...but I <3 technology

I was hoping to have this in better shape before posting today, but I’m getting impatient. I’m not apologizing or anything, I’m just saying if you try this out and something doesn’t work, there’s a good chance that I already know about and am currently working on it.

So what is the LettrWritr? The short story is, the LettrWritr is where my thesis research and general screwing around has gotten me so far. Will it be my thesis? I don’t know, but I’ve gotten some really good feedback on it already, so it just might be.

The long(er) story started a while back with a question: How do the communication tools that we use influence and shape the conversations that we have? It’s a classic question of form and content that lead me down the path of researching the qualitative differences between different communication technologies, from a social, psychological, interpersonal and UI perspective. I wanted to learn more about why we use the tools that we do to say what we say, and how one affects the other. In looking back on my recent projects and in conducting my weekly “experiments,” I’ve realized that what I”m really interested in doing, from a project standpoint, is highlighting those characteristics of communication devices that I find to be most interesting, and trying to play with them in some way.

This is how I eventually came to the LettrWritr. Knowing that there is some inherent quality in a handwritten letter that you don’t get in an email, both for the writer/sender and the reader/receiver, I wanted to see if the simplest of characteristics of the letter could be applied to content that was written in a different context, and see if the impact is still there. The purpose is to see what happens to a message that was written and submitted online, much like an email or web form, when it is translated into the form of a letter and delivered to its recipient that way. If you’re intrigued and not too scared, try it out and let me know what you think.

If you’re just looking for a tagline, LettrWritr is an email-to-letter converter. Snap.

I got back to New York after a four-hour bus ride that dropped me off at the Port Authority at 12 in the morning. It would’ve been a pretty miserable ride, except Steven Jackson was there to keep me company, I managed to get a slight bit of work done before my laptop battery totally died, the bus driver was really funny, and he almost kicked some kid off the bus in the middle of nowhere for smoking in the bathroom. Plus, being a Peter Pan and not a Fung Wah, meaning, the bus was actually owned and operated by Greyhound, the rest of the passengers were a pretty good source of amusement. Most of them were on their way from some podunk town in the Northeast to some other podunk town in the midwest. Only abut 5 people actually got off the bus in New York. It really didn’t compare to the car ride up- I’m talking heated leather seats, all the crappy radio you can sing along to, and an extreme and unapologetic mac-attack at a rest stop in Connecticut.

So now that I’ve had a chance to sleep lying down and digest everything (I’m talking about the conference, not the big mac, which I’ll be doing some yoga later to combat the effects of), I just wanted to mention some stuff I didn’t get to in my last post. For one thing MIT is a pretty amazing place. We actually stayed in Harvard Square so the difference in going from one campus to the other was pretty stark. There’s something more inviting about Harvard, like if you were to get lost it wouldn’t be so bad – you’d run across a coffee shop or a bar and it would be full of other Harvard students, where as MIT is very large and imposing and, I imagine, less forgiving to the lost wanderer (why do they not believe in street signs in Boston?).

I stayed later than I thought I would – it turned out that the demos and drinks session was in the MIT media lab building, so I somehow felt obligated to go and drink the free booze and try to sneak around to see some stuff. As it turned out, I didn’t have to sneak at all, as we ran into ITP grad turned MIT RA Alyssa, and she took us around. The lab we saw was like the giant playroom of some messy child, housing the Smart Cities, Infinite Kindergarden and Lego Learning Laboratory projects. (I’m sure I’ve just gotten these names wrong but I’ll look them up later. Except for the Lego Learning Lab. There were really, like, a bazillion legos in there, all organized by color, size and shape in little clear boxes on the walls.) Around the perimeter of this giant room were little offices, and all looked like they were stuffed to the brim with random toys and junk. In the back, Alyssa showed us their laser cutter, water cutter and four, yes FOUR 3D printers. It must be nice to have such great facilitiies. At the same time, though, the vibe in there was something I wouldn’t trade ITP for in a million years. The people were jumpy and kind of rude, probably an unavoidable side affect of being simultaneously the bitch and the golden child of Corporation X for your two year graduate stint. (See picture of Bill Gates Building below.)

