spend the day pretending to be queen, or mom or an alien with six heads. Trying on a new persona for size seems to be a part of the human psyche. And we have all been in jobs that required us to present a persona that didn’t ring true. But I grow weary of people spoofing a persona online or making up accomplishments to bolster their credibility. Patricia Wallace refers to this evolutionary phase of the web as a new laboratory for experiments. A place where we can construct and sculpt new identities. I am fine with nuanced shadings… Defining oneself as more courageous, or extroverted or sexy. As Wallace points out, some of those experiments can spill over positively into everyday F2F interactions. But too much of it is just crap. Or worse, a safe way to practice antisocial behavior. After a while you can spot them with ease, but only after being spoofed once too often.
Terveen and McDonald describe social matching systems that are dependent on the quality of data aggregated. Certainly mining for information that is both collaborative and content-based has become sophisticated big business. But a large part of that data is still dependent on the information the users feed into the system. And if that data is corrupt, or if the user’s intentions are misguided, then the connections created by these matching systems is correspondingly suspect. In addition, I don’t really like the idea of Opportunistic Social Matching, where connections are made because someone is watching my current and past activities. Not only does this strike me as frighteningly Orwellian, but I will be really hacked off when this data is cross-referenced with all of the commerce-based data that is sitting on a server in Atlanta. I would prefer that I have the opportunity to manage how I am presented on the web, and if someone is going to connect the dots for me, then I want it exposed so I can control how the data is used.
