'Social-media data collection, though, makes the illusion of a unified self hard to sustain. By imposing a single persistent identity, social media inevitably confront people with their inconsistencies. Yet one can’t abstain from Facebook without suffering growing economic consequences. What emerges from this pressure is social media’s tendency to both instantiate and discredit authenticity. They validate the quest for it while dismissing the possibility that you’ll ever arrive at it. The self-directed consumers who shop to express intrinsic inner being is supplanted by the well-connected, autoconfessional self who never pauses in disclosing information and thus runs ahead of any need to self-impose consistency. -- Social media gives us more information about ourselves than we can process, so any schematization of it seems to add to self-knowledge rather than limit it, broadening our identity repertoire. -- The data self coalesces in social media’s mircoaffirmations: we are matched with people who can affirm us, we see a reflection of ourselves in the data that makes us feel recognized, we are told what to want in a way that assures us we will be doing what is right and normal. What threatens the data self is not inauthenticity but lack of access, a disruption of the information flow. If the sharing process is disrupted, we are left with the underlying terror that there might be something crucial about our lives that can’t be expressed in data. The true existential threat is not that our identity will be exposed as fake, but that endless sharing of it will make it feel increasingly inexpressible. Key things might seem to escape our attempts to tell all. ...it becomes impossible to feel that something meaningful could also be unsharable. We are only what we share. Activity only means something to us because we know we can share it.'

'Control is one of the big attractions of living in the digital world, we only post the best pictures of ourselves enjoying the best parts of our lives. But does that mean we start to treat our lives more like a brand, to be sold to our friends and protected from anything negative? Aleks Krotoski talks to Sherry Turkle director of MIT's Initiative on Technology and the Self to ask if this could cause us problems.'

'I don’t think in terms of technological determinism. I think in terms of human vulnerabilities: technological affordances and human vulnerabilities. The technologies of mobile connection make us some offers we can’t refuse. Connectivity technology pushes every button. There’s this new research that shows that our iPhones light up our brains in the same places that love lights up our brains. We’re wanted. Somebody wants us, somebody needs us, somebody’s calling to us, somebody remembered us. -- We’ve cornered ourselves into a communications culture, where I think we’re spending less and less time reflecting. The issue for me is reflection and spaces for reflection. Social media satisfy some needs. People feel connected. In some online places, people do feel responsibility and belonging. But in fact, people can just leave when they wish; the friended is not a friend. What I’m finding in my work is that online life can create a sense of disorientation. The speed of online friendship is so fast: you get this sense of intimacy so fast and the sense of close connection; you feel that you’re getting right to the heart of things really quickly. You’re not going through all the hard things that come with a shared life and a shared community; you have the sense of cutting to the chase. That goes on for awhile, and then somehow you don’t know what you have. You don’t know what your responsibilities are. You don’t know what you can ask for. So then people wonder, “Do I have everything; do I have nothing? What do I have?” It’s fine if you have a couple of those ambiguous relationships; everyone does. But when ambiguous relationships become more and more of your life, people become very disoriented. I have tremendous respect for the support and the connection and the fun that people have online. But I think when we decided to call these online connections “communities” and “relationships,” we chose the words we had available to us, and we confused ourselves. -- ...the point is, when we’re with people we feel as though we’re getting some kind of authenticity, and we experience ourselves as authentic. Which is why we go see people in person—we know, no matter how much they’re made up or fluffed up or prepared, we’re going to see the real something. And that’s what these kids are trying to avoid, when they only want to text, when they don’t want to have a conversation, and that’s what they’ve become exhausted by. They’ve put themselves in a world where they are performing all the time. They have organized a world where they’re always at their screen. That’s when they just kind of crack and find some way to drop out for awhile. -- I’ve studied kids and dolls – whenever I do a robot study, I do a parallel study with a doll. And everything is different with a doll. With a doll you have the psychology of projection. A child will act out with a doll what is on her mind: a little girl with a Barbie who feels guilty because she broke her mother’s china will put the Barbie in detention. Because of its passivity, because it’s inert, the doll is a projective screen for the child’s imagination, fantasies, sense of wonder, anxieties. Everything’s projected onto the doll. But a relational artifact, a sociable robot, is in a position to initiate a conversation. The robot is in a position to voice an opinion. With a robot, one is not free to project what is on one’s mind. The psychology of projection gives way to the psychology of engagement. The robot is presented as active, in place to be a new kind of best friend. Why do we need robots to do that? With every technology we need to ask if it’s serving our human purposes. What is the human need? What human purpose does it serve to have imitation people, who really aren’t people, pretending to be people? -- it’s only a collective fantasy that a robot, a machine that does not recognize your existence, can address your loneliness. In my view, this is a fantasy. We need to understand its roots. My research suggests that its roots lie in people having a sense that no one is there to listen to them. We have to acknowledge this. So many of us are lonely. But it does not follow that something that will never experience anything about human life can understand the things we want to talk about, about our lives. -- A common reaction to my book has been: “What are you complaining about? The people in your book, the elderly people who are happy with their robots, can’t tell the difference. My grandmother wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. Why not give them this thing? If the machines will be so good we can’t tell the difference, what does it matter?” I think it matters very much. I think our humanity is at stake. -- It’s as though we don’t even have the word “solitude” anymore where solitude is a good thing. I have heard this formulation, how we need to “solve the problem of solitude,” not just on this one occasion. So, for example, people think of always having a device at hand as a way to solve the problem of solitude. We have a very hard time thinking of a life that does not include reaching for a device when one is alone. And I think we have an increasingly hard time even imagining that, imagining anything but loneliness. And of course, our connectivity devices give us the fantasy that we will never have to be alone. The capacity for solitude is crucial to our ability to reach out to people, not in anxiety but with a genuine ability to forge relationships. ...where we expect more from technology and less from each other; we’re treating each other as less human.'

