… party people drunkenly looking for pizza.
… lovers making out under the lamps in Washington Square Park.
… a couple in their 30s, looking at each other like teenagers in the first blush of love.
… dudes returning from a concert, “I processed this data differently when I was a teenager, man.”
… a swimsuit-clad blonde being photographed on the platform; commuters annoyed, gawking, uncaring.

I push my way on to the train and find myself standing in front of a Sikh man, obviously returning home after a long day of some sort of hard labor – his jeans, work boots, and turban covered in paint and dust. as he hungrily eats Parle-G cookies, he seems too tired to notice the people peripherally staring at him. or he’s too accustomed to it to care. I notice his kaddha, its edges smoothed with years of wear. I wonder if he got it in Amritsar. I can feel his weariness – with the world, with the prejudice, with himself. he came here for a better life… is this it?

he closes his eyes thinking of his fields back in Punjab, the smell of hot parathas slathered with ghee that await his return.

he looks over at the well-dressed blonde woman sitting next to him, yet not next to him – the distance she keeps between them obvious and deliberate. he looks down as he tucks his hands into the crooks of his elbows, his eyes younger than his weathered face and white beard indicate.

his jeans and backpack seem alien on him. I crave to see him in his salwar-kameez as it flutters in the winds of Punjab.

this is not his place.
this is not his home.
these are not his people.
this is not his time.
this is not the “good life” America promised him in Baywatch and on MTV.

“sat sri akaal”, I mumble to him hurriedly and under my breath as I disembark, wondering if he’d heard me, embarrassed that I’d said it wrong, worried that I’d offended him, hoping that I brought some comfort, some feeling of “home”.

my home?
a heritage I do not know.
a culture I do not understand.
a people whose blood flows through me, yet a kinship I do not feel.
but in this moment, I wish I felt it. if only to bring him comfort.

or was the comfort for me?

~

today I looked in the mirror and said to myself,
“you’re going to die in about 30 years.”
then I burst into tears.

I looked some more and said,
“so many people, so much love. it hasn’t been a bad life.”

and cried some more, but smiled through my tears…
because love makes life worth death.

]]> http://savasavasava.wordpress.com/2012/04/25/on-death/feed/ 8 savasaheli dead rat on NYC subway platform. it was loved by me before it died. http://savasavasava.wordpress.com/2012/03/30/gender-neutral-starts-with-me/ http://savasavasava.wordpress.com/2012/03/30/gender-neutral-starts-with-me/#comments Sat, 31 Mar 2012 01:45:38 +0000 savasavasava http://savasavasava.wordpress.com/?p=86 ]]> a colleague was asking for feedback on something he was designing for a class.

him: “they choose their avatar… they can choose a boy avatar or a girl avatar.”
me: “do you have any non-boy or non-girl avatar options?”
him, making ‘come ON sava’ eyes at me: “sava, these are 12-year-olds.”
me: “all the more reason to show them that gender doesn’t need to be a thing!”
him, patting my knee: “that’s your thing, sava.”
me: “that’s the world’s thing!”

but I was already ignored, written off as the crazy person who wasn’t focusing on the right thing.

I let it go… because at that point I would’ve become an asshole for “derailing the conversation” and making it about gender. but honestly? I think that these are exactly the kinds of situations in which we need to examine how we are propagating gender-normative behavior in the things we design and build.

not paying attention to this and not addressing it in everything we do further propagates the stereotypes and the bigotry and the sexism and the gender inequality that pervade our society.

I will address this issue with my colleague again, within a more appropriate context and setting (even saying that makes me angry at myself – any context in which it is not addressed should be the appropriate context!) because it’s important to be aware of our own biases and conditioning and inclination to conform to the prescribed gender dichotomy. or any kind of bias that excludes anybody.

we need to recognize that we, as educators, researchers, teachers, designers, human beings… have a responsibility to challenge things that encourage bias and exclusion.

maybe my colleague will read this and maybe he’ll think about it and maybe he’ll understand the point I’m making and maybe he’ll change the options in his design.

I can only hope.

what is transmitted in a tweet? information? knowledge? facts? all of the above?

in his essay, The Memo and Modernity [pdf], John Guillory says that

“The difference between information and fact is based on value in transmission.”

so, according to Guillory, facts become information when there is a value attached to that fact and it is important to transmit this information in a timely manner. once that window of time that supports the relevance of that information has passed, the information is no longer as valuable. Guillory is talking about the memorandum – but the description serves as an early metaphor for today’s tweets.

