Being a Woman

My mother had called me last night to tell me about a book that she is reading about. The book is about womanhood by a Japanese American author. She is a woman in her 50's, and I think that her views are a bit old fashioned, but there are still some meritt to what she says.

My mother and I got into a converstaion about the contemporary society and the loss of womanhood. The things that had engendered women had become lost in our society. Women are now expected to make and do like men. Make a lot of money, be active, and even lead a life that is not centered around families.

These are exactly the things that had offended me about American feminism when I was in high school. I hated the idea that women who were home makers were subservient to career women. According to American feminism, the specific customs and qualities that engendered myself, my mother, and my girlfriends were the very things that disempowered us. Things like, cooking, cleaning, ironing, and doing these sorts of chores around the house were things that belonged to us women. But it was shameful to participate in these things, let alone to enjoy them.

It's as if us women who came from another land, with different skin tones (other than white), we have an idea of gender and womenhood that is more practical. The idea of womanhood was something that came with our upbringing. Something that I had resisted as a child in Japan, when I had to learn how to speak Japanese, the girl way: when I had to play soccer in an all boy's club, because no girls wanted to play. But as I learned to become more acustomed to the society norms, I started to appreciate the things that made us women. When I graduated from college, I remember my brothers having to learn for the first time, how to cook and do laundry. How strange, seeing them go through the awkwardness of learning, and seeing them enjoy the practice.

It was Donna Haraway who wrote in Cyborg Manifesto, that she would rather be a cyborg than a goddess. I think the idea of being a machine or a self anointed divinity gives me the cringe. One conjures up an image of a skinny white woman in suits, and the other is a fat old woman with long wavy hair. But especially the idea of a cyborg, who is genderless, that is half human, half machine, half man, half woman, is horrifying. It strips me of the qualites that I had cherished in my mother, my own culture and myself. I had not considered my own gender, what kind of woman I am. I'm not thinking that I can make my own gender identity. It is what I am. What am I? I am many things.

Here are my heroes...

Etsuko Matsuo
Eleanor Roosevelt (well, I still have to read her autobiography)
Janine Antoni
Meena Satnarain
Andrea Zittel
Teri Rueb
Eliza McKenna
Jennifer Weiss
Elizabeth Diller
Octavia Butler
Ruth Asawa
all my girlfriends

My grandfather

List for the Week.

Ok, so here are some projects that I need to work on...

Growing Pain-as soon as possible
-since I was a kid, I used to have this thing, called growing pain. I remember crying at night as a kid, because my limbs would hurt. Weird... My mom told me, recently that my grandmother had the same thing too.... Anyway, it's a silly thing.

Some studies...

Binding thesis documents, white, cut them in to half size books.
Stuff the books with naked trees. seeds. Make the body of the books grow.
Give these away as christmas gifts.

As a counterpart to this,
Take pictures of pig meat parts, and stuff it with seeds.
Take pictures of wounds, stuffed with plants.
Take pictures of wounds of trees stuffed with bleeding fruits. - this is a different kind of pain... this is more about birthing.. it's kind of like a different project. It's like 'woman's work' that amanda, meena and i did... our work got stuffed into a tree... such a violent response, yet it's so powerful.

Making Space for Art-Saturday
Dirty space-Traditional Studio, private space
Clean space-Media studio, public space

floating sacs in the air, illuminated.

I need to do some diagramming of the key ideas overlayed onto the master plan... just so that I could start to understand how people navigate through this.

So for the pinup... I want to have collages, and diagrams. My goal is to have at least the general idea squared away, and take a stab at the design.

Structure and composition next step.


Mom's Website, Marketing-whenever
How can my mom sell bee health products? I'm thinking that if she approaches it more as beauty products... it might work better... or atleast be more fun on my part.
Hmmm.... I should go to Whole Foods and Elephant Pharmacy. How to make a website...

DIY-holiday project
I'm fixing my laptop. I swapped the hard drive from an old laptop to the one that's broken. Now I have to reconnect the drivers.
I need to fix my bike chain. The chain is lose, and I need to replace it. So this is probably going to be next week.

Christmas presents-lotions (?)

Time to Grow Up

I got my hair done in Chinatown, and I got my eye brows done in Piedmont, by a Chinese lady. They both struck me as self-righteous types. I didn't like the way they did their jobs, and commented on how to change it, and of course, they resisted. They take pride in their creations. They are like artists. I don't like those qualities. Self-righteous. I am the same way.



My grandfather almost died several times in China, and Siberia. He was lucky that he had survived. My family is lucky that we exist. He is my idol and my hero since I was little. He is also my mother's hero. He did what he had to do... I'm always trying to do what I want to do-nothing really special there.

Time to Grow Up

Touchable Stories

This is a project that is created by Shannon Flattery. She had traveled from East coast to here, in Richmond, creating these community story telling projects. She had interviewed hundreds of people in Richmond and created a handful of rooms/installations based on certain themes. People navigated through the rooms to see the themes. The most successful of the rooms were the Mexican one, where there was a gigantic Zoetrope. I think I liked it the most because it was really optic, and all inclusive, and playful. So these are the three magical combination for success in my book. Other people had apparenly felt that other rooms were more interesting... A former congressman cried when he saw one of the rooms.

This art form isn't really my kind of art. I'm not convinced. Probably because it really wasn't aesthetic. I got into a really interesting conversation after the event with a British artist who does similar work as Shannon. She had done some interesting and incredible work, centered around community activism and public art. She said that artists are important in bringing political change, and that they are facilitators between the government and the people. That's inspiring, but it's not true. I told her that we are more like 'shock troops of gentrification', and that we go into impoverished neighborhoods and bring in the developers. I told her that the 'intent' doesn't matter anymore, it's all about the system, and good or bad, we all get used up in this system.

But we still have to do something. Is what she said. And that's true. I still think that what she does is important.

Elizabeth Diller

She is an amazing person, who, like all genius is able to tell her story with such simplicity. She started her lecture explaining that it was going to be mostly theraputic, and less polemic.. I love that. I think I want my interaction with people to be more like that. I want to bring comfort and joy to people through the things that I love to do.

When I went to go see Rem Koolhas, I was turned off by him from the second he opened his mouth. Everything that he said was very complicated, and nobody was really able to understand him except for a selected few. I am thinking back at everyone in the audience who probably felt as stupid as I did, but just sat quietly and marveled at the ugly images that he cast in the projection. It's true, I don't care so much what the presenter say, as long as the images are beautiful.... We are an ocular centered society, after all. If Rem Koolhas was a student of mine: if I was his teacher (ha!), I would probably tell him to cut it out!

I am trying to figure Liz Diller out. She comes across like a simple farmer girl. And maybe that's really all that she is. She is very logical and non-emotional. She is very stable. She doesn't budge, and just follow suit with what she likes, and her pleasure in architecture comes through. She is very humble, and there wasn't a spec of ego that came through. She had accomplished quite a lot, but her attention was very much about the enjoyment of doing, more so than being proud of her accomplishments. She's sexy, well, I can only imagine, having sex with her will be a lot of fun.

My boss is also inspirational. I havn't come across people like that in a long time. People who still take enjoyment out of what they do. Finally, I've met a positive architect role model... twice in a row!

************************
This world is making me crazy. But it's also kind of fun. I think what ever happens, I can always enjoy life.... I mean, no body can really take that away. And the rest of the things, the price you pay for mistakes, are put on the tab called growth.

My 30th year resolution... I'm not going to feel sorry for myself anymore.. and also, I'm not going to apologize for myself anymore. I'm 30 and I'm realizing that I'm all alone in the world. I'm also free, again.

Diller and Scofidio - 12/13/07 at SF MOMA!

yay! I'm going to be there. :)

R A D I O H E A D

While you can still get them for free!

http://www.inrainbows.com/

and a few other sites... I would like to get more knowlegeable about music. So this is how I'm going to start... just by talking/writing about it.

CAN
http://www.spoonrecords.com/

Flaming Lips
http://www.flaminglips.com/main.php

LAMB
http://www.lamb.tv/home.html
they're just soooo mooody! I love it.

Devendra Banhart
http://www.devendrabanhart.com/

I really like what he's done in his new albums... I like that he's experimenting, unlike whats his name that had similar voice that just disappeared after doing many albums that were all very similar.

I get a lot of this from my roommate and my friends, like Dan (Jewish) Backman. I think we have similar music taste. Dora used to have a radio show. Pretty rad. I'm going to ask her more about her show (I think she said it was a lot of social political stuff). I'm a bit funny, and I like to listen to things like car-talk.... even though...... I don't have a car.