'Axe has come up with a mildly amusing Facebook app for young men that generates a fake relationship-status update to make it appear as though the user is involved with hundreds of women at the same time. When friends click on the update link, it takes them to an Axe Facebook app page, where they can install the custom relationship app themselves.' -- Dragnets

Digital Maslow: '#5 INFLUENCING: The need to be acknowledged and referred to as a unique personality with talent, opinion or expertise. Maximizing your online presence through branding yourself. #4 MONITORING: The need to asses reactions and relevance to improve global online reputation. Assessing influence score, Googling yourself. #3 BROADCASTING: The need to perform to feel accepted and appreciated by online communities. Showing both who we are and what we stand for [using social objects]. #2 CONFIDENTIALITY: The need to feel in control of one’s identity, personal data and information. Managing how one’s image and reputation is displayed by others in pictures, conversations, updates. #1 ACCESSIBILITY: The need to acquire the basic set of skills and markers, indispensable to start existing and interacting in the digital realm. Submitting to networks, picking a screen name and an avatar, learning the language and etiquette of a specific platform.'

'...social functionality operate within a space defined by the following three dimensions. #Knowledge: We use this stuff to learn. Specifically, we use it to learn from each other. For example, user reviews or Wikipedia. #Connection: We use this stuff to communicate, bond, meet, define affiliations and dislikes or just hang out where the people are. For example, friending... #Display: We use this stuff to communicate and manage presentations of ourselves, truthfully or not, to others. For example, user profiles or Flickr. No piece of social functionality is all one and none of the others, but they tend to be weighted differently in each case. Display often motivates contributions (and impacts the type of contributions) made via Knowledge and Connection functionality. ...it's crucially important for motivating contribution and can actually stabilize and help self-regulate systems of social functionality. ...the three Display dimensions: Status, Reputation and Esteem – form a continuum.'

'Among Harris' experiments touched on in the film is the art project "Quiet: We Live in Public," an Orwellian, Big Brother type concept developed in the late '90s which placed more than 100 artists in a human terrarium under New York City, with myriad webcams following and capturing every move the artists made. The pièce de résistance was a Japanese-style capsule hotel outfitted with cameras in every pod, and screens that allowed each occupant to monitor the other pods installed in the basement by artist Jeff Gompertz. The film's website describes how, "With Quiet, Harris proved how, in the not-so-distant future of life online, we will willingly trade our privacy for the connection and recognition we all deeply desire. Through his experiments, including another six-month stint living under 24-hour live surveillance online which led him to mental collapse, he demonstrated the price we will all pay for living in public."'

'We “learn to tolerate disappointment and ambiguity. And we learn that to sustain realistic relationships, one must accept others in their complexity.” There is a real danger, Turkle writes, that the rise of robotic companions will lower our expectations of human relationships, that we reduce relationships and come to see this reduction as the norm. She is clearly shaken by her research and she asks us to confront the implications of this loss. Turkle’s argument is that the choice of technologically-mediated friendships enables fragile and vulnerable individuals to regulate and plan their self-presentations in the world. The screen separates the speakers, she writes, offering an “illusion of privacy” and the “chance to write yourself into the person you want to be and to imagine others as you wish them to be, constructing them for your purposes.” Texting, in other words, offers at least the illusion of control and protection.'

'...I would still have the human decency NOT to try and publicly mitigate that guilt by conversion to shame because I know that if I succeed then it becomes okay for someone else. How I deal with guilt has an effect on how someone else will. -- What infuriates you is the idea that anyone or anything has control over us. You don't like to be told they aren't allowed to do something. "As long as it doesn't hurt anybody, I should be allowed..." You want complete freedom – which you will use to conform to very ordinary standards of living that you impose on yourself. ...the very thing that allows you to exist in a world of complete freedom are those internal controls and not the social controls – laws and shames – that you think bind you. Shame will never be enough – when your identity is "strong" enough nothing shames you... The laws will never be stronger than you. -- I am not trying to stop progress or technology, I'm telling you to be careful with your lives.'

DON'T WALK. DON'T WALK. CROSS NOW. CROSS NOW.

'Everything is extreme: So-and-so “is obsessed with.” So-and-so “just had the longest day EVERRRRRR.” They are in a perpetual high pitch of pleasure or a high pitch of crisis or sometimes just a high pitch of high pitch. Holden Caulfield might have called it “phoniness.” -- One of the other great adolescent poses of Facebook is irony at all times. So if you say, “can’t wait for the Lady Gaga concert,” you might add “lol” or you might say “Hey you are at camp and I’m in England, but I just wanted to let you know that I miss youuuu hahaha” to make it clear that you are not really looking forward to anything or expressing an actual emotion in a way that might be overly earnest or embarrassing.'

'"Chatroulette is eliminating all approach anxiety, there's no adverse signaling. You're just thrust into a conversation with people. Right now it's one to one, but you can imagine a one-to-many approach there, too. People who don't get nexted [skipped over to a next conversation] could be helped to draw a bigger audience. If you don't get nexted, you're more likely to be a cute girl, less likely to be a penis. You're more likely to be interesting. It could evolve toward live performance."'

'Among young people especially [Sherry Turkle] found that the self was increasingly becoming externally manufactured rather than internally developed: a series of profiles to be sculptured and refined in response to public opinion. “On Twitter or Facebook you’re trying to express something real about who you are. But because you’re also creating something for others’ consumption, you find yourself imagining and playing to your audience more and more. So those moments in which you’re supposed to be showing your true self become a performance. Your psychology becomes a performance.” Referring to “The Lonely Crowd,” the landmark description of the transformation of the American character from inner- to outer-directed, Turkle added, “Twitter is outer-directedness cubed.” -- I am trying to gain some perspective on the perpetual performer’s self-consciousness. That involves trying to sort out the line between person and persona, the public and private self.' -- I am Jack's Social Object

'...we are continually driven to produce our own boredom. ...social media lets us function as our own mini ad agencies, working to exhaust the meaning of things more quickly so as to expand the flexibility of our identities, and to make each identity-signifying gesture seem more significant in the moment. ...we want to expend the meaning in a good in a fireworks-like explosion of broadcasted signification; we don’t want our goods to continue to signify who we are after the contrived moment of their presentation to our public. As a result, we purposely make ourselves bored with things, and boredom is a state of open, uncommitted possibility for us, whereas ongoing engagement with some specific set of thing is confining.'

