In a paper published in PNAS, scientists from Oxford University, UC Santa Barbara, and UNC Chapel Hill reported on new computational techniques that allowed them to associate brain activity—specifically, the different combinations of 112 regions of the brain firing at the same time—with one’s speed in learning something new.

The experiment was conducted with 18 volunteers each instructed to push a series of buttons as quickly as possible. What the researches discovered after analyzing the brain images is that those with brains that rapidly changed the regions that were jointly active (“swapped partners”) were more likely to quickly learn new sequences in later sessions. Computational methods were developed to analyze the “multilayer networks” in aggregate, treating the brain like a social network—each region plays the part of a person. This process dealt with an extremely large dataset and took 10,000 days of computing time to complete. This was the reason the initial sample size was so small, but the researchers are now working on both extending the pool and refining their tools.

Learning is not just a function of biochemical mechanics. Another recent study—this one by collaborators from Columbia University, Washington University, and Northwestern University—shows that psychological belief about learning itself will affect how willing a person is to engage and master new concepts, leading to different impressions of their own learning.

This second study centered around two theories of learning. Entity theorists believe each person’s intelligence potential is fixed, and no additional effort can change that. These people will disengage when a challenge exceeds their threshold. Incremental theorists, on the other hand, believe intelligence can change. More time invested in learning yields better results.

In their experiment, the researchers gave subjects foreign words to learn. Everyone did better recalling the easy word pairs (e.g., Polisi-Police) than the difficult ones (e.g., Pembalut-Bandage), but entity theorists—the ones who were more confident when spending less time studying—had a more accurate perception of this effect than incrementalists—those whose confidence increased with study time. Incremental theorists tended to be overconfident about the difficult pairs and under-confident about the easy ones.

I’m not a brain scientist, but it would seem that these two distinct theories might also impact the value of knowing one’s brain flexibility. From an entity theorist perspective, perhaps your brain can only ever become so flexible, and speed of learning might correlate to one’s threshold for pursuing new challenges. An incrementalist would see flexibility as something that could be exercised into more adaptive learning behavior.

Mark Fuller was #54 on Fast Company's most creative people list

WET (Water Entertainment Technologies) is not a typical web design firm. They specialize in fountains and architectural art involving water. Fuller’s first water works was the “Leapfrog” fountain at EPCOT, a particular favorite of my sons when we went to Florida a couple years ago. Formed in 1983, WET Design has done a number of impressive water installations, including the Bellagio (1998), the Olympic Cauldron (2002), and the Dubai Fountain at the Burj (2009).

One of the things Fuller pushes for at WET is an organizational commitment to life-long learning. A full-time curriculum director manages courses in three classrooms. One of those courses teaches how to do improvisation. Although it took a while for the employees to get used to it, the improv course now has a waiting list.

The value improv brings to an organization is that it creates a workforce of listeners. As Fuller describes it in the interview:

You’re in an emotionally naked environment. It’s like we’re all the same. We all can look stupid. And it’s an amazing bonding thing, plus it’s building all these communication skills. You’re sort of in this gray space of uncertainty. Most of us don’t like to be uncertain — you know, most of us like to be thinking what we’re going to say next. You get your mind into a space where you say, “I’m really enjoying that I don’t know what he’s going to ask me next, and I’m going to be open and listening and come back.”

We’ve got graphic designers, illustrators, optical engineers, Ph.D. chemists, special effects people, landscape designers, textile designers. You get all these different disciplines that typically you would never find under one roof — even making a movie — and so you have to constantly be finding these ways to have people connect.

With improv, it is important to have good partners, people who are equally committed to the success of the interaction and the development of the tacit knowledge that makes communication easier.

The most important ingredient you can bring to effective improv is commitment. The adrenaline that comes with putting yourself in a situation where you don’t know what is coming helps sharpen senses, but that fear can also prompt a self-defense instinct to distance one’s self from the experience. If that happens, not only will you leave your partners hanging, but what you say becomes less convincing. The mindset you must take into improv is “Yes, and”—in other words, validate what you just heard and try to contribute something useful to improve the sense in the situation.

It is easy to imagine how these skills can be useful during brainstorming sessions, as well as transactions between different departments in an organization.

The courses are just one part of Fuller’s intentional crafting of a company culture. There is a lot of work posted on walls (to share ownership and invite early feedback), low tolerance for blame, an immersion program (to give people job experience in other parts of the company), and hiring interviews that look closely at hobbies.