We only spent about 30 minutes on our tour, so I did still manage to check out some of the things people were demoing. As I mentioned before, this year’s conference was focused specifically on participatory democracy, so there were lots of get-to-know-your-legislator type projects. The standouts were OpenCongress.org (launches Monday – oops!), Congresspedia (both funded by the Sunlight Foundation) and Metavid (a horrible name, but a smart idea – these guys use the closed captioning from CSpan video to index the entire catalogue, so you can search for or subscribe to certain keywords and watch all of the relavent activity based on that). The Democracy player guys were there, showing off their brand new version. And, of course, the $100 laptop was there. The OS looked terrible (there were 6 of us standing around prodding it like a group of monkeys for about 10 minutes before someone got it to do something) but DAMN is it cyuuuute!

But before we went and got buttered up with free food, there was a report back from the midday breakout sessions. Most of the groups were only vaguely successful (I mean, really, how can you tackle a problem like Law and participatory media in a three hour session?) but there was one in particular that I can see as being really successful. Bill Swersey, Director of WNYC Digital Media, ITP alum and friend of Bryan Nunez, reported on a project two years and two conferences in the making, that I think could really be potentially successful. It’s called Pubforge, and the idea is to provide a space where public broadcasters can collaborate and share solutions to problems of a technical nature. It is also a place where programmers can share or “donate” code. Not only is this a great idea in the way it allows people with skills to volunteer in different ways to their favorite PBS or NPR station, but it really touches on something that, as a former employee of a non-profit organization, I don’t think non-profits always have the forsight to do. Maybe I’ve mentioned this quote here before, but it’s one that sticks with me and that is particularly relevant to this project – I once heard idealist.org founder, Ami Dar, say something to the effect of “If given the choice between a free million dollars towards their cause or a free million dollars towards their particular organization, most non-profits would take the money.” So many people keep trying to reinvent the wheel – why? Is it pride? Or maybe it’s just that, when it comes to technical things like software that does what you need it to do, so many people who come with ideas for what they need or want don’t have a technical background, and so don’t realize that what they think is a crazy idea is not only totally doable, but that most of it has probably even been done before. How nice it will be for them to discover this and be able to use this resource. Now they just need to give their website a makeover so it doesn’t look like something only some open source code monkey can understand.

The conference left me with a lot on the brain, and dug up some old thoughts, and some old mementos on net-neutrality, an issue that, if technology has done anything for participatory democracy at all, these democratic participators should be able to combat. We’ll see, though. Verizon is still spinning its rhetoric, and the tech geeks are still doing their best to appeal to other tech geeks. The Save the Internet campaign was great, but I think, next time around, someone will have to find a way to reach all of those AOL and hotmail users out there, the older people who actually vote and who probably aren’t as well versed on the finer points of the internet like the Peter Pan guy.

A more condensed version of the annual look at the triumphs and tirbulations of participatory media took place at MIT this year (too bad I didn’t realize that until after I had booked my hotel at Harvard Square) and had a decidedly more political slant to it than last year’s conference. Maybe something happens the further away you get from the Berkman Center that makes copyright law reforms less pressing than news and politics, although I didn’t manage to see Dan Gilmore floating around anywhere this time, so that doesn’t seem right. Anyway, I’m doing some blogging for the conference again this year. Here you’ll find a more personal take, although I’m trying hard to refrain from complaining about any of the technical problems or annoyances of the conference.