'Carles invites his readers to make explicit the implicit surveillance they are already conducting, led onward by an administered proclivity for passive curiosity and vicarious fascination with famous persons ... and become actual informants, supplying him with information as if he were a Stasi bureau chief in charge of cultural subversives: Recommended TIP submissions: #mild misunderstandings that need more exposure to turn into over-exposed controversies... And so on. Carles's point of course, is to demonstrate how the media machine no longer needs diabolical masters to operate it ... Instead we create the material bases for our own ideological predetermination through our own eagerness to participate in the mystified consciousness and culture industries. By reporting on one another, we feel as though we have become more famous ourselves, more certain that every move of our own is being watched and evaluated...'

"We live in a bubble of fake bullshit." -- Ergo we must build an even bigger bubble of authentic bullshit.

'The public and networked nature of the Internet creates the potential for visibility. We have the ability to see into the lives of so many people who are different than us. But only when we choose to look. So who is looking? Why are they looking? And in what context are they interpreting what they see? By and large, those who are looking are those who hold power over the person being observed. Parents look. Teachers look. Employers look. Governments look. Corporations look. These people are often looking to judge or manipulate. Given the powerful position they are in, those doing the looking often think that they have the right to look. But do they have the right to judge? The right to manipulate? This, of course, is the essence of conversations about surveillance. And so we argue and argue and argue about the right to privacy in public spaces. -- One of the reasons why people fear the technologies we make are because they make thing visible that we don't like.'

'Life under conditions of global capital has shown us that there’s no way to consume our way out of the traps of consumerist conformity, no matter how alternative or distinctive our consumption practices are. We simply can’t stop ourselves from producing the terms of our own exploitation. -- ...the various sensual satisfactions that goods might supply have all been supplanted by the overarching satisfaction of having our identity, as expressed through a particular consumption act, recognized and validated. Then we know it mattered, that it meant something. -- Our desire, though it makes our own identity, is someone else’s capital. Though it registers to ourselves as integrity and psychological complexity, it is at the same time an impersonal measure of our productive capacity as immaterial laborers. We can’t prevent our consumption from serving as immaterial labor, and anything else we do is easily translated into a sign, into consumption.'

7 Core Concepts of Transmedia Entertainment: #Drillability #Mythology: Continuity vs Multiplicity #Immersion & Extractability #World Building #Seriality #Subjectivity #Performance -- On mask play in transmedia activism: "It's a way of taking transmedia back into society and trying to change the world using a shared mythology that shapes our experience." Example: Anonymous [V for Vendetta] vs The Church of Scientology -- It's getting a bit too easy to point to something and say 'transmedia'. HJ: "The best transmedia story of the last few years has been Barack Obama." http://henryjenkins.org/2009/12/the_revenge_of_the_origami_uni.html

'...what happens when markets become non-anonymous is that we become reliant on consumption more than ever to mediate our relations with others, so that friendships happen only within the context of brand communities and branded social networks and shared affinities for the same products. “Social networking, blogging, etc. have created a huge incentive for people to put themselves on display, when previously they may have just kept their opinions mostly to themselves.” It is that incentivizing that worries me ... its conflation with commercialized self-display and personal branding. Social networks keep score of attention in measurable ways, heightening the stakes, and our physical isolation erodes the traditional mitigating forces of courtesy (which is where the stigma against performing, of hogging attention, arose from in the first place). The danger is that performance as a gift, a carefree act of self-forgetting, instead becomes an ongoing requisite act of self-definition.'

'One must invent a community, an adoring audience, in order to imagine that self-expression is a gift. and things like Facebook serve to make that fantasy easier to sustain, by making positive feedback thoughtlessly implementable. The ordinary impersonal markets ... are suspended to force participants to sell their own "radical self-expression" instead as a self-conscious product, for approval and attention and status and a stable position in an emerging social hierarchy. This is allowing identity-driven consumerism to supplant capitalist consumption. -- The market is an atavistic structure that works against the sort of self consumerism exalts -- markets prefer anonymous subjects engaging in exchanges ruled entirely by rationality rather than the vagaries of social relations and social/cultural capital. -- ...social networks seize upon the mechanisms Burning Man evinces for creating a community built on coercive sharing, but tosses out the impermanence that excuses the coercion.'

'The main purpose of social networks ... is to guarantee us a place to display our consumption. The point is to discourage online anonymity, to get us invested in the notion of reputational capital. We begin to publicize every purchase, to authenticate every choice by broadcasting it. We strengthen our communal ties with every singularized transaction. We will have reason to believe that everything we buy has an impact on our reputation, on how we are seen, on who we really are. We will respond accordingly, stylizing and designing the most mundane commodities so that they can elucidate some aspect of personality. If we share, we contribute information, we add value to the network and we know that our voice has been aggregated. Our drop was added to the demographic data pool, but more important, our own personal archive has been enriched. We become more findable. We can begin to keep score of how often we’re found, how real we are to the world.'

'Rather than entering into an exchange with a stable identity, we become ourselves through the public transaction, which provides us with a self only for as long as it is approved in the interaction process. The exchange is “singularized,” its uniqueness supplants that of the people involved. They fade into the communal backdrop, waiting to emerge again in another dramatic moment of “sharing.” And every effort at sharing will be judged, fixing our place within a status hierarchy. We can fantasize about finding the status hierarchy we could dominate — maximizing our “subcultural capital.” But this involves doubling down on personalized exchange, moving further away from the capital that circulates with no questions asked (money) and reinforcing the value of contingent capital that has worth only in particularly circumstances. So at that point, we would be dealing in an even more obscure personal currency, begging for people to accept it, exchange it into acceptance and attention.'