Richmond Art Center

I went with Kelley today to the Richmond Art Center to meet with Julia Hamilton. It turns out that I knew Julia. I have been to her house, her brother had worked with me, and her father runs the school that my classmate's husband is studying at. She looked composed and awkwardly landed in her new environment. She is freshly graduated like Kelley and I.

The meeting was nebulous and disorganized, and it seems like that's the forcast for this project. Julia asked yes or no questions, and not many thought provoking questions. Her questions were things like 'Do you have conflict resolution experiences?' How am I supposed to answer that? Kelley answered no, and I said yes. But in truth Kelley is more apt with interpersonal things, and I am better at getting things done. So the meeting was strange because we kept on tossing the ball around, where nobody wanted to take ownership of the ball. I hate leaving meetings feeling like I should have gotten more out of it.

On the ride back, Kelley warned of burnout. It seems like we might have to do a lot of legwork. To prevent burnout, I can spend more energy into thinking about how other people can help us with this project. And if we are more organized, then it can prepare us.

Anyway. I love the prospect of being around foodies. People who love good food. It seems to go hand in hand with life. I can't imagine being in a country that doesn't appreciate good food.

UK is not all Brains

-Because I forget where I park my bike all the time. And aparently, I'm not that exceptional.


Forget It-http://www.preciousonline.co.uk/lifestyle/wellbeing/july06/forget_it.php







Be honest – how many times a day do you utter the phrase: “Now, where are my keys?”. If it’s even once, you can count yourself among the 73% of the UK population who routinely forget where they left spectacles, keys and the TV remote control, according to a new survey carried out by YouGov for BRAIN TRAINER, the pocket-sized ‘mental gymnasium’.

In an online survey of over 2,450 men and women around the country, we ’fessed up to being a nation of lightweights when it comes to recalling the essentials of life. "Nearly half of us (48%) forget to post important letters or bills on time. Around a third (35%) fail to remember work information or deadlines, which can have dire consequences - since 7% of the forgetters have had trouble at work or been fired as a result. 36% of people often forget a route they have travelled several times before. And at one time or another, 34% have forgotten where they parked the car.

Some statistics in the research reflect generally held assumptions – for example, that more men (13%) than women (8%) forget anniversaries or birthdays (37% for men to 24% for women). Men (41%) are more likely than women (30%) to need reminding about work information or deadlines. However, women are more forgetful about the factors that require spatial or time awareness – such as the ‘where’s my car?’ parking dilemma the car or remembering to post that important letter. It must be my age, dear! It’s easy to characterise people as ‘a bit dippy’ and put their forgetfulness down to age or gender. Surprisingly, the research doesn’t always bear this out. ",1]

Around half of us (47%) can’t even remember what day it is, and if it’s a special day like a family birthday, 30% of us will be completely oblivious. 10% will forget that it’s their wedding anniversary, but if they’ve mislaid their glasses, they probably couldn’t see to write a card anyway!

Nearly half of us (48%) forget to post important letters or bills on time. Around a third (35%) fail to remember work information or deadlines, which can have dire consequences - since 7% of the forgetters have had trouble at work or been fired as a result.

16% of people often forget a route they have travelled several times before. And at one time or another, 34% have forgotten where they parked the car.

Some statistics in the research reflect generally held assumptions – for example, that more men (13%) than women (8%) forget anniversaries or birthdays (37% for men to 24% for women). Men (41%) are more likely than women (30%) to need reminding about work information or deadlines. However, women are more forgetful about the factors that require spatial or time awareness – such as the ‘where’s my car?’ parking dilemma the car or remembering to post that important letter.

My Re-affirming Conviction

It's time for revenge. Goddamit.

Fuck Architecture

I think this is my latest conviction.

I HATE ARCHITECTS!! I've always hated architects. The profession's killing me.


.....................................................

So, on a lighter note... I went to this amazing sushi restaurant today in Alameda. I don't want to blog the name of the restaurant, because the chef really wants to limit his clientel. You can always yelp it, or drop me an email.

The restaurant's tiny, and you can only bring maybe one or two other guests. Bar seating is the best so that you can interact with the chef. The place opens at 5.30pm.

This is the best of what we had:
Tuna tataki - lightly seared tuna on a bed of sliced white onion, with slices of garlic and pickled hot stuff. The tuna just didn't taste like fish, it tasted more or less like meat.
white saba nigiri - the fish tasted like foie gras.
maguro maki - this is a traditional Osaka style sushi. Sweet rice was sandwiched between two pieces of fatty maguro and a layer of kelp seaweed. The roll was wrapped in banana leaves for a couple of days. It tasted more like a Chinese tamali than sushi. sooo amazing! He said that this style of sushi was the predecessor to the contemporary virsion.

The expression on everyone's face was pretty amazing. Everyone transformed into a child when they were ordering their tastings. We sat around the bar, and waited for our turns, and watched the chef dice up the fish. Waiting, waiting, giggling, waiting. Then came the most beautiful mori awase. Definately, this experience filled me with a feeling of bountiful gratitude.

Everything's a learning experience for me lately. This particular experience reminded me what I had forgotten. The joy of making something beautiful and having other people partake in the joy of the experience. To experience beauty is really worth living for. And I want to be a maker of beauty.

Moorfield Eye Hospital

http://www.mediaarchitecture.org/conf/about/moorfield-eye-hospitallondon/
So this is beautiful. Visual stimuli for the visually impaired children.

Children's Eye Hospital

Shameless

The Good, the Bad.... and the Ugly
Why shameless can be good, and not so good.

'Shameless'. What does it mean to be shameless? It means that you're embarassing, that you lack pride, and you don't care about what other people may think. So therefore, 'fearless' and innocent ignorance may also fall into the same category. No?

Shameless can be good, for the active do'ers who wants to get shit started. For those people who jump into things and figure out later. If you're shameless, you're probably a bit more interesting than the usual boring crowd. You may be more shocking, more humble, more funny than other people. Breaking the social protocol, too is shameless. But that can also be good sometimes. For example, inviting yourself over to an exclusive party, can be shameful, but what they hey, no parties should be exclusive unless if it's gendered. I think the underlying intention is the important part. As long as you can explain yourself afterwards, it's all ok.

Here are example of good shamelessness.

-When my friend shamelessly invited herself over to a fishing event, and had hooked up with the boy that she loves.
-When my friends and I shamelessly took over a classroom in our school, just for the three of us, just because we needed to lounge and chit chat.
http://www.shamelessmag.com/

Shameless is bad, because it shows a disregard of the public view, and can be immature. Shameless is bad, because it means that you were brought up with bad parenting. Any act that would leave your friends to talk behind your back afterwards... is pretty much bad.

Here are examples of bad shamelessness.
-Drinking a 40 on the streets of New York City with a friend who doesn't do any kind of drinking.
-Chasing after a boy who's clearly not interested in you. (that's more pathetic than shameless)
-Eating out of a trashcan.
-Puking in the middle of Chinatown, in the middle of walking across a crosswalk.

Shameless is ugly... because it is.
-Walking around without having had a shower in three days... There's really no excuse, no excuse at all that can let this happen.

TV Reality Shows that I'd Consider Signing up for...

Can somebody nominate me please?

TLC: http://tlc.discovery.com/broadband/makeover-train/makeover-train.html
-$5000 worth of new clothes, but they're mean stylists.

The Biggest Loser: http://www.nbc.com/The_Biggest_Loser/
-lose a lot of pounds, and then get a lot of money.

How Do I Look?:http://www.stylenetwork.com/BeonTV/HowDoILook/index.html
-another fashion make over.

Inked: http://www.aetv.com/inked/
-get a tatoo

Project Runway: http://www.bravotv.com/Project_Runway/index.php
-its all fashion all the time

Black Friday

I went up to Twin Peaks today. I saw the moon shining over San Francisco on one side, and the red sun dipping into the Ocean on the other side.

It was so fucking beautiful it made me cry.

I am still soooo naive.

jerk

some people only feel better when they can control other people. some people feel better when they feel like they are above other people. some people are jerks. some people call only to fight. jerk. i hate people who take things too personally. i hate people who don't have their own boundaries straight. i hate people who always think that it's all about them.

how am i going to deal with them? she's not much of a friend to have. she's just a bit fucked up. i can have better friends. someone who would be nice to me. someone who would make me feel better.

11.20.07

November 19th, 2007

In many ways, this is a significant day. Because I've survived one of my worst week.. and also because I'm currently experiencing an epiphay, as we speak. Also, it's 71 days until I'm 30. And so all of that combined together makes today a special day.

Unbelievable that my first REAL job I had, I got laid off after working there for a measly month and a half.