Henry Jenkins started it off with a pretty lively keynote, plugging his new book “Convergence Culture” and delving into the participatory culture of media as a combination of interactive technology and a language of mainstream culture that can be effectively utilized to encourage political and ideological dissent, discussion and, of course, independent distribution. Beth Kantor got some great pictures of his slides. If I weren’t so lazy, I might make an enhanced podcast. Anyway, he was a great speaker and his book really does sound like a good read:

Henry Jenkins keynote

After Henry there was a presentation from a very rushed John Palfrey. He was well-read and well-spoken, and gave a very concise, yet all-encompassing report on the state of participatory media. I’d like to go back and listen to this one again, if only to pick out some of the really great lines he had and give myself an additional moment to disgest them. I also thought the way he handled the question at the end was very dignified (I probably just would have blurted out something stupid like, “you obviously have no faith in crowdsourcing?” It’s not that it was a bad question, it’s just that the problem really does have a way of rectifying itself, and I don’t think that censoring assholes is going to mean there are less assholes out there.

John Palfrey

From there we saw a pretty diverse group get up and panelize the who’s, how’s and what’s of participatory media, from the corporate (MTV and Yahoo!), not so corporate (Reason Magazine) and Indie (Four Eyed Monsters) angles. They talked about everything from monetization, such as Aaron Crumley’s description of a future wherein creators are sponsored for their real-life product shots (a question which begs the answer, how real life is your life if you are being paid to live it?) to online governance, as ITP grad Kenny Miller describes the feeling of taking the training wheels off of his very successful the-n.com teen social networking site, to the mediation and distribution of citizen news items, as Elizabeth Osdar decsribes Yahoos! approach to routing both top-down and bottom-up stories to its users. All-in-all this was a very compelling group of people who raised a lot of interesting questions, and I highly recommend listening to it if you have the time:

Participatory Culture Panel

I have to say that this Kenny Miller seems like a pretty interesting guy. Initially, I was a little turned-off by his referencing of binary competition as a part of our DNA rather than a product of a stereoptyping, while calling participatory culture a “trend” rather than the inevitable result of technology finally catching up to human needs. I think he eventually won me over after off-handedly addressing my favorite bi-product of technological profficiency applied poorly to real life – that is, the content problem.

The Four Eyed Monster guy, on the other hand, may never win me over, although, it may have just been that fact that I was petrified of his giant oz-like head looming over me for the past hour. Really, guys. Now just because someone is on video chat, doesn’t mean that their face needs to be 50 times the size of the live and present panelists.

The last panel was also a lively one, although I can’t say that I find bickering at the panelists’ table very attractive. Unfortunately my ipod died before we got to that part in the discussion, and all I have here is some audio with some people talking participatory democracy. Hopefully the comments from the audience are still intact and audible, as I found a few peoples’ contributions to the “who’s government is actually listening to its constituents in realtime” question very interesting. In Estonia, you can “call in” on congressional meetings, and, in Indonesia, report government corruption via SMS. For some reason these both sound way more reasonable to me than New York’s new approach to vigilante crime-reporting (no, not to the press, to the police). Anyway, here it is:

For more information on the conference and a full list of participants and panelists go here: Or you can, like, log on in Second Life, dude.

After our class discussion last Monday, Jonah recommended I check out iso-phone. I guess it was my reference to letter writing and how I’d noticed the effect that your environment can have on the letter that you write. Personally, I find this effect to be not only interesting, but also essential. It’s part of where you find your voice when you sit down to write a letter.

isophone is an experiment that deals with just this phenomenon. After all the talk about how the context (the form of a method of communication) shapes the content (that is, what’s actually said), it’s interesting to see that there is a whole other context involved as well being addressed, that is, the environments of the people who are communicating. Iso-phone highlights this by attempting to remove the communicating parties from any external stimulus.

While the thought is an interesting one, I can’t see it as being terribly affective. I suppose the point is to give the talker nothing else to focus on, other than the conversation itself, but this, I think, would affect the conversation even more than paying for your coffee while your on your cell phone. Floating in a pool of water, in pitch blackness, is just not something we, as humans are used to doing. Sure, you might be more inclined to remember the intimate details of the conversation you had after the fact, but only really because you were bobbing up and down and (probably) feeling a bit like an idiot.