'In order for consumption to be meaningful ... it must be publicized in some way. -- Kozinets notes that though Burning Man “has many similarities to a Disney theme park,” he found that — unlike at Disneyland, I would venture to say — “people indicated that they were constantly judging others in terms of the degree of their participation in the event” in order to identify outsiders to be derided as inauthentic. Of course, these poseur “tourists” serve to structure the authenticity of these self-appointed judges’ own participation, and by extension, their identity. Kozinets suggests that Burning Man participants’ “use of these passive, isolated consumer-as-dupe comparisons may point to the higher cultural capital” denoting the festival goers’ belonging to an “educated intelligentsia.” They engage in “building strong communal ties and using the ancient practice of vilifying the outsider.” Communal relations are indeed reestablished, by the palpable and immediate threat of exclusion.'

'Harry, a diffident 32-year-old charity campaigner, tells me, “The first girl I fell in love with couldn’t keep anything off her profile. It gave me a weird sense of out-of-body experience. Maybe I would have been self-conscious anyway, but I found myself thinking not, ‘What do I want to say to her?’ but ‘How will this play on her page?’ I wasn’t just after her approval, but that of an entire community. -- What we are talking about here is nothing less than a new means of symbolising relationship, and new methods of constructing a romantic identity: the virtual affair, the untagged husband, the status-update-parcelled-out self. As Lucy observes, “I still find myself ‘self-tweeting’. Every little thing that happens has the potential to go public, and it is a game to find a concise, witty way to make it viral." -- "...you realise it’s all just so many pixels on a screen.” Pixels with more permanence than some of the relationships they depict.'

'The power of all things ‘NOW’ can be traced back to the eternal lure of instant gratification ...many ‘fixed’ items run the risk of becoming synonymous with boredom, hassle (Maintenance! Theft! Going out of style! Repairs!), eco-unfriendliness, and sinking a large part of one’s budget into one object (which impedes spending on multiple experiences). ...'digital' has become synonymous with 'instant'. -- Zygmunt Bauman: "...fragmented lives require individuals to be flexible and adaptable — to be constantly ready and willing to change tactics at short notice, to abandon commitments and loyalties without regret and to pursue opportunities according to their current availability." -- Raw experiences: ...‘live’ cannot be edited, controlled or censored and therefore offers the possibility of boredom-beating surprises. And surprises, excitement, controversy, scandal, realness, and rawness is exactly what many consumers are openly or secretly craving.' -- Have fists, will travel.

'My thought process is private ... the “immediate self” is not a true reflection of what we mean or what we want or what we are. The stream of real-time information to which we are continually supposed to contribute may seem a spontaneous eruption of expression, but it is an expression of pure administration. -- The self we develop in that matrix of perpetual publicity will be more malleable than ever before; there will be no reserve for the individual to draw from, no private experience to shore up a sense of self that the social network rejects or doubts. The endless real-time communication foretells a perfect system for imposing dispersed power on an individual at every moment—to have that individual compulsively referring everything that he regards as significant that he does to the public sphere for comment and recognition, a never-ending compulsion to confess, to invent the anticipated sins and perform the social penances.'

'Peep culture involves watching and being watched, snooping and spying, gawking and gossiping; it means exposing our intimacies with an eye toward bonding with others and growing comfortable with the increasingly common slippage between public and private. Peep culture, like pop culture, informs the atmosphere — it is the atmosphere — in which we live. Writes Niedzviecki, “It’s like that famous line about pornography: you know it when you see it. And you do see it. All the time, everyday, everywhere. -- ...people like Twitter because it's connection with low expectations. And that's a phrase that has stuck with me and has become almost an overarching explanation for the whole peep culture phenomenon. ...we want the feeling of connection without the weight of being expected to do something.”

'Converging technology, transhumanism, and our future in the making. The cutting edge group known as transhumanists see a beautiful future brought about by artificial intelligence, life extension, and cybernetics. What one must realize before getting carried away with such utopian dreams is that transhumanism was born out of the elitist pseudo-science eugenics. This documentary provides vital information on the history of eugenics and its new cutting edge transformation.' -- Transhumanism is a eugenics cult. Well, yeah. The idea is to man-u-facture better slaves. This is what humans lust to do to each other. 'Twas ever thus.

'The 10- and 12-year-old girls updated a Facebook status to say they were lost in a drain on Honeypot Road at Hackham in Adelaide’s southern suburbs on Sunday night. Glenn Benham from the MFS says it was fortunate a young friend was online at the time and was able to call for help for them. “It is a worry for us because it causes a delay on us being able to rescue the girls,” he said. “If they were able to access Facebook from their mobile phones, they could have called 000, so the point being they could have called us directly and we could have got there quicker than relying on someone being online and replying to them and eventually having to call us via 000 anyway.”' -- IM. TAKING. MY. LAST. BREATH. LOL

Texting isn't writing: it's talking. -- '...young people today write far more than any generation before them. That's because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. ..life writing, as Lunsford calls it. ...students were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos—assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across. The modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago.' -- See? There's nothing letter-ly/linear going on here. These are sound-words that are meant to be overheard in an acoustic space conducive to overhearing: the internet. -- 'The Stanford students were almost always less enthusiastic about their in-class writing because it had no audience but the professor...' -- Why write for one when you could talk to all?

'"To remain dominant in the future, we need to dominate the central nervous system." By attempting to dominate the central nervous system, Big Pharma gambled its future on treating ailments that have turned out to be particularly susceptible to the placebo effect. ...one way that placebo aids recovery is by hacking the mind's ability to predict the future. We are constantly parsing the reactions of those around us—such as the tone a doctor uses to deliver a diagnosis—to generate more-accurate estimations of our fate. One of the most powerful placebogenic triggers is watching someone else experience the benefits of an alleged drug. Researchers call these social aspects of medicine the therapeutic ritual. ...why would the placebo effect seem to be getting stronger worldwide? Part of the answer may be found in the drug industry's own success in marketing its products.'

'...men are left cognitively impaired by [the presence of a female], an effect that seems to be related to the diversion of cognitive resources towards the challenge of creating the best possible impression. -- That men, but not women, were affected by a brief mixed-sex encounter is consistent with research in evolutionary psychology (and with received wisdom) showing that men are more motivated by mating goals. -- Karremans' team said their findings could have important real-life implications, for example in relation to whether schooling should be single or mixed-sex. "Part of boys' valuable cognitive resources may be spent on impressing their female class members," they said.'