Unbelievable that that same week, I had a heart break-a tiny one that really was more than what it was.

Unbelievable that that same week, my dad told me never to talk to him again.

Unbelievable. I've gotten this far without having had a real job... I mean, I'm almost 30, and I'm still not doing the REAL job thing....

Keep the idealism, shed the naivety. Work on stability, keep the exploration and freedom. And always enjoy yourself.... What am I going to do when I turn 30?

Invisible.org

Here's a sonic history of the toxic land that is Cali~fornia.
http://invisible5.org/

There's an audio clip that you can download and listen to on your way between SF and LA.
I'm going to download the part about West Oakland right now and listen to it.
It's an interview of locals. It's nice having KALX streaming behind it.

ALSO: $1 Bus Ride between SF and LA
http://www.megabus.com/us/

I hope that I could do this kind of thing even after I get employed full time. ugh, not looking forward to that, but I hope that the next place is going to be more creative, more fun, more energy with young people. I'm going to enjoy this time that I have for now and keep exploring, keep trying to find what I'm good at.

A Silly Theory of Mine

I'm hanging out with a great friend of mine, Emerson. We are so similar, and look so alike, we are more like kin than our actual brothers and sisters. My actual family are special, and irreplaceable, but Emerson's an aquired brother. We even bicker like brother and sister. I'm trying to work on it, so that I understand how NOT to get into fights with him. I owe him a great deal of compassion and friendship. Meena too, have said the same about him... that he's a great friend. I hope that he knows that I really appreciate him, and think that he is very special.

Sometimes I feel really alone in the world. This feeling of being alone, I don't know where it comes from. I think it comes from the need to be more self-sufficient. It's like growing up. The feeling comes with desperation and depression. When I'm overworked, when I'm underworked. When I can't feel like I could relate to my environments. When I'm so tense and anxious that I can't play with my friends. Ugh, it's embarassing when I get that way, too serious to be funny, too funny to be anything else.

I feel like one of those Chinese workers... just a number in a sea of workers. Nothing special. hmmm..

On the 11th day of Unemployment~

Well, nothing really happened that's special. But however, I'm freaking out a little less.

I'm looking for a job, working on my thesis (Which I'm going to get done next week, on Friday), and would really like to make a furry wooden chair in three weeks. Hopefully I can get my shit together by then.

I hate being in this predicament. I'm making it an excuse to behave badly.

I hate the idea that I'm not special. I have to work. I have to become smarter.

I don't like who I've become. I'm not proud of my reflections in the pictures. It's too bad.

Some people look the way they did in high school. I am...

Knoend

Last night, 11.16.07 was Knoend's opening at 427 Bryant St. They featured products designed by Ahmed and his friend Ivy and her husband. Ivy and her hubby have a company named Knoend.

They have products that take into consideration the material a lot.. So questions like 'where it's been, how was it made, what happens to it, and where does it go' gets factored into the design itself. It's pretty cool.

So, the lite 2go, encorporates the packaging as a major component of the light itself.

Other cool products included a Carlo Rossi jug that as cut, and then became a floor lamp.
Another thing is a biodegradeable flower vase that looks like a flower pot.

This is very beautiful, and I hope that one day I can do something like this with my friends. I want to reasearch crazy materials and think about ways to cut cost, cut material, and make beautiful things.

knoend

http://www.knoend.com/index.htm

We went to this show where the designers made products that had incorporated recycling and life cycle of the material directly into the design itself.

Some cool things were things like...

A hanging light where the packaging of the light fixcture was a major part of the light itself.

A Carlo Rossi jug that had been cut and became a light stand for a low to the ground light fixture.

A bio-degradeable flower vase that looked more like a flower pot.

It seemed like they put a lof of thought into the material themselvs, as well as into the design. It's really cool. I would really like to do something that they are doing... The whole idea of recycled plasstic bottle T-shirts are just a whole lot of fun. This is also an ideal way to work... which seems like it's mostly play.

I think that some things could become a little bit more streamlined. The designs could go for another couple rounds of iterations and I think it would be great.

Heather Gold at Luscious Garage

The event this evening was a 'talk show' at an auto mechanic shop, Luscious Garage. It's a cute idea so I thought I'd check it out. It's an adventure of sorts.

I think the greatest thing about tonight's event was of course the energy that it generated, and how much the viewers were interested in the topic. People were calling out from the audience, participating in the 'talk show.'

So the guests were good too. A Black woma comedian, she was awesome. The Stanford Law Professor who's also the founder of Common Ground, and this woman, Beth... ugh, I guess she's a marketing guru of sorts.

They all talked about earnesty, and the lack there of in America. It was actually nice for me to hear these things from these people. They were exactly the sort of thing that I was feeling. The conversation remained on an abstract level, which is not good. They need to bring it down to specifics, and also people were too timid to be fiesty in the 'talk'. Even boring Berkeley seminars sometimes have more critical discussion. I hate it when people are too agreeable.

anyway, i'm tired... so more on this tomorrow

Play

play (plā) v., played, play·ing, plays.
v.intr.

To occupy oneself in amusement, sport, or other recreation: children playing with toys.
To take part in a game: No minors are eligible to play.
To participate in betting; gamble.
To act in jest or sport: They're not arguing in earnest, they're just playing.
To deal or behave carelessly or indifferently; toy. See synonyms at flirt.
To behave or converse sportively or playfully.
To act or conduct oneself in a specified way: play fair; an investor who plays cautiously.
To act, especially in a dramatic production.
Music.
To perform on an instrument: play on an accordion.
To emit sound or be sounded in performance: The band is playing.
To be performed, as in a theater or on television: A good movie is playing tonight.
To be received or accepted: a speech that played poorly with the voters.
To move or seem to move quickly, lightly, or irregularly: The breeze played on the water.
To function or discharge uninterruptedly: The fountains played in the courtyard.
To move or operate freely within a bounded space, as machine parts do.v.tr.
To perform or act (a role or part) in a dramatic performance.
To assume the role of; act as: played the peacemaker at the meeting.
To perform (a theatrical work) on or as if on the stage.
To present a theatrical performance in (a given place): The company played Detroit last week.
To pretend to be; mimic the activities of: played cowboy; played the star.
To engage in (a game or sport): play hockey; play chess.
To compete against in a game or sport.
To occupy or work at (a position) in a game: Lou Gehrig played first base.
To employ (a player) in a game or position: Let's play her at first base.
To use or move (a card or piece) in a game: play the ace of clubs
To hit (a ball, shot, or stroke), as in tennis: played a strong backhand.
To attempt to keep or gain possession or control of: No foul was called because he was playing the ball.
To bet; wager: played ten dollars on the horse.
To make bets on: play the races.
To perform or put into effect, especially as a jest or deception: play a joke on a friend.
To handle; manage: played the matter quietly.
To use or manipulate, especially for one's own interests: played his opponents against each other.


The performance of such a work.
Activity engaged in for enjoyment or recreation.
Fun or jesting: It was all done in play.
The act or manner of engaging in a game or sport: After a time-out, play resumed. The golf tournament featured expert play.
The act or manner of using a card, piece, or ball in a game or sport: my partner's play of the last trump; his clumsy play of the rebound.
A move or an action in a game: It's your play. The runner was thrown out in a close play.
Participation in betting; gambling.
Manner of dealing with others; conduct: fair play.
An attempt to obtain something; a bid: a play for sympathy.
Action, motion, or use: the play of the imagination.
Freedom or occasion for action; scope: give full play to an artist's talents. See synonyms at room.
Movement or space for movement, as of mechanical parts.
Quick, often irregular movement or action, especially of light or color: the play of color on iridescent feathers.

Poetry and Social Activism

With social activism comes a parade of optimism and hidden reality. The projects in Rural Studio are beautiful, visionary, amazing, what people don't want to mention is that they don't always work.

Green Cities, Brown Folks

November 14th, 6-8pm Free

Lake Merritt United Methodist Church1330 Lakeshore Ave., Oakland
RSVP: greencities@ellabakercenter.org

Speakers are Babak Tondre (Dig City Cooperative), Jason Harvey (Oakland Food Connection), Van Jones: "Green For All"

I wonder if this event is going to be a small thing, with a total of twenty people, with maybe two non-Black people. One being me.

I'll see how it goes.. I think my biggest bet is in Dig City Cooperative. They seem to be doing interesting things.

By the way, why is it that most architecture non-profit organizations are pretty bland? They don't seem to be doing much. The projects are skim, the outreach is skim, the contact with the public is, again, skim, and there's very little challenging of the system.