Maybe this isn’t the point, and I’m open to the idea that I’m misinterpretting, but the only other affect I could imagine this having – the hyper awareness of the tone and cadence of the other person’s voice, perhaps – also seems contrary to the reasons why we speak. There are inuendos in the way a person speaks that imply something beyond the words they speak, which makes voice communication an affective tool, but most humans have the social aptitude to realize that they should politely ignore most of them. On that note, most humans have the social aptitude to hold a conversation without having to be isolated in a pool of water.

Of course, I am also open to the idea that I may just be reading too much into this. If nothing else it’s an interesting commentary on just how diverted our attention is when we communicate, and a fun (albeit, kind of creepy-looking) take on how to separate the content of a conversation from the context in which it takes place. While I personally think that your environmental surrounding are an integral part of that context, I can also appreciate the extremes to which the idea was taken in this piece.

http://www.xinroman.com/itpblog/images/letter2.jpg

http://www.xinroman.com/itpblog/images/letter3.jpg

http://www.xinroman.com/itpblog/images/letter1.jpg

It’s funny how the simplest things can be the most inspiring. Last week we parsed through some text files and calculated how many times each word appeared in the file. Simple enough. But start doing it with text that you’ve written, say, in email, to other people, and you start getting an interesting sense of your communication that goes beyond how you think you present yourself to others, and forces you to look at what you actually say to people.

I think it would be interesting to take this same data, and group it by contacts. First, by specific people, but people who represent a different type of contact in my address book. I’d like to do a word analysis for each of these people and compare them to eachother. How much overlap is there between emails to my mother and emails to my sister? Are there words that appear in emails to my boss that don’t appear in emails to my friends? And last, can I create a sort of “spectrum” of these contacts based on the words that I type to them, or that we type to each other? Can I interpret what my relationship is with an anonymous correspondent, just by looking at a collection of key words.

Overtime, using some lessons from Bayesian filtering, I’d like to compare other outgoing/incoming emails to these control groups, and see how they stack up. Do all of my casual acquaintances fit nicely into the casual acquaintance group, or do some of them fall closer to the close friends group? Does this say something about my relationships to those people?

Last, I’d like to visualize this data in some way. While I”m usually wary of data visualizations in general, I think that in this case it’s appropriate. I especially like this processing visualization, We Feel Fine as it deals with verbal expressions without being to wordy or to abstract. I’d like to be able to accomplish something similar.

I was also thinking about doing something similar with IM, mostly because I downloaded this iChatAnalyzer app a few weeks ago, really wanted to use it, but for some reason can’t get it to work on my computer. The more I think about it, though, it seems to me that email is a much better medium for analyzing this sort of thing. For one thing, there is a much broader range of people I email than people I IM (everyone from perfect strangers to my mother). For another, IM has a way of bastardizing any conversation with any person into the same generic IM language, whereas different emails are better at expressing different ideas. Even IM’s with my bosses or professors are determined to revert back to the same “brb” “no probs,” and “l8r”.

I’m trying not to expect too much from my results and I’m hoping that this will be an interesting analyzation tool and learning experience. Probably the best plan of action will be to try it out first, see what happens, and, if it is interesting/telling enough, continue on with the data set to create a visualization, perhaps for my final in this class. I’m pretty sure I can lump this is with thesis research/experiments as well, naturally.

So last week I had to present more on the “context” of my thesis, but I didn’t really get into the details of the projects I showed – why I loved/hated them or how exactly I saw them fitting into my area of research. I also thought of/discovered a few more after the fact. Most importantly, though, I never managed to post ANY of that here. So here goes.

Oh, and just in case you forgot, I’m exploring how communication technologies shape interpersonal relationships. Or how they shape our conversations. Or how our social interpretations shape communications technology. Or something. They’re all related you see!