'An emotion tracking system has been patented by Sony; it detects laughter and other emotions in media consumers. The application picks up on metadata, which includes laughter recorded by the microphone and a user’s expression from the camera. Both devices are linked to a “game console”, shown as a PlayStation 3 in the diagram, which identifies the user, notes emotions, and transfers the data over a network.'

'We assume we know the people whose petty complaints and daily routines we’ve heard so much about because, traditionally, the only way to hear such things was to get to know them well. But it’s impossible to really know someone through sanitized soundbites. In 140 chars, there’s little room for the nuances of personality such conversation typically reveals. ...all see the carefully-prepared facade people want to present, and come away thinking that we know them better than we really do. With people we know in “real life,” this isn’t such a big deal. We already know their personality; Twitter simply helps maintain our relationship by keeping us up-to-date. And while, in doing so, it lets us maintain vastly more relationships ...on Twitter, at the same time you sign up to hear from Oprah, you can also follow—and cement your relationship with—more real friends. And it’s a good thing too, because with all these fake friends running around, we’re going to need all the real ones we can get.'

'It's all about shared intimacy that is of no value to a third-party ear who doesn't know the person babbling. It's a back-and-forth that makes sense if only we didn't look down at it from outter space. Of course it looks alien. Walk into any typical social encounter between people you don't know and it's bound to look a wee bit alien, especially if those people are demographically different than you. It's about the more subtle back and forth that allow us to keep our connections going. It's about the phatic communication and the gestures, the little updates and the awareness of what's happening in space. We take the implicit nature of this for granted in physical environments yet, online, we have to perform each and every aspect of our interactions. What comes out may look valueless, but, often, it's embedded in this broader ecology of social connectivity. What's so wrong about that?'

'Sharing once seemed to me a simple, straightforward thing, but the way tech and social media companies have co-opted it recently have made me increasingly suspicious of it. ...we aren’t sharing at all, we are working to move information and data into digital space where it can be manipulated and harvested for profit.' -- '...don’t we want actual editors filtering content for us rather than our friends? I would be inundated with more information to process about my friends’ efforts to signal who they want to be. And I would have my own performance to worry about as well.' -- '... [we are sending] the message to the world that it is okay to assume that we are always, always performing. That sort of claustrophobic suffocation precludes the possibility of a true public space, as in not private. Everything that once might have delineated the private is now being compulsively shared or extracted and brought into view. ...always on the verge of boasting.' -- Performance anxiety?

'...people play MMOs like Spymaster for the social experience of gaming with others, research suggests a more solitary experience enriched by the presence of, if not the meaningful interaction with, other players. Researcher Nick Yee identified this as an “alone together” experience, meaning we’re playing in the same space, but we’re not really playing with each other. What is the draw of playing “alone together”? In studying MMOs, Yee observed that "players have important roles beyond providing direct support and camaraderie in the context of quest groups: they also provide an audience, a sense of social presence, and a spectacle.” He said this trio of factors “can help explain the appeal of being ‘alone together’ in multiplayer games.”' -- The players are the content for other players.

On media ecology and Postman's amusing ourselves to death. Quoting Henry Canbry, 1926: "What we are encountering is a panicky, an almost hysterical, attempt to escape from the deadly anonymity of modern life ... and the prime cause is not vanity ... but the craving of people who feel their personality sinking lower and lower into the whirl of indistinguishable atoms to be lost in mass civilization." -- That 'context collapse' makes people to want to discover an authentic self to perform authentically towards 'authentic causes' that reinforce the authenticity of the endlessly authenticating self? Dude needs to read some HRO.

On 'users’ criticism of a popular style of profile picture referred to as “MySpace Angles.” Reactions to this style of portraiture label the display of these photographs “deceptive,” alleging that MySpace Angles fool users into believing that the subject is more attractive than they actually are. ...the MySpace Angle commentary, revealing three main themes in users’ critique of MySpace Angles: 1) users who post these photographs are conforming to a social trend at the expense of their individuality; 2) the presentation of these photographs is narcissistic; and, 3) these photographs purposefully conceal the body. This case study displays a shift in the conception of deception online; on the social Web populated by SNSs, theories of deception and authenticity are called into question as users are increasingly anchored to their bodies and expected to effortlessly present an online self mirroring the offline self.' -- False advertising. Caveat emptor.

'Call it Living by Numbers—the ability to gather and analyze data about yourself, setting up a feedback loop that we can use to upgrade our lives, from better health to better habits to better performance. -- ...people change their behavior—often for the better—when they are being observed... -- We tend to think of our physical selves as a system that's simply too complex to comprehend. But what we've learned from companies like Google is that if you can collect enough data, there's no need for a grand theory to explain a phenomenon. You can observe it all through the numbers. Everything is data. You are your data, and once you understand that data, you can act on it. -- For many Nike+ users, doing their exercise becomes inextricable from measuring it. "Forgetting my Nike+ sensor, or my iPod battery being dead, just takes the life out of my run."'

'On Facebook, users have every interest in lying or exaggerating about their preferences to signal various commitments and so on. They are hardly sharing their “real thoughts and tastes” in every instance. But when they do Google searches, they actually are interested in getting the information; there is not point of pretense. So having that record of what actually gets searched allows Google to spy much further into the individual user’s psyche. That seems for more “real,” for marketers’ purposes... Facebook is a performative space; the Google search window is not. -- Built into this social-search idea as well is this annoying presumption that no one can generate an interest in something without a friend already being interested in it. Whatever happened to autonomous curiosity? The “social graph” is more a primary source for what is being gossiped about; it would be terrible if that constituted the horizons of what I learned about the world.' -- Facebook, The Ministry of Friendship

"Sure, the two services overlap. Groups of friends do share on Twitter, but the service makes even more sense as a tool for reaching people you do not actually know. There is a reason why celebrities like Twitter. It allows them to reach fans with little expectation they will actually interact with them. Facebook, meanwhile, demands interaction. Twitter's length restriction, doubtless part of its genius, also makes it better suited for announcements than conversation. Facebook, by comparison, is a two-way street. I have had long discussions on Facebook that eventually involved perhaps a dozen people, each of whom could easily read all the others' sometimes lengthy comments. Maybe there is a way to do this on Twitter, but I have not found it." -- Like chance encounters in the street, exchanging 'catch-ups', then moving on to the pub for a proper 'conversation'. Shifting into different 'performance' space-places is half the fun.