The newsletters that these organizations publish are so uninteresting. How can this change? What are architects who are interested in social justice interested in knowing?

Emotional Dynamite

I'm sick. Emotionaly sick. Can't really do anything about it, just wait til it gets better, I suppose. Kind of really sensitive, and scared of getting hurt again... so I'm feeling like I really don't want to see anybody today.

The key point in falling, is to start running before you hit the ground. To take it literally, I am going to go running today when I get back. Metaphorically, I'm going to set up plans to meet with people for other days. I'm going to apply to other jobs. I'm going to dream about this art project that I'm working on. I'm going to dream of a better life.

Meanwhile, all this emotional turmoil is making me learn something about myself.

I think I want to create things with people so that I can have an emotional connection with them. Which is beautiful. I also want to make beautiful things, and bring joy to people. I want to be appreciated for this act.

That's why I'm an installation artist.... because I want to create events, ephemeral moments that can be shared with people... and is succesful when there are others to be shared with. That's why I draw, because it's about making beautiful objects.

Emotional connection.

It's one of the most abstract thing ever. It's not something that can be easily described, documented, recreated, planned, or fabricated. It's something that happens when you are open. It's part of 'play'. 'Playing' is about seeing the possibility in things and people. When I meet people, I can visualize how to play with them.

Alameda

The USS Hornet in Alameda. 6.30am.11.03.07

Motorcycle training 101.

Objective: how to succeed in something you don't know anything about!

So this is pretty straight forward.... You just have to do what the man says. Basically.

-Find a good motorcycle-one that you can comfortably sit both feet flat on the ground with.
-Be confident. Don't be afraid. Relaxation allows you to think.
-Listen to directions. If they want you to raise your hand, just raise your hand.
-Getting comfortable with the bike... takes trials - and so you just have to keep moving. Don't expect to get comfortable right away, and also the first couple of tutorials aren't going to be under your belt a hundred percent... which is fine.
-Focus, and really try to learn.
-Focus. Don't be afraid of the bike... be a little bit more aggressive than than your comfort level allows you to be... this is how you push youself.
-Ask questions, be engaged with other students, make friends.
-A little of it, too of course is trying to please the instructor. If you get along with that person.


*I always feel like I don't have enough 'past' experiences, or preparations for challenges... I always am resentful that my parents aren't architects or artists like my cool classmates. I feel like if they were artists or architects, then I would have been exposed to the things that I'm interested in much earlier and become better at it. These are things that I can not change. BUT, it turns out.. most of the things that people acquire, skill wise, is on the job... through actually trying to do it. I'm discovering that it's not much about preparation as it is about strategizing, or having a good work ethic, or really, just doing it. Classes are great, because they give you strategies. In other places, you have to develop your own strategies.

I can succeed in something that I don't have any clue about... with good teaching... so I need to seek teachers out.

The assortments of motorcycles were...

Honda Nighthawk, 250cc, which is known to be a starter bike. Honda Rebel, which is a bit smaller. Yamaha Eliminator, Honda Ninja... God, who named these? They have such terrible names.


Growing pain.

An image of myself with my two confidants, taken five years ago, superimposed to a reflection of myself now. What has changed? It seems like not much has changed... I am still naive. I feel somewhat more alone now than before. Because of more responsibility?

Honesty

It's time to be honest. It's not my style... but I'm not getting away with it anymore. It's time.

Baudrillard

Below is an excerpt of Baudrillard about Los Angeles. His writing is so beautiful, so inspiring. Los Angeles is exactly that. It's caos, you can feel it when you're in it. The people that you meet are even like that. It's too simplistic to say that they are fake, because they're not. It's like they are always on the move.

Baltimore... is influenced by John Waters' movies. Waters' early films like Female Trouble depict Baltimore's interior. The domestic urbanity that he depicts are always ridden with violence and dirt.

What would the city have to do to undo such a strong negative imagery?


Disneyland: the archetype of the simulated city. A city in which illusion becomes reality; in which the hopes and dreams of the ideal world are realized. The crowd at Disneyland is a warm one, people are friends, laughter, joy, imagination and creativity abound. No body cries in Disneyland. Just like a real city, the crowd (the population) are directed in ordered currents and flows. We follow arrows, we stand in lines, just as we drive between the painted lines of the street. Disneyland is, in miniature, the ideal American city. Rules are obeyed because there is no alternative.

Here is a city where murder, rape and adultery do not exist.
No one is pretending that Disneyland is real: even children are made keenly aware of this fact.
ëYou are about to enter the world of Imaginationí ëYou are about to enter the world of Tomorrow' Baudrillard writes that, "Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas Los Angeles [is] no longer real, but belongs to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation."

Los Angeles has become, according to Baudrillard, "a city whose mystery is precisely that of no longer being anything but a network of incessant, unreal circulation -- a city of incredible proportions but without space, without dimension.

As much as electrical and atomic power stations, as much as cinema studios, this city, which is no longer anything but an immense scenario and a perpetual pan shot, needs this old imaginary like a sympathetic nervous system made up of childhood signals and faked phantasms.

inebriation no more

When I go out, I drink. When I drink, I smoke. When I smoke, I get cancer.

So time to quit. Quit what?

Dice-K

these are diceK's tattooes. He had recently gone to NYC to seek out a specific tattoo artist. He said that the tattoo artist in picture above would not tattoo somebody who's got a dinky little tattoo on their body. How interestingly elitest...if elitism is interesting to you.

He's made a few trips to nyc on this... and I want to do a mapping of the tattoo artists when I get a chance in the future.

I hate them.

I cannot be a Japanese. I hate them.

-An Ode to the things that really annoy Reiko, especially wealthy Japanese doctors who haggle prices in the increments of fifty fucking bucks, in Japanese, of course.

I hate how they have to say thank you a million times and drag on the conversation.

Please! practice economy of words! Say it once and mean it!

I hate how they ask questions when they obviously know the answers to them.

I think you're stupid too!

I hate how they say, 'Oh, that's wonderful'... to everything!

What? My shit is wonderful to you?

I hate polite people.

Please! Stop smiling! Stop saying Reiko SAMA!

I hate how tiny they are!

Eat something!

I hate cute little Japanese Punk Rock girls!

I hate how they don't emote!

Fucking cyborg!

I hate how they're better at everything!


I hate them.
I hate them!!!!

Jack

A woman sat next to me yesterday at MAMA BUZZ cafe. She was a tarot reader. She read my fortune, and found out that there were a number of cards that showed up that signifies a beginning. Three aces, the fool, the paige, and the wheel of fortune. Great. One of them's going to be my tattoo.

I don't know where the direction is... I think I'm taking a shot gun approach. I just don't want to abandon any of my pasts. I feel like this deck of cards were something that I had gotten 10 years ago.

Keep moving. That's about the only thing that I can do.

Master

My boss wants an apprentice.

There are not very many men I think of as my role model. My grandfather was a strong one when I was growing up. He was a serious and austere man. A general in an army. Concentration camp survivor, and a 2nd in charge of a mayor. I want to be like him. Some one who can do good deeds, who is strong, and has immense will power. I want to build community, public services, dreams, beauty.

Stand against the grain.

Dating

What's up with it?

Is it just something that happens in NYC?

Well, I think, definately, when girls talk about 'dating' in NYC, it's definately different from 'dating' here in the bay area.

NYC dating is action packed... it's about doing the courting with a nice meal and a cultured event like a show, a play... and a sac later. Yeah, it seems like NYC girls just don't fuck around... or rather, they DO.

Here, it's rather pathetic... People just don't ask others out. Or, if they do, it's sooooooooo low key, a lot of times, it just doesn't come across.

What is a date?

Coffee... aparently, is not considered a date.

A date is a plan. It's something that you are committed to.

Playful Aggression

When the South Americans came last year to teach at Berkeley, they scoffed at the Castro's Halloween. Eventhough it is one event San Francisco's proud about for its roudyness, for its festivity level. There are a lot of drunk drag queens with colorful colors and lots of street dancing.

It's true what the criticisms are... The street festival is tame compared to any street festivals in Brazil. Afterall, Castro's got a curfue. It really calls to attention the lame-ness of American cities... Too much order, not enough rebellion.

July 4th in the Mission, San Francisco, though, was a sight that I have not encountered ever in my whole life. Rebellion for sure. Illegal smuggled fireworks that filled a whole room. And people shooting it off at random, to anything. It was the residential neighborhood near 26th and 28th streets that participated in such blatant act of playful rebellion. Yes, was quite like chaos.. or sounded much like a battle ground. Cops were around, but didn't know what to do. Cop cars did get targeted and were damaged.