Ze Frank was on to something here when he did this little video about what goes on between the lines of an email. It’s all done in good fun, but the truth is, the lack of emotion of an email is one of the things that make it such a useful tool. Perhaps because we’ve all been trained by interoffice communication, it’s most often used for coordination and other dry administrative type communications.

So what didn’t I like about this project? Well, just Ze Frank, really.

Next up is the email typewriter which I thought of in the shower one day, only to google it and to find that it had already been made (damn!). So what’s cool about this project is the way that it instills one communication technology with the characteristics of another. Sitting down to a typewriter is such a different experience than sitting down to write an email. There’s the sound, the feeling of the keys, the feeling of finality, the linearness with which it forces you to write, many of the same things I ascribe to letter writing, but with a more official feel.

The problem with this project is just that, though. An email is not a typewritten letter because you don’t write an email with a typewriter. It’s cool that the two channels can physically intersect, but the fact that it’s the physicality (mostly) of those two channels that makes them produce such different forms of content, just makes the whole thing really uncomfortable. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it still makes you think about form and content and whatever, but I just can’t help thinking of all those poor typewritten letters written by grandma, and how her grandchildren just dread getting them in their email inboxes.

On that note, though, I can’t rag too much, as this did inspire one of my weekly experiments (to come!).

Next, I mentioned clipfm, which Jonah recommended that I check out, before the semester started. I can’t really take this project more seriously than just seeing it as some kind of commentary on the flippancy of sms messaging. Most of these are messages that no one should ever send, yet they are somehow eerily familiar to those pre-programmed text messages that come with your phone, or just about any ridiculous message from your drunk friend that you’ve ever gotten. I filed this one under “things that are technically possible, somehow in keeping with the technology that enables it, but just shouldn’t be done.” This is a social matter, obviously, and, fortunately, we are mostly “right” in the codes of contact that we socially construct. Another one that I’ll keep in this pile is the iPhone Shuffle, which Alex sent to me the day before my presentation.

Not to get too picky here, but what I don’t like about this project, or rather, what I’d like to try to avoid in coming up with my own, is, again, the form and function mix up, at least, if it’s not intentional. These are all very short messages that make sense to type on a mobile keypad, yet they are being sent from a web page. Again, I think that mixing mediums is interesting, but, like the email typewriter, I just can’t be sure if that was one of the intentions.

Another project Jonah referred me to was this person’s blog. I know, I know. But just look at it will you? This person has managed to recreate an entirely rich and amuzing portrait of their life and character, just through text messaging! The technology has obviously enabled some new way of communication for this person, perhaps even a new artform.

My only problem with this is the fact that it’s public. It reminds of the momblog in this way. No matter how cool I think it is, there’s always some asshole out there going “but it’s public!” and as much as I hate that asshole, he’s right. It’s almost impossible not to be affected by the fact that, nomatter how honest you think you are, part of you is really doing it for the invisible audience. I keep running into this problem and it’s not going away. How do you talk about interpersonal communication without some real examples of, uh, getting personal?

Well, this guy did it. He wrote a piece of fiction. Written entirely in text messages. I see absolutely nothing wrong with this work. Absolutely nothing whatsoever. I just wish I could speak Finnish.

Unfortunately, I don’t think it will fly for this semester’s projects. But I enjoyed writing it for Nancy’s class last semester and didn’t want to see it “go to waste.

There’s a story my mother likes to tell us. By us I mean my sister and me. And by story I don’t mean so much an account of factual incidents as a rendering of isolated historical events and permeating ideas strung together, over time and through much retelling, to resemble a tale so solidified that its events very well could have happened all in one day. It goes something like this:

As a child, when my sister wanted to learn to swim, she dove right in. She didn’t know how to swim, of course, so she just flopped around for a while, struggling and working, frustrated and tired, until she finally figured it out. When I wanted to learn to swim, I stayed by the side of the pool. I waited and I watched, for so long in fact that my parents thought I may never actually jump in. I shrugged off any attempts of the older and wiser people around me to teach me what to do, contemptuously, in fact, as though offended by their offers and their lack of faith. But eventually, after much observation and contemplation, I jumped in, when no one was looking, and swam straight to the other side of the pool.