"The mediated evolution from passive to active pruning and preening of our identity has been the story of the internet’s penetration into everyday life generally. Gadgets insert themselves into that process of identity projection; they offer the individual a chance to seemingly extend their personality’s reach, while at the same time they give outside parties an opportunity to exploit it. So gone is the idea of seeing someone on the train reading a book that makes you curious about them; coming is the era is using Twitter to blast out to all your followers (the future version of friends) what you are reading, with an automatic link to Amazon already worked in."

'Since "adult services" have previously managed to use other communications systems -- postal services, telephones, shop windows, email, the web, advertisements in tabloid newspapers -- this shouldn't come as a huge surprise, but brothel stories are probably good for raising your circulation (fnar fnar).' -- Yup. Sell the sizzle not the steak. See 'Big Sister' businessmodel: http://bit.ly/2c3cm

"Avatar Endurance Performance"

'It’s a safe bet that the Kindle is unlikely to attract people who seldom pick up a book or, on the other end of the spectrum, people who prowl antiquarian book fairs for first editions. But for the purpose of sizing up a stranger from afar, perhaps the biggest problem with Kindle or its kin is the camouflage factor: when no one can tell what you’re reading, how can you make it clear that you’re poring over the new Lincoln biography as opposed to, say, “He’s Just Not That Into You”?'

'The speculative bubble was based on a bet that served as its own foundation. It was “performative,” in the terminology of the linguistic philosopher John Austin. “This session is now open,” proclaims the president in an assembly. It’s true because he says it: here reality is based on speech, while in ordinary cases speech is based on reality—that is, it is not performative but indicative. Similarly, the financial bubble, piling credit on top of credit, got rich on self-affirmation. It was contained in its self-relation, which is what made it a bubble. It gradually eliminated the principle of reality: nothing counted but the financial products invented by people’s investments.' -- Must re-read McLuhan on America being somewhat backward (in the electronic age) due to having been born of and stuck in a linear/literal/words -based culture. For older, oral-based cultures, this is a postmodern/systemic/accoustic crisis; for America, it's a modernist/determinist/linear one.

'Who among us doesn't contain a few multitudes? ...the online world -- where we are spending an increasing amount of time -- is intolerant of our multiple personality disorder. This is one of the paradoxes of the Internet age: the freedom of the Internet is also constraining. The image we project of ourselves online -- what some academics call "unitary identity" -- becomes our defining image for all audiences. It does not allow us to shed a past identity or recreate ourselves, or to project different images to different audiences. -- The problem is that all these sites -- Facebook, MySpace and Twitter -- constrain us to sending one "signal" to many audiences. Harvard Business School professor Mikolaj Jan Piskorski has written about the need to send different signals at different times. What we need are better controls over which signals we are sending to our various online audiences... we want our multiple digital identities to more closely mirror our contradictory selves.'

'... the improving raw numbers of cultural consumption matter mainly to entrepreneurs in the culture industries. Consumers care more about what their cultural consumption signifies. The new emphasis on the quantity of culture consumed and the signals it can be deployed to send has led to the development of a widespread collector’s mentality toward culture: Quote: George Balgobin: 'Facebook is devoted to cataloguing this cultural rebirth. Here people curate their personas and project them at the world. Characteristic of the younger generations, the mood strains for the eclectic while feigning nonchalance. The alchemist arranges lists in search of gold... Status updates remind you that a friend has just returned from an “HD Mozart Opera” while another is “getting into Herzog films”. This is an achievement panopticon; the participants are its prisoners.' -- The key question ends up being whether we believe that performing our appreciation of something means we don’t really appreciate it.'

'My avatar has changed. For the past half year I’ve been writing under a stranger’s face - a “spare” avatar ... At first, I found it awkward to write and felt slightly irritated by being represented by a stranger. ... self-representation and avatar usage can be a serious matter online. The avatars we chose to represent ourselves have an impact on how we behave and also on how we’re perceived online. That’s why sites that easily allow you to change your avatar often are more engaging and interactive. People change their avatar to reflect their mood, send secret messages to other friends, display self- attributes, social role, a fantasy representation of who they want to be or they might just want to provoke. ...seeing people’s creative use of avatars make me much more interested in finding out what’s going on at a site and communicate with the people who use it."

'... college was my big chance to [...] reinvent myself, to get busy with the embarrassing, exciting, muddy, wonderful work of creating an adult identity. Can you really do that with your 450 closest friends watching, all tweeting to affirm ad nauseam your present self? Perhaps my nieces will find a new way to establish distance from their former selves, to clear space for introspection and transformation. Perhaps they will evolve through judicious deleting and updating of profile information, through the constant awareness of their public face. It could be that [...] Facebook marks a return to the time when people remained embedded in their communities for life, with connections that ran deep, peers who reined them in if they strayed too far from the norm... Kids [...] will inevitably want to drive a stake into the heart of former lives, may simply abandon [Facebook] and find something new: something still unformed, yet to be invented — much like themselves.'

"That night, a disturbing thing happened. At 3 am, I semi-woke, finding my brain was restructured into a stream where I was waiting for the latest 140 character outburst from the random collection of people I follow--colleagues, old lovers, the guy I know who is building a space elevator. I was dreaming in Twitter. The static electricity of all these quick, fragmentary thoughts made me feel more jittery and caffeinated than if I had drunk three lattes before bed. I spent between the next four hours waiting for something, but I couldn't figure out what. All I knew was that I wasn't satisfied. I thought of cradling my cuddly iPhone with me in bed. I could read tweets in the middle of the night. That thought terrified me. I felt like I was being watched, if not by others, than by myself, scanning through my existence for the next Twitterable moment. I couldn't sleep for longer than two hours at a time."