It's just very strange that such a thing would happen on July 4th. It's a little confusing if it was really an act of rebellion or festivities.... I think in a lot of ways, people were looking for ways to playfully release their anger and frustrations.

In France, the rebellion that recently happened there wasn't a group act. It was anti-representation. It's interesting... it lacks a sort of group unity that comes with the traditional riots...

I feel like a douchbag, I totally forgot about Elliott's Art Event that he was planning for a whole year. WTF...

http://www.cocanow.org/

I forgot the woman's group event that Heather was planning yesterday...

I am an idiot. I want to shoot myself.


Well, when I get more information about his event, I'll post it.... atleast I am going to pretend that I went...................................................

Virtual Friendship and Virtual Narcism

.... excerpt from an email....

I especially liked 'Virtual Friendship and the New Narcism', It makes me think about social networking competitiveness, and the burnouts people get from these sites... which is just such a silly idea. It's like the 90s was characterized by boredom, and the new millinium's about burn-out. Anyway, just to be coy, I posted it on my facebook page.

Hope you are doing well!
Reiko


Published on The New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology and Society
Summer 2007
Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism
Christine Rosen

For centuries, the rich and the powerful documented their existence and their status through painted portraits. A marker of wealth and a bid for immortality, portraits offer intriguing hints about the daily life of their subjects—professions, ambitions, attitudes, and, most importantly, social standing. Such portraits, as German art historian Hans Belting has argued, can be understood as “painted anthropology,” with much to teach us, both intentionally and unintentionally, about the culture in which they were created.

Self-portraits can be especially instructive. By showing the artist both as he sees his true self and as he wishes to be seen, self-portraits can at once expose and obscure, clarify and distort. They offer opportunities for both self-expression and self-seeking. They can display egotism and modesty, self-aggrandizement and self-mockery.

Today, our self-portraits are democratic and digital; they are crafted from pixels rather than paints. On social networking websites like MySpace and Facebook, our modern self-portraits feature background music, carefully manipulated photographs, stream-of-consciousness musings, and lists of our hobbies and friends. They are interactive, inviting viewers not merely to look at, but also to respond to, the life portrayed online. We create them to find friendship, love, and that ambiguous modern thing called connection. Like painters constantly retouching their work, we alter, update, and tweak our online self-portraits; but as digital objects they are far more ephemeral than oil on canvas. Vital statistics, glimpses of bare flesh, lists of favorite bands and favorite poems all clamor for our attention—and it is the timeless human desire for attention that emerges as the dominant theme of these vast virtual galleries.

Although social networking sites are in their infancy, we are seeing their impact culturally: in language (where to friend is now a verb), in politics (where it is de rigueur for presidential aspirants to catalogue their virtues on MySpace), and on college campuses (where not using Facebook can be a social handicap). But we are only beginning to come to grips with the consequences of our use of these sites: for friendship, and for our notions of privacy, authenticity, community, and identity. As with any new technological advance, we must consider what type of behavior online social networking encourages. Does this technology, with its constant demands to collect (friends and status), and perform (by marketing ourselves), in some ways undermine our ability to attain what it promises—a surer sense of who we are and where we belong? The Delphic oracle’s guidance was know thyself. Today, in the world of online social networks, the oracle’s advice might be show thyself.

Making Connections

The earliest online social networks were arguably the Bulletin Board Systems of the 1980s that let users post public messages, send and receive private messages, play games, and exchange software. Some of those BBSs, like The WELL (Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link) that technologist Larry Brilliant and futurist Stewart Brand started in 1985, made the transition to the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s. (Now owned by Salon.com, The WELL boasts that it was “the primordial ooze where the online community movement was born.”) Other websites for community and connection emerged in the 1990s, including Classmates.com (1995), where users register by high school and year of graduation; Company of Friends, a business-oriented site founded in 1997; and Epinions, founded in 1999 to allow users to give their opinions about various consumer products.

A new generation of social networking websites appeared in 2002 with the launch of Friendster, whose founder, Jonathan Abrams, admitted that his main motivation for creating the site was to meet attractive women. Unlike previous online communities, which brought together anonymous strangers with shared interests, Friendster uses a model of social networking known as the “Circle of Friends” (developed by British computer scientist Jonathan Bishop), in which users invite friends and acquaintances—that is, people they already know and like—to join their network.

Friendster was an immediate success, with millions of registered users by mid-2003. But technological glitches and poor management at the company allowed a new social networking site, MySpace, launched in 2003, quickly to surpass it. Originally started by musicians, MySpace has become a major venue for sharing music as well as videos and photos. It is now the behemoth of online social networking, with over 100 million registered users. Connection has become big business: In 2005, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation bought MySpace for $580 million.

Besides MySpace and Friendster, the best-known social networking site is Facebook, launched in 2004. Originally restricted to college students, Facebook—which takes its name from the small photo albums that colleges once gave to incoming freshmen and faculty to help them cope with meeting so many new people—soon extended membership to high schoolers and is now open to anyone. Still, it is most popular among college students and recent college graduates, many of whom use the site as their primary method of communicating with one another. Millions of college students check their Facebook pages several times every day and spend hours sending and receiving messages, making appointments, getting updates on their friends’ activities, and learning about people they might recently have met or heard about.
There are dozens of other social networking sites, including Orkut, Bebo, and Yahoo 360º. Microsoft recently announced its own plans for a social networking site called Wallop; the company boasts that the site will offer “an entirely new way for consumers to express their individuality online.” (It is noteworthy that Microsoft refers to social networkers as “consumers” rather than merely “users” or, say, “people.”) Niche social networking sites are also flourishing: there are sites offering forums and fellowship for photographers, music lovers, and sports fans. There are professional networking sites, such as LinkedIn, that keep people connected with present and former colleagues and other business acquaintances. There are sites specifically for younger children, such as Club Penguin, which lets kids pretend to be chubby, colored penguins who waddle around chatting, playing games, earning virtual money, and buying virtual clothes. Other niche social networking sites connect like-minded self-improvers; the site 43things.com encourages people to share their personal goals. Click on “watch less TV,” one of the goals listed on the site, and you can see the profiles of the 1,300 other people in the network who want to do the same thing. And for people who want to join a social network but don’t know which niche site is right for them, there are sites that help users locate the proper online social networking community for their particular (or peculiar) interests.
Social networking sites are also fertile ground for those who make it their lives’ work to get your attention—namely, spammers, marketers, and politicians. Incidents of spamming and spyware on MySpace and other social networking sites are legion. Legitimate advertisers such as record labels and film studios have also set up pages for their products. In some cases, fictional characters from books and movies are given their own official MySpace pages. Some sports mascots and brand icons have them, too. Procter & Gamble has a Crest toothpaste page on MySpace featuring a sultry-looking model called “Miss Irresistible.” As of this summer, she had about 50,000 users linked as friends, whom she urged to “spice it up by sending a naughty (or nice) e-card.” The e-cards are emblazoned with Crest or Scope logos, of course, and include messages such as “I wanna get fresh with you” or “Pucker up baby—I’m getting fresh.” A P& G marketing officer recently told the Wall Street Journal that from a business perspective, social networking sites are “going to be one giant living dynamic learning experience about consumers.”

As for politicians, with the presidential primary season now underway, candidates have embraced a no-website-left-behind policy. Senator Hillary Clinton has official pages on social networking sites MySpace, Flickr, LiveJournal, Facebook, Friendster, and Orkut. As of July 1, 2007, she had a mere 52,472 friends on MySpace (a bit more than Miss Irresistible); her Democratic rival Senator Barack Obama had an impressive 128,859. Former Senator John Edwards has profiles on twenty-three different sites. Republican contenders for the White House are poorer social networkers than their Democratic counterparts; as of this writing, none of the GOP candidates has as many MySpace friends as Hillary, and some of the leading Republican candidates have no social networking presence at all.