Guillory describes memorandum as something that

“… gives directions, makes recommendations, but, above all, it is a means of transmitting information within the large bureaucratic structures organizing virtually all work in modernity.”

this isn’t all that a tweet can represent, but it provides a very good description of a basic function of a tweet. so, in essence, a tweet can be thought of as a memo – to oneself, to one’s followers, to a particular user; it is a transference of information.

for example, in different “#____chats” on Twitter, information transmitted during the weekly meetings is relevant, timely, and contextual. this is valuable for the duration of the meeting, but the information transmitted can be valuable beyond just the meeting, which is why members sometimes archive the chats or favorite certain tweets. tweets made at other times can still be valuable, based on who they are addressed to and what information they are transmitting.

in describing the nature of a memorandum, Guillory also touches upon another feature of the tweet – ephemerality. he characterizes memos as both ephemeral and permanent. ephemeral because memos contain information for a particular audience or oneself, and when the transfer of that information is complete, the memos are no longer required. permanent because even though they have fulfilled their purpose, they will be preserved and filed. in the same way, after a tweet reaches its intended audience, it is gone – it passes by in the Twitter stream and if you missed it, there is no way to know that you did. but, even if it is not visible in your Twitter stream, there are different ways in which it has been recorded; the most permanent of which is in the archive at the Library of Congress.

tools like Twapperkeeper allowed us to archive and save Twitter activity over a particular period of time based on different parameters, but Twitter revoked their access because it was in violation of their API. to get around this, people often archive the weekly chats in a wiki, or follow other useful workarounds. another way to save individual tweets for later is to “favorite“ them. people also Storify twitter exchanges, creating “social stories” or archives of interesting conversations. these solutions address some of the issues of ephemerality of Twitter, but those tweets that are not archived or favorited, are lost in the ether.

Guillory spoke of the memorandum as another sign of the death of rhetoric. in his analysis of how the attitude towards rhetoric changed and what role the memo played in redefining the norms of information transfer, he talks about clarity and technicity.

“The norm of clarity arose form the publicness of print culture, which presupposed that written communications were addressed ideally to everyone, to the hypothetical general reader.”

this helps to set a tone for tweets – the need for clarity is of importance because of the character constraint, the public nature of the tweet, and the wide audience that it needs to inform. on the other hand, technicity also brings up an integral feature of Twitter – if you don’t understand the language of Twitter, you may not understand the information being transmitted.

communities use the specific language of Twitter in addition to the specific language of their own communities, the #_____chat communities, for instance. given the character constraint and specific language, the rhetoric undergoes a certain change – not necessarily a death, but definitely an evolution. newcomers have to spend some amount of time deciphering not only the language of the tool, but also the language of the community.

[note: a friend pointed out that I don't touch upon memos as a bureaucratic/intra-organizational form of communication, being intended for a closed or specific audience, or even how confidential memos (DMs?) work or can be leaked. while not a focus in my research, I agree that this is something I should at least look at a little. I hope what I've got here makes sense nonetheless. and, thank you to my friend who read over and encouraged me to post this.]

[note: these are just fractured thoughts as I had them... forgive if they do not provide enough context or depth. I am happy to discuss further in the comments =)]

I read parts of Ann Blair‘s book – Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age - for a class, and I found a few interesting metaphors for Twitter and tweets. I intend to read further and will hopefully continue to post notes here.

in her book, Blair lays out a historical view of how and when information management began in the middle ages and describes the different methods by which people recorded and shared information. this includes descriptions of how texts and information were copied by hand and recorded, shared, or preserved in libraries. we still do exactly this with our information, only, the tools we use are different. Twitter fits into this paradigm as an information management tool because of the volumes of information that are tweeted and how these tweets are composed, shared, and as of April 14th, 2010, stored at the Library of Congress.

Blair talks about an interesting concept: florilegium.

“… which, rather than summarizing, selected the best passages or “flowers” from authoritative sources.”

Tweets can be thought of as forced florilegium – the constraint of 140 characters forces us to distill the important or best information (our own or from others) and share it. the idea that each tweet is a specially picked flower puts the onus on the author of the tweet to be trusted to have picked the ‘best flower’ to share. this also points to the role of curator that individuals often play – we choose what to tweet based on how we would like ourselves and the communities we are affiliated with to be represented.

in a great section on note-taking (in the book as well as this article (.pdf file)), Blair traces a practice that is centuries old having been used across genres; like by merchants for book-keeping and students for learning together. She also discusses note-taking as a memory aid and a writing aid and talks about the different ways in which note-takers figured out ways to manage their notes; like using a ‘literary closet’ in which one could store slips of paper in alphabetical order based on topics.