'This new species of extremely appealing, touchy, feely, humanoid machine puts Sherry Turkle on edge. She believes people are passionately attaching themselves to sociable robots, and fantasizing a reciprocal interest from these machines. “You care about them and want them to care about you. Nurturance turns out to be the killer app in robotics. There is a danger that we’ll become accustomed to superficial cyber connections, and develop lower expectations for human to human interactions," says Turkle. Cyber intimacy may lead to cyber solitude. And you can turn off a robot when it bores you, or conversely, depend on it to “live” forever, while human relations come with endless baggage, complexities and sometimes unhappy endings. “Roboticists have come to speak of ‘I Thou’ relationships with machines, but what is the value of interactions that contain no understanding of us and that contribute nothing to the shared store of human meaning? These are not questions with ready made answers.”

'What is real? What is virtual? What is living? What is nonliving? Of the many selves I am, who is he real me?' -- 'Computing would offer [Turkle] endless moments of sweet epiphany when theories that had seemed right but abstract were suddenly right and manifest. Constructing the self with language and the notion of permeable boundaries? There it was on the screen. You could almost substitute computing for terms of Lacan's manifesto: computing is constructed as a set of languages; language (the relationship of terms to each other) is the structure that forms computing; the boundaries between data and execution are blurred; and so forth. What in other contexts has seemed like the gibberish of postmodernism–decentering (oh, you mean multiple users), intertextuality (oh, hypertext), fragmentation (oh, me in the Parenting conference, me in the Eros conference), blurring (oh, object-oriented languages)–is rendered clear at last.'

"Eliza had a strong emotional effect on many who used it. Weizenbaum was surprised that his students were eager to chat with the program and some even wanted to be alone with it. What made Eliza a valued interlocutor? What matters were so private that they could only be discussed with a machine? Eliza not only revealed people's willingness to talk to computers but their reluctance to talk to other people. Students' trust in Eliza did not speak to what they thought Eliza would understand but their lack of trust in the people who would understand. Relational artifacts have become evocative objects, object that clarify our relationships to the world and ourselves. People who meet these objects feel a desire to nurture them. And with this desire comes the fantasy of reciprocation. People begin to care for these objects and want the objects to care about them."

"If I were of a mind to launch a Web 2.0 business today, I wouldn't rely on advertising or subscriptions or try to maximize my page views. I wouldn't worry about technology at all, in fact. I'd become a personal avatar consultant, helping nervous people construct and manage their menagerie of online selves. Or else I'd become a psychotherapist specializing in "avatar issues," ... I would, in short, find a way to capitalize on what promises to be a lucrative epidemic of avatar anxiety."

"I’d say games are closer to plays. The director is the game designers, the game itself is the script, the player is an actor. Actors have a lot of wiggle room they interpret the lines and perform them, in ways that the director or scriptwriter may never have thought about or intended. But on the other hand, the actor can’t go outside of the script. Just like a game may have all sorts of alternate paths and endings, but the player can’t go outside them. I think the point really is that players have no problem being actors, even in roles that may be very different from themselves. I think many players want to expand their range a bit more than designers give them credit."

'He said he decided to stick to type and formatting that could have been created on a typewriter, with the first ten pages duplicating shots of Torrance's work from the film. "I thought 'if he continues to get crazier, what would those pages look like?'" he said. "I hit writer's block about 60 pages in, and I had to get to 80 - that went on for about a week." His fiancée, who had neither read the book nor seen the film, became a little concerned about his actions. "I finally showed her the movie, and she realised I wasn't really losing it," said Buehler.' -- via: @windo

'#Scarcity: A gamer looks at scarcity and says “oh, this is just survival horror”. There’s no longer any bonus to highscores and killing everything; the only victory is survival. And when reduced to those raw elements, survival is, by its very nature, horrific. #Complexity: ...it requires a reasonably high degree of systems literacy to recognise that the game is a regular system, and as such, its behaviour can be calculated. Learning what you can and can’t calculate or predict is an important skill... #Effectiveness & Efficiency #An End to Colocation #Living in a Data Rich World: ...gamers love scores...consider the popularity of Championship Manager, the world’s most popular spreadsheet... #Failure: When we learn in games, we learn by failing -- On Politics: 'Obama ‘08 Call Friends (iPhone app)... It has online high-score charts; you can compete against people you don’t know to be the best campaigner. On the sly, they turned politics into an MMO.'

'Fakesters were a way of “hacking” the system to introduce missing social texture. Although Fakesters had taken on a collective impression of resistance, their primary political stance concerned authenticity. In discussing Fakesters, Batty was quick to point out that there’s no such thing as an authentic performance on Friendster—“None of this is real.” Through the act of articulation and writing oneself into being, all participants are engaged in performance intended to be interpreted and convey particular impressions. While some people believed that “truth” could be perceived through photorealistic imagery and a list of tastes that reflected one’s collections, the Fakesters were invested in using more impressionistic strokes to paint their portraits. If we acknowledge that all profiles are performative, permitting users to give off a particular view of themselves, why should we judge Fakesters as more or less authentic than awkwardly performed profiles?'

"... bourriaud formulated a new aesthetics for contemporary art. his theoretical leaning, summarized as 'relational art,' gives a new interpretation of the aesthetic object. the object is no longer materially or conceptually defined, but relationally. "what do relations eventually create? relations to the artistic work, institutions and so on?" -- Transformations. Design for the transformation. Everything else is secondary.

"Playwright Oriza Hirata says the work raises questions about the relationship between humanity and technology. The play, called Hataraku Watashi (I, Worker), is set in the near future. It focuses on a young couple who own two housekeeping robots, one of which loses its motivation to work. In the play, the robot complains that it has been forced into boring and demeaning jobs and enters into a discussion with the humans about its role in their lives."