Despite the increasingly diverse range of social networking sites, the most popular sites share certain features. On MySpace and Facebook, for example, the process of setting up one’s online identity is relatively simple: Provide your name, address, e-mail address, and a few other pieces of information and you’re up and running and ready to create your online persona. MySpace includes a section, “About Me,” where you can post your name, age, where you live, and other personal details such as your zodiac sign, religion, sexual orientation, and relationship status. There is also a “Who I’d Like to Meet” section, which on most MySpace profiles is filled with images of celebrities. Users can also list their favorite music, movies, and television shows, as well as their personal heroes; MySpace users can also blog on their pages. A user “friends” people—that is, invites them by e-mail to appear on the user’s “Friend Space,” where they are listed, linked, and ranked. Below the Friends space is a Comments section where friends can post notes. MySpace allows users to personalize their pages by uploading images and music and videos; indeed, one of the defining features of most MySpace pages is the ubiquity of visual and audio clutter. With silly, hyper flashing graphics in neon colors and clip-art style images of kittens and cartoons, MySpace pages often resemble an overdecorated high school yearbook.
By contrast, Facebook limits what its users can do to their profiles. Besides general personal information, Facebook users have a “Wall” where people can leave them brief notes, as well as a Messages feature that functions like an in-house Facebook e-mail account. You list your friends on Facebook as well, but in general, unlike MySpace friends, which are often complete strangers (or spammers) Facebook friends tend to be part of one’s offline social circle. (This might change, however, now that Facebook has opened its site to anyone rather than restricting it to college and high school students.) Facebook (and MySpace) allow users to form groups based on mutual interests. Facebook users can also send “pokes” to friends; these little digital nudges are meant to let someone know you are thinking about him or her. But they can also be interpreted as not-so-subtle come-ons; one Facebook group with over 200,000 members is called “Enough with the Poking, Let’s Just Have Sex.”

Degrees of Separation

It is worth pausing for a moment to reflect on the curious use of the word networking to describe this new form of human interaction. Social networking websites “connect” users with a network—literally, a computer network. But the verb to network has long been used to describe an act of intentional social connecting, especially for professionals seeking career-boosting contacts. When the word first came into circulation in the 1970s, computer networks were rare and mysterious. Back then, “network” usually referred to television. But social scientists were already using the notion of networks and nodes to map out human relations and calculate just how closely we are connected.

In 1967, Harvard sociologist and psychologist Stanley Milgram, best known for his earlier Yale experiments on obedience to authority, published the results of a study about social connection that he called the “small world experiment.” “Given any two people in the world, person X and person Z,” he asked, “how many intermediate acquaintance links are needed before X and Z are connected?” Milgram’s research, which involved sending out a kind of chain letter and tracing its journey to a particular target person, yielded an average number of 5.5 connections. The idea that we are all connected by “six degrees of separation” (a phrase later popularized by playwright John Guare) is now conventional wisdom.

But is it true? Duncan J. Watts, a professor at Columbia University and author of Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age, has embarked on a new small world project to test Milgram’s theory. Similar in spirit to Milgram’s work, it relies on e-mail to determine whether “any two people in the world can be connected via ‘six degrees of separation.’” Unlike Milgram’s experiment, which was restricted to the United States, Watts’s project is global; as he and his colleagues reported in Science, “Targets included a professor at an Ivy League university, an archival inspector in Estonia, a technology consultant in India, a policeman in Australia, and a veterinarian in the Norwegian army.” Their early results suggest that Milgram might have been right: messages reached their targets in five to seven steps, on average. Other social networking theorists are equally optimistic about the smallness of our wireless world. In Linked: The New Science of Networks, Albert-László Barabási enthuses, “The world is shrinking because social links that would have died out a hundred years ago are kept alive and can be easily activated. The number of social links an individual can actively maintain has increased dramatically, bringing down the degrees of separation. Milgram estimated six,” Barabási writes. “We could be much closer these days to three.”

What kind of “links” are these? In a 1973 essay, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” sociologist Mark Granovetter argued that weaker relationships, such as those we form with colleagues at work or minor acquaintances, were more useful in spreading certain kinds of information than networks of close friends and family. Watts found a similar phenomenon in his online small world experiment: weak ties (largely professional ones) were more useful than strong ties for locating far-flung individuals, for example.

Today’s online social networks are congeries of mostly weak ties—no one who lists thousands of “friends” on MySpace thinks of those people in the same way as he does his flesh-and-blood acquaintances, for example. It is surely no coincidence, then, that the activities social networking sites promote are precisely the ones weak ties foster, like rumor-mongering, gossip, finding people, and tracking the ever-shifting movements of popular culture and fad. If this is our small world, it is one that gives its greatest attention to small things.

Even more intriguing than the actual results of Milgram’s small world experiment—our supposed closeness to each other—was the swiftness and credulity of the public in embracing those results. But as psychologist Judith Kleinfeld found when she delved into Milgram’s research (much of which was methodologically flawed and never adequately replicated), entrenched barriers of race and social class undermine the idea that we live in a small world. Computer networks have not removed those barriers. As Watts and his colleagues conceded in describing their own digital small world experiment, “more than half of all participants resided in North America and were middle class, professional, college educated, and Christian.”
Nevertheless, our need to believe in the possibility of a small world and in the power of connection is strong, as evidenced by the popularity and proliferation of contemporary online social networks. Perhaps the question we should be asking isn’t how closely are we connected, but rather what kinds of communities and friendships are we creating?

Won’t You Be My Digital Neighbor?

According to a survey recently conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, more than half of all Americans between the ages of twelve and seventeen use some online social networking site. Indeed, media coverage of social networking sites usually describes them as vast teenage playgrounds—or wastelands, depending on one’s perspective. Central to this narrative is a nearly unbridgeable generational divide, with tech-savvy youngsters redefining friendship while their doddering elders look on with bafflement and increasing anxiety. This seems anecdotally correct; I can’t count how many times I have mentioned social networking websites to someone over the age of forty and received the reply, “Oh yes, I’ve heard about that
MyFace! All the kids are doing that these days. Very interesting!”

Numerous articles have chronicled adults’ attempts to navigate the world of social networking, such as the recent New York Times essay in which columnist Michelle Slatalla described the incredible embarrassment she caused her teenage daughter when she joined Facebook: “everyone in the whole world thinks its super creepy when adults have facebooks,” her daughter instant-messaged her. “unfriend paige right now. im serious.... i will be soo mad if you dont unfriend paige right now. actually.” In fact, social networking sites are not only for the young. More than half of the visitors to MySpace claim to be over the age of 35. And now that the first generation of college Facebook users have graduated, and the site is open to all, more than half of Facebook users are no longer students. What’s more, the proliferation of niche social networking sites, including those aimed at adults, suggests that it is not only teenagers who will nurture relationships in virtual space for the foreseeable future.

What characterizes these online communities in which an increasing number of us are spending our time? Social networking sites have a peculiar psychogeography. As researchers at the Pew project have noted, the proto-social networking sites of a decade ago used metaphors of place to organize their members: people were linked through virtual cities, communities, and homepages. In 1997, GeoCities boasted thirty virtual “neighborhoods” in which “homesteaders” or “GeoCitizens” could gather—“Heartland” for family and parenting tips, “SouthBeach” for socializing, “Vienna” for classical music aficionados, “Broadway” for theater buffs, and so on. By contrast, today’s social networking sites organize themselves around metaphors of the person, with individual profiles that list hobbies and interests. As a result, one’s entrée into this world generally isn’t through a virtual neighborhood or community but through the revelation of personal information. And unlike a neighborhood, where one usually has a general knowledge of others who live in the area, social networking sites are gatherings of deracinated individuals, none of whose personal boastings and musings are necessarily trustworthy. Here, the old arbiters of community—geographic location, family, role, or occupation—have little effect on relationships.

Also, in the offline world, communities typically are responsible for enforcing norms of privacy and general etiquette. In the online world, which is unfettered by the boundaries of real-world communities, new etiquette challenges abound. For example, what do you do with a “friend” who posts inappropriate comments on your Wall? What recourse do you have if someone posts an embarrassing picture of you on his MySpace page? What happens when a friend breaks up with someone—do you defriend the ex? If someone “friends” you and you don’t accept the overture, how serious a rejection is it? Some of these scenarios can be resolved with split-second snap judgments; others can provoke days of agonizing.

Enthusiasts of social networking argue that these sites are not merely entertaining; they also edify by teaching users about the rules of social space. As Danah Boyd, a graduate student studying social networks at the University of California, Berkeley, told the authors of MySpace Unraveled, social networking promotes “informal learning.... It’s where you learn social norms, rules, how to interact with others, narrative, personal and group history, and media literacy.” This is more a hopeful assertion than a proven fact, however. The question that isn’t asked is how the technology itself—the way it encourages us to present ourselves and interact—limits or imposes on that process of informal learning. All communities expect their members to internalize certain norms. Even individuals in the transient communities that form in public spaces obey these rules, for the most part; for example, patrons of libraries are expected to keep noise to a minimum. New technologies are challenging such norms—cell phones ring during church sermons; blaring televisions in doctors’ waiting rooms make it difficult to talk quietly—and new norms must develop to replace the old. What cues are young, avid social networkers learning about social space? What unspoken rules and communal norms have the millions of participants in these online social networks internalized, and how have these new norms influenced their behavior in the offline world?