Blair describes Harrison and Placcius’ vision of the closet as a collaborative note-taking tool… Twitter feels like an updated version of this closet:

“… both Harrison and Placcius emphasized the virtues if the closet for what they called “public use,” that is, for sharing with others the burdens and the rewards of note-taking.”

“Harrison further envisioned group use of the closet: a group of students in a college or a literary society, say, six or more, could distribute among themselves books to read or arguments to read for and keep the excerpted passages in common in the closet. At a moment’s notice they could all and all at once examine and compare opinions and authorities on any topic, gathered from a great mass of books.”

there are several more examples of note-takers, note-takings, and types of notes in the book and article – those of you interested in this sort of thing will enjoy the detail and history of this activity.

Twitter allows for varied forms of note-taking, some covered by Blair, but also beyond those examples partly because of the affordances of the new tools. a type of collaborative note-taking manifests in the ‘chat’ communities on Twitter during their scheduled meetings. notes from these meetings are often archived and made available to the broader community via a wiki. people also use Twitter to record notes for class, connect with and share resources with their class, notes on books they are reading, proceedings of a conferences, and even just short interactions that can be Storified. While it might be hard to organize these notes alphabetically (if one wanted to, that is), it is possible to categorize tweets or notes using hashtags, and then searching and sorting using those hashtags.

do you use Twitter for note-taking? how do you save your notes? how do you share?
how do you use hashtags?
as teachers or learners, do you use Twitter or hashtags in your classroom? what has your experience with this been?
do you use Twitter to connect with your community?

share your stories and questions and thoughts in the comments… I’d love to hear from you.
also, ask me stuff… I have more examples and resources – just don’t want to add clutter here!

[many thanks to Noel Kirkpatrick for invaluable inputs and reviewing, among other things.]

[edit: a redditor pointed me to a more commonly used rage comic builder.]

I’d been hearing about the redditgifts secret santa for a couple of years now, and after seeing a few tweets about it this year, I decided to sign up. those of you who know me, know I’m all bah humbug about this holiday season nonsense, so you might wonder why…

because I like making people happy, that’s why.
and it turns out that other people do it for exactly that reason.

signing up required me to give them my postal address. I’ll be honest: I felt insecure giving my address to a stranger, and I almost quit the endeavor… but what is community without trust? I’ve heard the reddit community being described as a really great, caring, and involved community; people who look out for each other, nevermind what the rage comics and the snark that sometimes pervades their comments indicate. *

I signed up. and waited. and got a notification email for the person I was assigned to. a woman in NJ. ok. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I stalked her a little, found out she was into “dorky tattoos, candy, and dancing” (her words, not mine). she sounded like fun, but I wasn’t sure what to do with that information. and then I got busy, so didn’t think about it much, till later. **

a few days later, I was orangered. this was the exchange:

and a few more days later:

and:

yet another few days later, my secret santa present!!

his note said:

Hey Sava,

I did some stalking and found your Amazon wish list, while I wouldn’t be as presumptuous as to guess what books out of the list you want most I hope this gift while small will help you obtain some of those books. Here’s hoping this small gesture from an anonymous Redditor will bring you some joy when you get your mail in a few days. I’m also including the sticker so you will hopefully use it and a Socially Awkward Penguin can scream something about bacon and narwhals to you and give you something to submit either as a story or rage comic.

Wishing you the best

Your Secret Santa

this made me unbelievably happy. like stupidly so. the fact that someone thought of me, drew for me, researched and sent me – a total stranger and not much of a redditor – something… just melted me.

so… I sent my secret santa a message – I still had no idea who he was.

he didn’t reply to my message, but he commented on my pic of the gift, and then… I had his username: ZetaAlorix. he was a real person! I could do some stalking for myself! I didn’t do much, to be honest. but the things I did find, made me want to track him down and give him the biggest, longest hug EVAR. ***

so, here’s what I found about him on reddit…

1. he posted a question because I didn’t really have much of a presence as a redditor.

2. a comment on a post about opening presents before christmas.