Dave Meslin calls himself a community choreographer, a term I find as endearing as his notion about the dynamics of political disengagement. He identifies seven barriers that make it difficult to participate in local politics, including:

• City Hall—An example of “intentional exclusion” is the overly verbose legalspeak in documents that make it difficult and uninspiring to take action. Meslin drives home his point by showing a retail ad with the same treatment.
• Public Space—We sell it to those with the most resources, rather than reserving it for the most important issues
• The Media—With movies, plays and other forms of entertainment, articles often include easy-to-find information about how to take action (e.g., a time, place and location of a show). In political coverage, there is no such follow-up opportunity.
• Heroes—A quick rundown on popular movies shows a pattern of heroes being chosen. This creates a myth about leadership that discourages the uninvited dreamer. In reality, being heroic is a collective effort that is voluntary and imperfect.

He wants to redefine our notion of voter apathy as this complex web of barriers. By doing so, we can more easily identify and dismantle those obstacles.
redefine apathy as complex web of barriers

Meslin’s talk is a reflection of his practice, which includes a number of creative ideas to combat political apathy. He has run a candidate version of American Idol to pare down a field of politicians to support, and his Better Ballots coalition is a citizen movement that focuses on problems with elections (low turnout, low turnover, lack of diversity, and lack of fairness).

Related: David Bismark has an idea for secure electronic voting that is verifiable and transparent.

James M. Titus isn't human, but he played one on Twitter

Organized by the Boston-based Web Ecology Project, the experiment called for three teams to program social-bots Twitter accounts that coule mimic human conversation. They selected 500 real users (I presume they had a way of confirming that), most of which shared an affinity for cats. Accounts like @JamesMTitus relied on a database of generic responses, focusing on the most responsive people in the target community. In the second week, additional bots were added to allow teams to try to thwart the efforts of other bots to be perceived as human.

Although the Evil applications are readily apparent—in February, Anonymous hackers revealed government interest in infiltrating online groups—Tim Hwang also sees the potential for great good. A new version of this social experiment called “The Narrows” will attempt to construct a community where one does not yet exist, leading to the hope of using bots as connective mechanisms to help shape large online communities.

This immediately reminded me of a couple other projects related to fakery on Twitter.

Truthy

Truthy (@ truthyatindiana) is an Indiana University research project about detecting astroturfing and other misinformation around political topics. While it takes a little practice to understand the meaning of the network visuals—the site now offers a nice visual guide that explains some of the common patterns, with specific examples—the work has produced some new insights about political use of Twitter, as well as statistically confirming other assumptions.

One of the most relevant to my perpetually delayed dissertation is the analysis of the #gop hashtag, which clearly shows a polarized group.

Truthy mapped the network of activity around #gop on Twitter

An example of a grassroots meme, the #gop hashtag is widely used on Twitter, but in two very distinct ways. One cluster reflects use by conservatives, and the other contains liberal critics. People will retweet others in the same community. When they do mention those in the other community, it is typically expressed as a disagreement. This might support known patterns within political forums online, where members engage with opposing views while reinforcing information flow from their peers.

Cyc AI

The other is Cyc (@cyc_ai), a non-profit organization to manage and grow an ontology of general knowledge that can allow computers to reason like humans. The Cyc systems leverage natural language interface, detailed background information, and deep inference to create conversational knowledge. Cycorp and Cleveland Clinic Foundation built the Semantic Research Assistant (SRA) to answer clinicians’ ad-hoc queries. Cyc, which began back in 1984, is using Twitter to help train it’s information. Recently, the tactics have changed to use a variety of inquisitive wordings to prompt confirmation of data.

Cyc is using Twitter to help train its algorithms

The Twitter account claims to allow you to send a direct message and get an answer, but that hasn’t worked for me yet. The Cyc project isn’t without criticism, not the least of which is scalability and responsiveness to cultural shifts in meaning.

The project—which surveyed about 300,000 students, 43,000 parents, 35,000 teachers, 2000 librarians and 3500 administrators—asked communities from 6500 private and public schools last fall about technology use in education. The researchers were interested both in how the tech is currently being used and how parents and students want it to be used. The results point to a big gap between adoption of technology and willingness of administrations to use it in schools.

The key findings include:

• Parents have shifted significantly in favor of online textbooks, moving from just 21 percent to two-thirds in just two years. Only one-third of high school students report they are currently using an online textbook, however.
• About two-thirds of parents said they like the idea and would purchase a mobile device for their child to use for schoolwork, if the school allowed it.
• Just over half of middle and high school students reported that the biggest obstacle they face are school policies restricting the use of cell phones, smart phones or MP3 players. 71 percent of high school students said the best way schools can help is to facilitate greater access to the digital content currently blocked by filters and firewalls.
• Nearly 30 percent of high school students have experienced some type of online learning.