Social rules and norms are not merely the strait-laced conceits of a bygone era; they serve a protective function. I know a young woman—attractive, intelligent, and well-spoken—who, like many other people in their twenties, joined Facebook as a college student when it launched. When she and her boyfriend got engaged, they both updated their relationship status to “Engaged” on their profiles and friends posted congratulatory messages on her Wall.

But then they broke off the engagement. And a funny thing happened. Although she had already told a few friends and family members that the relationship was over, her ex decided to make it official in a very twenty-first century way: he changed his status on his profile from “Engaged” to “Single.” Facebook immediately sent out a feed to every one of their mutual “friends” announcing the news, “Mr. X and Ms. Y are no longer in a relationship,” complete with an icon of a broken heart. When I asked the young woman how she felt about this, she said that although she assumed her friends and acquaintances would eventually hear the news, there was something disconcerting about the fact that everyone found out about it instantaneously; and since the message came from Facebook, rather than in a face-to-face exchange initiated by her, it was devoid of context—save for a helpful notation of the time and that tacky little heart.
Indecent Exposure

Enthusiasts praise social networking for presenting chances for identity-play; they see opportunities for all of us to be little Van Goghs and Warhols, rendering quixotic and ever-changing versions of ourselves for others to enjoy. Instead of a palette of oils, we can employ services such as PimpMySpace.org, which offers “layouts, graphics, background, and more!” to gussy up an online presentation of self, albeit in a decidedly raunchy fashion: Among the most popular graphics used by PimpMySpace clients on a given day in June 2007 were short video clips of two women kissing and another of a man and an obese woman having sex; a picture of a gleaming pink handgun; and an image of the cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants, looking alarmed and uttering a profanity.

This kind of coarseness and vulgarity is commonplace on social networking sites for a reason: it’s an easy way to set oneself apart. Pharaohs and kings once celebrated themselves by erecting towering statues or, like the emperor Augustus, placing their own visages on coins. But now, as the insightful technology observer Jaron Lanier has written, “Since there are only a few archetypes, ideals, or icons to strive for in comparison to the vastness of instances of everything online, quirks and idiosyncrasies stand out better than grandeur in this new domain. I imagine Augustus’ MySpace page would have pictured him picking his nose.” And he wouldn’t be alone. Indeed, this is one of the characteristics of MySpace most striking to anyone who spends a few hours trolling its millions of pages: it is an overwhelmingly dull sea of monotonous uniqueness, of conventional individuality, of distinctive sameness.

The world of online social networking is practically homogenous in one other sense, however diverse it might at first appear: its users are committed to self-exposure. The creation and conspicuous consumption of intimate details and images of one’s own and others’ lives is the main activity in the online social networking world. There is no room for reticence; there is only revelation. Quickly peruse a profile and you know more about a potential acquaintance in a moment than you might have learned about a flesh-and-blood friend in a month. As one college student recently described to the New York Times Magazine: “You might run into someone at a party, and then you Facebook them: what are their interests? Are they crazy-religious, is their favorite quote from the Bible? Everyone takes great pains over presenting themselves. It’s like an embodiment of your personality.”

It seems that in our headlong rush to join social networking sites, many of us give up one of the Internet’s supposed charms: the promise of anonymity. As Michael Kinsley noted in Slate, in order to “stake their claims as unique individuals,” users enumerate personal information: “Here is a list of my friends. Here are all the CDs in my collection. Here is a picture of my dog.” Kinsley is not impressed; he judges these sites “vast celebrations of solipsism.”

Social networkers, particularly younger users, are often naïve or ill-informed about the amount of information they are making publicly available. “One cannot help but marvel at the amount, detail, and nature of the personal information some users provide, and ponder how informed this information sharing can be,” Carnegie Mellon researchers Alessandro Acquisti and Ralph Gross wrote in 2006. In a survey of Facebook users at their university, Acquisti and Gross “detected little or no relation between participants’ reported privacy attitudes and their likelihood” of publishing personal information online. Even among the students in the survey who claimed to be most concerned about their privacy—the ones who worried about “the scenario in which a stranger knew their schedule of classes and where they lived”—about 40 percent provided their class schedule on Facebook, about 22 percent put their address on Facebook, and almost 16 percent published both.

This kind of carelessness has provided fodder for many sensationalist news stories. To cite just one: In 2006, NBC’s Dateline featured a police officer posing as a 19-year-old boy who was new in town. Although not grounded in any particular local community, the imposter quickly gathered more than 100 friends for his MySpace profile and began corresponding with several teenage girls. Although the girls claimed to be careful about the kind of information they posted online, when Dateline revealed that their new friend was actually an adult male who had figured out their names and where they lived, they were surprised. The danger posed by strangers who use social networking sites to prey on children is real; there have been several such cases. This danger was highlighted in July 2007 when MySpace booted from its system 29,000 sex offenders who had signed up for memberships using their real names. There is no way of knowing how many sex offenders have MySpace accounts registered under fake names.

There are also professional risks to putting too much information on social networking sites, just as for several years there have been career risks associated with personal homepages and blogs. A survey conducted in 2006 by researchers at the University of Dayton found that “40 percent of employers say they would consider the Facebook profile of a potential employee as part of their hiring decision, and several reported rescinding offers after checking out Facebook.” Yet college students’ reaction to this fact suggests that they have a different understanding of privacy than potential employers: 42 percent thought it was a violation of privacy for employers to peruse their profiles, and “64 percent of students said employers should not consider Facebook profiles during the hiring process.”

This is a quaintly Victorian notion of privacy, embracing the idea that individuals should be able to compartmentalize and parcel out parts of their personalities in different settings. It suggests that even behavior of a decidedly questionable or hypocritical bent (the Victorian patriarch who also cavorts with prostitutes, for example, or the straight-A business major who posts picture of himself funneling beer on his MySpace page) should be tolerated if appropriately segregated. But when one’s darker side finds expression in a virtual space, privacy becomes more difficult and true compartmentalization nearly impossible; on the Internet, private misbehavior becomes public exhibitionism.

In many ways, the manners and mores that have already developed in the world of online social networking suggest that these sites promote gatherings of what psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton has called “protean selves.” Named after Proteus, the Greek sea god of many forms, the protean self evinces “mockery and self-mockery, irony, absurdity, and humor.” (Indeed, the University of Dayton survey found that “23 percent [of students] said they intentionally misrepresented themselves [on Facebook] to be funny or as a joke.”) Also, Lifton argues, “the emotions of the protean self tend to be free-floating, not clearly tied to cause or target.” So, too, with protean communities: “Not just individual emotions but communities as well may be free-floating,” Lifton writes, “removed geographically and embraced temporarily and selectively, with no promise of permanence.” This is precisely the appeal of online social networking. These sites make certain kinds of connections easier, but because they are governed not by geography or community mores but by personal whim, they free users from the responsibilities that tend to come with membership in a community. This fundamentally changes the tenor of the relationships that form there, something best observed in the way social networks treat friendship.

The New Taxonomy of Friendship

There is a Spanish proverb that warns, “Life without a friend is death without a witness.” In the world of online social networking, the warning might be simpler: “Life without hundreds of online ‘friends’ is virtual death.” On these sites, friendship is the stated raison d’être. “A place for friends,” is the slogan of MySpace. Facebook is a “social utility that connects people with friends.” Orkut describes itself as “an online community that connects people through a network of trusted friends.” Friendster’s name speaks for itself.

But “friendship” in these virtual spaces is thoroughly different from real-world friendship. In its traditional sense, friendship is a relationship which, broadly speaking, involves the sharing of mutual interests, reciprocity, trust, and the revelation of intimate details over time and within specific social (and cultural) contexts. Because friendship depends on mutual revelations that are concealed from the rest of the world, it can only flourish within the boundaries of privacy; the idea of public friendship is an oxymoron.

The hypertext link called “friendship” on social networking sites is very different: public, fluid, and promiscuous, yet oddly bureaucratized. Friendship on these sites focuses a great deal on collecting, managing, and ranking the people you know. Everything about MySpace, for example, is designed to encourage users to gather as many friends as possible, as though friendship were philately. If you are so unfortunate as to have but one MySpace friend, for example, your page reads: “You have 1 friends,” along with a stretch of sad empty space where dozens of thumbnail photos of your acquaintances should appear.