3. and finally this… the thing that makes me want to do something special for him, his is the first comment, and a few responses further down as well.

if you look through some of the gifts in the redditgifts gallery, and some of the gifts that have won awards, you might think my gift is not much. but to me, it is worth more than the ipads, and mugs, and handmade whatevers that other people got. the thoughtfulness and sacrifice that ZetaAlorix made to bring happiness in my life – a time I needed some happiness – made my day, week, month, year, many years… I will not forget this.

dear dear ZetaAlorix, you have forever earned my affection and appreciation. love and fabulously good things will come to you, I promise.

one day, I hope I can give you this hug in person.

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<hug>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

———————————-

* I had been aware of reddit from before, but my interest in them was further piqued during my @communitp class with @kthread at NYU’s ITP. we had @hueypriest as a guest who talked about the reddit community.
** I sent my secret santee a really nice diary/journal thing from India. I hope she likes it!
*** I obtained permission to use our personal correspondence and his username for this post.

———————————-

I’ve recently had a few different experiences that involved expectations and behaviors based on 3 different kinds of trust – I’m sure there are more, but I’m going to talk about 3.

• public persona legitimacy trust
• professional connection trust
• trust once removed

so I haven’t really met that many people off the internet. my first introduction to irl versions of virtual (twitter) people was a couple of years ago at a conference tweetup. this was predictably awkward, but still fun (those of you who know me, know how much I love awkward!) strangely, none of those connections endured – probably because of a lack of shared context and the fact that the conference was over, and maybe the fact that I felt a little out of my depth.

cut to two years later – someone I’d been following on twitter for a while but had never really interacted with, pinged me out of the blue and we started communicating fairly regularly, finally deciding to meet. I was crazy nervous about it – partly because we had built up a rapport online and I wasn’t sure how that would translate irl, and partly because I was so so self-conscious.

how come I decided it was ok to meet? because of who he is. obviously, I looked him up – found out that he was a legitimate human being, he wrote, was written about, spoke at things, was obviously established in his field. his public professional persona lent him the credibility that made it ok for me to meet him. what happened after might be told in another blog post, but it’s not relevant to this context. and no, he’s not an axe murderer. and yes, we’re still in touch. kinda.

at a recent conference, I met many many people who are in my field – people I’ve already created connections with online, mainly through twitter. this allowed for a sense of trust born out of a mutual understanding of our field, conversations around related research, and shared academic experiences. there was also an awareness of the importance of maintaining these relationships and trust for our professional careers. I will say that it was a wonderful relief that everyone I met irl turned out to be awesome, and I know that some of these relationships can and will go beyond just the professional.

through a similar academic affiliation, I have an online friend, a very good friend. we talk every day on twitter, im, sms. we’ve developed a trust to the point that we would loan each other money if either of us needed it, and I would trust him with my cat – if I had one. this friendship was strengthened by the fact that he was one of very very few people who was aware of a somewhat obscure anime series I really liked.

(Note: since the original draft of this post, I’ve met this friend irl, and am happy to report that our meeting has only served to solidify and deepen our friendship. yes, he’s adorable.)

as happens on twitter, we follow each others’ followers and build new connections. I started following an acquaintance and colleague of this friend and had a few exchanges once in a while. as it happened, my travels took me to the town this guy was in. so I reached out, and after verifying with our mutual friend that the worst thing about each of us was that he was a nerd and that I could sometimes be funny irl, we decided to meet. (it did help that he was cute-ish.)

the evening, at first awkward, was actually really great. we got along well, we talked, we listened, we were even genuinely interested at times. but the more I thought back on it, the more I realized that the reasons it was good were not necessarily because we were good company. it had a LOT to do with our mutual friend.

worse, I found myself having certain expectations of this guy, based on my relationship with our common friend. I expected reactions like those from my friend, I expected a depth of conversation and connection like I had with my friend. and this was unfortunate, because even with how similar they are in many respects, they are most definitely very very different people.

I feel bad because my expectations of transfer of connection probably didn’t give this acquaintanceship a fair chance to develop on the basis of who he is. of course, we are still in touch and interact online. and I do hope we are slowly developing our own equation that was precipitated by, but is not affected by our mutual friend.

in another ‘trust once removed’ situation, I became friends with an online friend’s girlfriend (also online). this posed even more challenges because of the risks of being caught between them – being in a situation like that in real life is bad enough, imagine online! there were rocky patches, but honesty has ensured that these relationships are in a good place right now.