'When you run, you see your hands pumping up and down in front of you. When you jump, your feet briefly jut up into eyeshot — precisely as they do when you're vaulting over a hurdle in real life. And when you tuck down into a somersault, you're looking at your thighs as the world spins around you. What's more, the Mirror's Edge world feels tactile and graspable. Because the game is designed around the concept of parkour, or moving through obstacles, most times when you see something that looks like you could jump on it, you can. The gameplay requires it. The upshot is that these small, subtle visual cues have one big and potent side effect: They trigger your sense of proprioception. It's why you feel so much more "inside" the avatar here than in any other first-person game. And it explains, I think, why Mirror's Edge is so curiously likely to produce motion sickness. The game is not merely graphically realistic; it's neurologically realistic.'

Stuff's just beginning to trickle in reflecting on our Halloween reenactment of The War of the Worlds on Twitter. Here are some links to what we've found so far. Each participant averaged 2.6 tweets total. The most active participants posted 60 to 100 tweets. There were around 600 people following the invasion progress. That's about 1500 tweets for all participants over the course of the event. I think it's safe to assume that about 10,000 people were touched by these apocalyptic tidings."

"#1: a noteworthy astronomer speculates on the possibility of an alien invasion. This would be a good time to talk about the Drake equation in your blog, especially if astronomy is your hobby. Send an email to wotw@cixar.com with your blog so we can proliferate it on the @wotw2 Twitter account. -- #2: The alien invasion occurs. Follow @wotw2 to keep in sync with the progress of the invasion. This Twitter feed will automatically update, in general terms, the unfolding of the alien invasion like clockwork throughout the world. Coordinate with Tweeters in your area to tell local stories. -- #3: After the threat dies down, people begin to blog and speculate about what happened, and every topic near and dear to them. -- #4: The curtain rises. Blog, link, and tweet about the experience."

"In the recent War of the Worlds example, some estimated 600 participants got together and generated around 1500 tweets about what they envisioned to be happening around them as various events within the original narrative unfolded, so that as the tripods touched down, people were encouraged to generate local narratives and fill in gaps in the story... a "real time" unfolding of a story-act, creates not only a story world, but one which is ambiguous in its boundaries, where characters can enter and leave at will, in any direction... the original story is merely the facilitating mechanism in the storytelling effort... the stories that explode out of the framing device have gaps, overlaps, contradiction, temporal inconsistencies, and all forms of delay, change, surprise. We are not only talking about a multilinear hypertext narrative, but rather an entire narrative ecology that potentially explodes the structure of how we, as a collective, tell stories."

"#Slide: Convergence is a cultural rather than a technological process. We now live in a world where every story, image, sound, idea, brand, and relationship will play itself out across all possible media platforms. The convergence is in our heads, not necessarily in tech devices. -- #Slide: "People don't engage with each other to engage viruses; people exchange viruses as an excuse to engage with each other." - Douglas Rushkoff -- #Slide: In a gift economy, status, prestige or esteem take the place of cash remuneration as the primary drivers of cultural production and social transaction. - Lewis Hyde"

Comment: Barbara Fister: "... an amorphous, self-organizing group that works to sustain a story - that reminds me of what it felt like as a kid to play "let's pretend" with a group, all working off the same premise. I haven't had that experience as an adult, and I remember exactly when we all looked at each other and realized we were too old to do anymore. We had become self-conscious and it ruined the improvisational ability to make stuff up on the fly together. I'd love to have that experience again!" -- :((

"ExitReality is a free internet plug-in that allows anyone to view every web page in 3D"

"Real-life customer stories will fuel the re-invention of marketing, all brands in the future will exist between the intersection of a value system and stories around them. Expect that in 3 years the competition of noises and images will evolve into a stage which I call stories war. Every brand will fight not to own a positioning (that’s so old school advertising) but to own stories. The next competitive front for brands would be to own the “best stories” and most relevant "key words” for search."

"Users are in a better position than designers to discover better products and experiences and, increasingly, better positioned to create them too."

"Cognizers can offload some of their cognitive functions onto cognitive technology, thereby extending their performance capacity beyond the limits of their own brain power. Language itself is a form of cognitive technology that allows cognizers to offload some of their cognitive functions onto the brains of other cognizers. And as with language, the cognitive tool par excellence, such technological changes are not merely instrumental and quantitative: they can have profound effects on how we think and encode information, on how we communicate with one another, on our mental states, and on our very nature.

"A brief look at the Big Bang birth of a fandom: the explosion of 'Dr. Horrible' fandom in just 47 days. Quite a lot of "more inside" follows." -- Campfires...

'Profile Pages on Facebook can have audiences of course, but this requires that users continually roam Facebook to look for news in their network. Facebook realized this limitation and introduced the News Feed. Its intent was to move a user’s “acts and performances” from the stage of the profile page to a single and central stage, a single place for Audience.'

"The longevity of a media property is elongated by the desires of the community to keep it going. I wonder if it's possible for game designers to create products with the intention of ludic activity spraying beyond the boundaries of the games they create."

"Sooner or later, It'll seem ludicrous that we couldn't exactly track our real-time energy usage, sense the ongoing impact on our immediate environment." -- Scaffolding Gaia.

"As a player I am both producing my experience in the ways in which I express my skill within a particular game play moment whilst simultaneously consuming the results of my actions. The player performs the game activity necessary to build a pattern of behaviour to “progress” the game. Carrying out this pattern of activity can be regarded as a performance on the behalf of the player. All game players build a skilled performance of action in order to win the game."

"Performativity in discourse produces action. Performativity in video games couple gameplay to real-world action. Performative gameplay describes mechanics that change the state of the world through play actions themselves, rather than by inspiring possible future actions through coersion or reflection." -- Great examples: The Grocery Game and Bankquest

Sulka Haro: "I guess I really don't look so much at the definition of "game" as much as I look at the definition of "play." If you look at Habbo, nobody can say that people aren't playing in there. People really do play in all of these environments, so I would use that as the unifying metaphor for discussing the different environments and products you can use to play. It's more clear."