digital digs

Blogging teleology

Some conversation around with Collin, Derek, and Jenny about what to do with this blog thing. Clearly there are many more options for user-generated content than there were when I started this 578 posts ago. There's the minimalist microblog and status update. Video. The various social networks. Some are more time intensive, others less.

I was talking FTF with Derek about this a couple days ago and we both said presented with the question of whether we imagined we'd be blogging in 10 or 20 years that the answer was "of course not." One of the things Sifry's 2008 State of the Blogosphere reports on is the changing nature of what blogging is. So even if we were doing something that we still called "blogging," it wouldn't be this.

So where is all this leading? Whatever this is.  I suppose I started blogging to investigate this question. But in some ways it is a broader question. Why write? It doesn't surprise me that the vast, vast majority of blogs are started but quickly go silent or are rarely updated with no sense of rhythm or exigency. Writing is hard. Yes the blog gives the average person the technical ability to compose and publish texts. My sneakers give me the techncial ability to run a marathon too. And though I jog on a near daily basis, I'm not running any marathons.

Blogging is an endurance event as well. It's not about the individual post. It's about doing it on a regular basis and getting back to it when your habit fails. Actually for me it is a little more like meditation than jogging in this respect. I'm always getting back to meditation and getting back to blogging.

That might suggest that there is some objective, or if not an objective at least a trajectory carved out through the practice of regular blogging. I imagine one can be interpreted from this blog or any other. However, not surprisngly, I don't see this as about telos. I'm not trying to get anywhere (sorry). Instead it is the regular practice of writing that interests me--in all of its myriad components: an engagement with rhetoric and composition that can only come through writing itself.

So "blogging" may change and I may stop blogging someday. I am sure I will. But I will always be doing this.

shaking free of computing woes!

I hope to be getting back to blogging after a week of vacation followed by a series of annoying computing woes. First my router went down at home. Then I went to school to discover that the College has been messing with the email. Apparently on August 12th they decided to stop POP and IMAP from working the way it had in the past. I thought I was accessing my Cortland email through my gmail. As I was away most of that time and checking email on my iphone I just didn't notice that the Cortland stuff wasn't coming through. Missing those emails was a pain. One of my colleagues stopped me in the hall and asked if I was angry with her b/c I hadn't responded to her email. Plus there was a number of student emails I missed.

But the real pain is how I am going to move forward at this point. The college made this change for security purposes, specifically problems with phishing and spam. I understand that. I get 50-100 emails a day, sometimes more, but that's a good average. My gmail also catches around 50 spam messages a day (plus about another 100 more through kpraxis email, that thing is ridiculous!). But they all go into the spam filter. I never see them unless I want to. It's pretty rare for them to get through.

So anyway, I've got an idea about how to get rid of spam. We can just stop using the internet. Or at least email. Short of that, we can try to tie it down so much as to make it basically unusable anyway. The trick is to find the balance, I suppose.

So here is what Cortland has left me. I could access my account through webmail. But the webmail is horrible on a Mac. You can't search. You can't filter messages. It's just a big pile of messages. Worthless.

I could use VPN and Apple Mail. The thing is, I don't really care for Apple Mail. Plus having to get in through VPN is just an additional hassle.

Then there's the matter of access via my iPhone. You can set up VPN on your iphone, so maybe that's a possibility. Again though, this all just seems like an unnecessary hassle when I can choose from any number of free e-mail services like gmail.

What possible reason could there be for using my Cortland email?

So my solution is to just use Gmail. Maybe I'll set up a second Gmail account for personal use. That's not a problem. I've already informed my students and advisees of my gmail address. And I've changed my contact e-mail in the college's information system.

number games, reputation economies, and Aristotle (of all people)

Danah Boyd posts on Many-to-Many about the "number games" that often drive online participation. As she and the commenters on her post point out, one's numerical identity whether it be a character's level in Worlds of Warcraft or number of MySpace friends or hits on a blog or rating on eBay or whatever, surely drives participation in a number of Social Software situations.

One of those commenters references research done in online gaming, where Richard Bartle identified four gamer types: Achievers, Explorers, Socializers, and Killers. As I understand it, the Achiever-type is quite common and would be characterized by the desire to achieve new levels or a higher reputation, numerically represented. The way we regularly talk about this is in terms of a "reputation economy." There's an interesting article in First Monday on the uses and abuses of recommendation systems (e.g. Amazon) for the purpose of raising one's reputation. Again, I'm not familiar with Bartle, but it strikes me there's some connection there.

That said, it strikes me that we are seeing a twisting of reputation economies in the development of numerical evaluation systems. Reputation economies are gift economies, where the idea is that what is offered (in the case of Social Software, information) is given freely. Gifts imply some obligation on the part of the receiver, of course, but it is not a fungible exchange; it can even be a case of "paying it foward" so to speak. However, the inclusion of a numerical system effectively commodifies the exchange. One can see this fictionalized in Bruce Sterling's Distraction were characters in reputation economies rise through the ranks and then can essentially spend their reputation (with the result that they get demoted). Google transforms the entire web into a kind of reputation economy, where the gift of putting a link on your website increases the linked sites visibility. Clearly this is a numerical reputation which is regularly commodified and sold.

I suppose I could critique this commodification, but I want to set that aside for a moment. Instead I want to look at this as a classically rhetorical concept, ethos. From this perspective, the primary problem of numerical reputations is that they undermine the ethos of the giver. When one writes an evaluation on Amazon, does one write honestly or write to improve reputation? It is not a problem that can be resolved but rather a question of rhetorical evaluation that must be folded into one's reading.

Certainly this is at stake in academic communities, which is clearly a reputation economy. I don't mean to suggest that academics lie or plagiarize or falsify results to try to improve their reputations (though all those things do happen sometimes). Instead, I'm thinking more subtlely about the motivations for publication. I need to publish to get tenured, to get a raise or promoted, and/or to gain some notoriety in my field (which might lead to a better job down the line). Are such rewards an appropriate motive for research? Clearly we seem to think so, because we make such connections quite transparent. And I'm not complaining about that. Honestly, I'm not. However, I can't help thinking about that when I read an article. I think, this is the thing someone wrote to get tenure or whatever. And I'm sure it would be the rare article where that is the sole motivation, but one would be foolish to think this concern wasn't at play. Obviously the same is the case with any other writing in the marketplace: there is always a commodifiable goal.

Anyway, I digress. Boyd's point is about the desire for a great reputation driving participation in Social Software. I have circled around to suggest that when reputations become commodified in some numerical representation (e.g., a Top 100 Reviewer on Amazon or characters or items in a MMORG you can sell on eBay or eBay Seller reputations for that matter) they are ripe for cashing in. And when that potential hangs there, one must carefully consider the ethos of the gift you are about to receive.

technorati tags:reputation, economy, ethos

trackback spam

I've temporarily removed the listing of trackbacks from my site as my trackback function was spammed by multiple rape porn links. I know that I can do IP comment banning. I wonder if I can do the same with trackbacks? I'm hoping the Typepad folks will have an answer for me. Have others experienced this?