I wonder about whether these examples of trust are different from how it works irl. and I find that what I’ve always said still holds true: these interactions are the same as the ones we have irl, only the medium is different. another important difference, however, is the perceived safety of the mediated environment. being somewhat removed allows for communication to flow differently. it allows us to be more open than we might normally be, reveal things about ourselves from the safety of being behind a screen, not having to look into someone’s eyes while admitting to something embarrassing.

I know I’m not saying anything new. but I am looking at my online life more closely. the investment in online friendships is different: it doesn’t involve getting dressed, making a plan, picking a place, figuring out transportation, budgeting for food and drink. but it does involve emotion and time, sometimes more than in real life. mediated environments, while protecting us from that pesky awkward physicality that we have to deal with irl, allow for way more misunderstandings. these misunderstandings are harder to resolve online because sometimes, all one needs is a hug.

I am aware of the fact that my in-the-flesh relationships are affected by my online ones. for example, when I talk about my online friends, my in-the-flesh friends often roll their eyes and don’t take my online relationships seriously. to me, my online friendships are just as real as my in-the-flesh ones.

I’m also aware that my partner is affected – he knows I have close and important friendships online and often, the time I spend with these friends is the time that I am physically near him. I do make the effort to offset this, and I appreciate that he gives me my space and time, but I know that he is sometimes resentful of my online friendships. we talk about it, as often as we can, and well, I sometimes have to give in and watch his lame tv shows with him, but that’s a small price to pay!

as always, I’m learning. the one thing I do know is that honesty, love, and trust are the bottom-line for all relationships, whether online or irl. so, for all you know, I’m in my jammies with curlers in my hair and zit cream on my face, and we’re having amazingly profound conversations online…

I’ve always thought of ‘craft’ as something other people did. People with talent, people with practice, people with passion. I just looked at/read/experienced their work jealously and tried to date them or make them my friends so I could live vicariously through them. This is all true. Even today.

But my understanding of ‘craft’ has started shifting over the years, and has recently been pushed further by reading the frist chapter of Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman, “The Troubled Craftsman”. I’ve come to realize that ‘craft’ is a term that can be applied to many different aspects of human existence. The more I think about it and the more I examine these ‘crafty’ people I have gathered around me, the more I realize that what drives them to perform this craft and immerse themselves in it, is a deep and lasting passion for their craft. A love for what they do. A need for doing it as much and as often as they can.

Of course, this spelled out further doom for me. I fancy myself something of a magpie: I spot a shiny object and it’s all “Oooooh, shiny!” Then I’m all over it, then I bore of it, and then I move on to the next shiny object. This isn’t true of all things, obviously, but definitely of things I have tried to DO with my life. Because all my life I’ve been told that it is important to find something to DO – some craft with which to occupy myself. Idle hands and all that.

As luck would have it, I find myself in a PhD program – something that forces you to commit to something for long periods of time. Obviously, I’m having a hard time of it, but I’m… practicing. And apparently, practice makes perfect.

As I’ve progressed through academia, I’ve gotten a glimpse into what my future academic life could look like. And it’s not always pretty. In fact, it’s sad. There are those academics who seem to have found their niche, their little corner of happiness and/or fame. But at what cost? From the outside, it looks like they’re all happy and friends and supporters of each other and great collaborators and such. But sometimes, underlying all this is bitterness, regret, isolation, and conflict. The constant requirement to produce something, be brilliant, prove oneself to one’s own community is omnipresent. Does this a community make?

Right now, as a doctoral student, I work hard at creating and maintaining my community with my cohort and other cohorts. I organize get-togethers, meet individuals when I can, talk about my research interests, ask them about theirs, create online spaces for us to communicate, and so on. We also share insecurities, admit to gnawing self-doubt, talk about our impostor syndromes, and discuss family problems. We are as much colleagues as we are each other’s support group.

This will be my community of peers as I progress through academia. These are the people I will reference when I teach, contact to come speak at colloquia, and speak fondly of while lecturing. But they will also be my competition. Will I be bitter if a colleague, for whom I wish nothing but amazing success and happiness, does better than me? Will I hate and envy her when she gets more recognition or publishes a paper on something I am writing and gets it out there before I do? I absolutely don’t want to feel that. I absolutely don’t want to follow the patterns of academic competition and forced congeniality that I sometimes see around me. I feel much despair.

But then I realize this: people are my passion. My ‘craft’ might be my ability to connect and create community, to nurture people. All the shiny things I have done along the way have served as settings in which I could practice and hone my craft.

And what I do now, allows me to study my craft while I continue to practice it. I will be crafty after all.