The story itself isn’t so important, as the context in which I retell it to myself, and the fact that it’s taken on such mythological meaning. Perhaps I shouldn’t put so much faith in the perceptions of others, but I can so clearly remember my own accounts of the life that’s come afterwards where, looking back on this story, for all of its flaws and exaggerations (was it really a pool or the ocean?), it seems perfectly analogous, almost prophetic.

My family collects stories the way most collect photographs or certificates of achievement. But, like all artifacts of the past, it is the stories themselves that become the memories, and telling them reminds us of who we think we are. I often observe my own actions in the present tense and wonder how I will talk about them once they are in the past, as though just living them isn’t enough. Whether this is indicative of some grandiose literary perception of my own life or just some leftover childhood paranoia – the notion that your life doesn’t really exist unless it’s being observed, an idea exacerbated even more by our current personal media landscape – I’m not really sure. But perhaps it really is just the retelling of events that breathes life into them, and if you’re lucky, someone will be there to listen.

But this isn’t the only story of my life, and it certainly isn’t one that I retell often. Maybe to my sister now and then, when we look to each other for advice or feel the need for reassurance in the different ways we live our lives. But over the years I’ve consulted my family’s myths as their own literary form, and I’ve taken some comfort in the fact that the stories I use to describe myself don’t need to be factual, so much as true to who I am. More than the events retold, it’s the telling of the story – the cadence, the peaks and the pitfalls, the lessons learned, the context of it in our daily lives – that really matters.

It’s recently occurred to me that, while I’ve been busy being a good thesis student – researching, reading, talking, experimenting- I’ve completely neglected to document any of my thoughts or findings online. Bad ITP student!

So here was last week’s experiment, the Email to text message converter.

I’ve been taking what I’m calling the “Ze Frank” approach to my thesis. That is, every week I’m doing at least one mini-project related to my topic. So far it’s been fun! I’ll post all of the others in a bit, but this one was also a weekly assignment for Daniel Shiffman’s Programming A to Z class that’s due tomorrow.

It’s not very robust yet, as you can see it’s only really looking for a few different words or phrases that I normally use. The idea is to be able to write an email to someone and have it converted into an SMS. Or, rather, have the language shortened and converted to a style that’s acceptible for text messaging.

I’ve noticed a lot of email to sms apps popping up on the web lately, and I think it’s funny how much they’ve missed the point. Also earlier this week when my phone was disconnected I found myself stuck a few times emailing my sister’s phone, which is essentially the same thing as sending a text message. I realized that you simply can’t write an sms message the way that you write an email. There’s the physical constraints (small screen size) and then there’s just the difference in acceptible content for one medium over the other. I also did this because it’s interesting for me to think about what stylistically separates different types of communication, and the differences in etiquette.

I’ve really been enjoying Daniel’s class, dispite the fact that most of what we’re doing goes way over my head, and the best I can usually do is modify and tweak his example code. Not that that really matters. Hopefully, I’ll just be able to come up with some ineteresting things and, should the need arise, I’ll be able to do some textual analysis type stuff should my thesis end up calling for that.

Here was this week’s class assignment too. You know, since I’m already here and all. It reads a text input, counts the number of acronyms in the text and then rates the author’s nerdiness. Can’t wait to get some ITPers blogs running through this thing.

This was the first, and probably the hardest, of many weekly thesis experiments to come.

The first week of school, I posed myself the question, what is it that I say to someone, before they’ve even read my message, about why it is that I’m sending them the message. In other words, what am I already communicating, by writing an email or picking up the phone before they’ve even heard what I had to say. In other, other words, if my devices could speak, what would they say? Here are just a few examples.

Oops! These are pretty tiny. Click on the image, if you want to read without going blind.