This promotes a form of frantic friend procurement. As one young Facebook user with 800 friends told John Cassidy in The New Yorker, “I always find the competitive spirit in me wanting to up the number.” An associate dean at Purdue University recently boasted to the Christian Science Monitor that since establishing a Facebook profile, he had collected more than 700 friends. The phrase universally found on MySpace is, “Thanks for the add!”—an acknowledgment by one user that another has added you to his list of friends. There are even services like FriendFlood.com that act as social networking pimps: for a fee, they will post messages on your page from an attractive person posing as your “friend.” As the founder of one such service told the New York Times in February 2007, he wanted to “turn cyberlosers into social-networking magnets.”

The structure of social networking sites also encourages the bureaucratization of friendship. Each site has its own terminology, but among the words that users employ most often is “managing.” The Pew survey mentioned earlier found that “teens say social networking sites help them manage their friendships.” There is something Orwellian about the management-speak on social networking sites: “Change My Top Friends,” “View All of My Friends” and, for those times when our inner Stalins sense the need for a virtual purge, “Edit Friends.” With a few mouse clicks one can elevate or downgrade (or entirely eliminate) a relationship.

To be sure, we all rank our friends, albeit in unspoken and intuitive ways. One friend might be a good companion for outings to movies or concerts; another might be someone with whom you socialize in professional settings; another might be the kind of person for whom you would drop everything if he needed help. But social networking sites allow us to rank our friends publicly. And not only can we publicize our own preferences in people, but we can also peruse the favorites among our other acquaintances. We can learn all about the friends of our friends—often without having ever met them in person.

Status-Seekers

Of course, it would be foolish to suggest that people are incapable of making distinctions between social networking “friends” and friends they see in the flesh. The use of the word “friend” on social networking sites is a dilution and a debasement, and surely no one with hundreds of MySpace or Facebook “friends” is so confused as to believe those are all real friendships. The impulse to collect as many “friends” as possible on a MySpace page is not an expression of the human need for companionship, but of a different need no less profound and pressing: the need for status. Unlike the painted portraits that members of the middle class in a bygone era would commission to signal their elite status once they rose in society, social networking websites allow us to create status—not merely to commemorate the achievement of it. There is a reason that most of the MySpace profiles of famous people are fakes, often created by fans: Celebrities don’t need legions of MySpace friends to prove their importance. It’s the rest of the population, seeking a form of parochial celebrity, that does.

But status-seeking has an ever-present partner: anxiety. Unlike a portrait, which, once finished and framed, hung tamely on the wall signaling one’s status, maintaining status on MySpace or Facebook requires constant vigilance. As one 24-year-old wrote in a New York Times essay, “I am obsessed with testimonials and solicit them incessantly. They are the ultimate social currency, public declarations of the intimacy status of a relationship.... Every profile is a carefully planned media campaign.”

The sites themselves were designed to encourage this. Describing the work of B.J. Fogg of Stanford University, who studies “persuasion strategies” used by social networking sites to increase participation, The New Scientist noted, “The secret is to tie the acquisition of friends, compliments and status—spoils that humans will work hard for—to activities that enhance the site.” As Fogg told the magazine, “You offer someone a context for gaining status, and they are going to work for that status.” Network theorist Albert-László Barabási notes that online connection follows the rule of “preferential attachment”—that is, “when choosing between two pages, one with twice as many links as the other, about twice as many people link to the more connected page.” As a result, “while our individual choices are highly unpredictable, as a group we follow strict patterns.” Our lemming-like pursuit of online status via the collection of hundreds of “friends” clearly follows this rule.

What, in the end, does this pursuit of virtual status mean for community and friendship? Writing in the 1980s in Habits of the Heart, sociologist Robert Bellah and his colleagues documented the movement away from close-knit, traditional communities, to “lifestyle enclaves” which were defined largely by “leisure and consumption.” Perhaps today we have moved beyond lifestyle enclaves and into “personality enclaves” or “identity enclaves”—discrete virtual places in which we can be different (and sometimes contradictory) people, with different groups of like-minded, though ever-shifting, friends.

Beyond Networking

This past spring, Len Harmon, the director of the Fischer Policy and Cultural Institute at Nichols College in Dudley, Massachusetts, offered a new course about social networking. Nichols is a small school whose students come largely from Connecticut and Massachusetts; many of them are the first members of their families to attend college. “I noticed a lot of issues involved with social networking sites,” Harmon told me when I asked him why he created the class. How have these sites been useful to Nichols students? “It has relieved some of the stress of transitions for them,” he said. “When abrupt departures occur—their family moves or they have to leave friends behind—they can cope by keeping in touch more easily.”

So perhaps we should praise social networking websites for streamlining friendship the way e-mail streamlined correspondence. In the nineteenth century, Emerson observed that “friendship requires more time than poor busy men can usually command.” Now, technology has given us the freedom to tap into our network of friends when it is convenient for us. “It’s a way of maintaining a friendship without having to make any effort whatsoever,” as a recent graduate of Harvard explained to The New Yorker. And that ease admittedly makes it possible to stay in contact with a wider circle of offline acquaintances than might have been possible in the era before Facebook. Friends you haven’t heard from in years, old buddies from elementary school, people you might have (should have?) fallen out of touch with—it is now easier than ever to reconnect to those people.

But what kind of connections are these? In his excellent book Friendship: An Exposé, Joseph Epstein praises the telephone and e-mail as technologies that have greatly facilitated friendship. He writes, “Proust once said he didn’t much care for the analogy of a book to a friend. He thought a book was better than a friend, because you could shut it—and be shut of it—when you wished, which one can’t always do with a friend.” With e-mail and caller ID, Epstein enthuses, you can. But social networking sites (which Epstein says “speak to the vast loneliness in the world”) have a different effect: they discourage “being shut of” people. On the contrary, they encourage users to check in frequently, “poke” friends, and post comments on others’ pages. They favor interaction of greater quantity but less quality.

This constant connectivity concerns Len Harmon. “There is a sense of, ‘if I’m not online or constantly texting or posting, then I’m missing something,’” he said of his students. “This is where I find the generational impact the greatest—not the use of the technology, but the overuse of the technology.” It is unclear how the regular use of these sites will affect behavior over the long run—especially the behavior of children and young adults who are growing up with these tools. Almost no research has explored how virtual socializing affects children’s development. What does a child weaned on Club Penguin learn about social interaction? How is an adolescent who spends her evenings managing her MySpace page different from a teenager who spends her night gossiping on the telephone to friends? Given that “people want to live their lives online,” as the founder of one social networking site recently told Fast Company magazine, and they are beginning to do so at ever-younger ages, these questions are worth exploring.

The few studies that have emerged do not inspire confidence. Researcher Rob Nyland at Brigham Young University recently surveyed 184 users of social networking sites and found that heavy users “feel less socially involved with the community around them.” He also found that “as individuals use social networking more for entertainment, their level of social involvement decreases.” Another recent study conducted by communications professor Qingwen Dong and colleagues at the University of the Pacific found that “those who engaged in romantic communication over MySpace tend to have low levels of both emotional intelligence and self-esteem.”

The implications of the narcissistic and exhibitionistic tendencies of social networkers also cry out for further consideration. There are opportunity costs when we spend so much time carefully grooming ourselves online. Given how much time we already devote to entertaining ourselves with technology, it is at least worth asking if the time we spend on social networking sites is well spent. In investing so much energy into improving how we present ourselves online, are we missing chances to genuinely improve ourselves?

We should also take note of the trend toward giving up face-to-face for virtual contact—and, in some cases, a preference for the latter. Today, many of our cultural, social, and political interactions take place through eminently convenient technological surrogates—Why go to the bank if you can use the ATM? Why browse in a bookstore when you can simply peruse the personalized selections Amazon.com has made for you? In the same vein, social networking sites are often convenient surrogates for offline friendship and community. In this context it is worth considering an observation that Stanley Milgram made in 1974, regarding his experiments with obedience: “The social psychology of this century reveals a major lesson,” he wrote. “Often it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act.” To an increasing degree, we find and form our friendships and communities in the virtual world as well as the real world. These virtual networks greatly expand our opportunities to meet others, but they might also result in our valuing less the capacity for genuine connection. As the young woman writing in the Times admitted, “I consistently trade actual human contact for the more reliable high of smiles on MySpace, winks on Match.com, and pokes on Facebook.” That she finds these online relationships more reliable is telling: it shows a desire to avoid the vulnerability and uncertainty that true friendship entails. Real intimacy requires risk—the risk of disapproval, of heartache, of being thought a fool. Social networking websites may make relationships more reliable, but whether those relationships can be humanly satisfying remains to be seen.

Christine Rosen is a senior editor of The New Atlantis and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

The Daily Awesome

http://www.yourdailyawesome.com/2007/09/24/the-floating-ukranian-bunker/

This is from my ever-internet savvy friend Austin Hill.