The most telling indicator of the gap, though, is generational. While most high school teachers (74%), principals (72%), and parents (62%) thought their school was doing a good job using technology to enhance learning, only 47% of high school students agreed.

The beautiful artwork by artist Adam Long are like postcards from the past, commemorating some of the notable events that have led to our present social networking culture. These include:

• The Notificator, a message vending machine at British railway stations
• CompuServe, the first computer time sharing service
• CBBS (Computerized Bulletin Board System), a computerized answering system born in the Chicago Blizzard of 1978. It survives today as chinet.
• The invention of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee
• Q-Link, the predecessor to America Online, that connected Commodore computers together (see the 1986 promotional video).
• The 2003 launch of social network systems on the Web, notably Friendster, MySpace, and LinkedIn
• Tim O’Reilly’s FOO Camp, a hand-picked curation of interesting people coming together for a conference with no set agenda
• The launch of Facebook, which in 6 years would eventually get to 500 million users in July 2010
• Dell Hell, the name given to Dell’s poor customer service
• The launch of Twitter, which just celebrated it’s 5th birthday, and its coming out party at SxSW in 2007.
• A Burger King employee takes a bath in a BK sink, demonstrating to businesses that there is no controlling a brand anymore.
• The Sacha Baron Cohen movie Bruno met an early death. Twitter buzz is credited. Twitter is also assigned importance in international politics, with the U.S. State Department urging the service to postpone a scheduled maintenance to keep Iranian protestors tweeting.
• The “United Breaks Guitars” trilogy chronicles the poor customer service of United Airlines. Later, Southwest gets a tweetful from filmmaker Kevin Smith, who was deemed “too fat to fly.”
• NASA astronaut T.J. Creamer tweets from space
• Japan’s win over Denmark in the 2010 World Cup sets a record with 3283 tweets per second (tps)
• Charlie Sheen sets a record as the fastest Twitter account to reach 1 million followers.
• Rebecca Black’s video, “Friday,” is at the moment is approaching 38 million views (the artwork pegged it at 18 million) despite being widely panned

The Command Center opened last month with Tim O’Reilly, Brian Solis and others speaking on social media. PeopleBrowsr recently released ReSearch.ly, allowing access to 1,000 days of Twitter data and creating a focus on collective memory.

Let your iPhone prompt you to connect with someone else

Ben Carey and Henrik Delehag—known as Benrik—are the artists behind the app, just one of the ways they are trying to change the world to their liking. They have a book series—This Diary Will Change Your Life—which encourages readers to reinvent themselves every day of their lives by following specific instructions for lateral living.

With the Situationist iPhone app, members of this community receive alerts when others are in their vicinity, prompting them to create a specific situation. These assignments must be done in a five-minute window and end with you walking away. Think Aardvark for interpersonal relationships.

Situationist protests the “Stranger Danger” view of people we don’t know, intentionally trying to overcome inhibitions and connect with others.

This is in direct reference to the Situationist International, a radical movement that sought to transform everyday life and the world through experimental forms of behaviour. Having largely inspired and informed the May 1968 riots in Paris, the situationists then disbanded in 73, riven by internal politics, and paranoid about being recuperated. This was a strategic mistake, and the effective retreat into silence has proved self-defeating. Much of their language was inevitably recuperated anyway, particularly by the advertising industry. “Situationism” itself is no longer a live movement, but a minor ism taught on media studies courses, and argued over by cantankerous survivors on the more obscure fringes of the net.

More detailed background is available.

To participate, you consent to the app sharing your location and photo with other Situationists (There is also the legalese requiring you to be an adult and not to blame Situationist if interactions go wrong). To avoid Chat Roulette kinds of exhibitionism, the photos and situations are all heavily moderated. There is no map of members, either; the prompts come to you in a moment when another member draws near enough to trigger a situation.

The interactions range from physical contact (a hug or neck massage) and provoking (a scare or giving the finger) to trivial acts of humanity (a wave or compliment). These little manufactured moments made me think of a recent encounter a friend had with a security guard. I narrowed my list down to a few that might brighten my day a bit:

• Give me the money in your left pocket
• Ask me for my autograph
• High five me
• Walk alongside me for two minutes
• Ask me what’s wrong

Provided they aren’t violent or obscene, you can also suggest your own situations (although they have to be approved).

As Benrik describes it: “Serendipity doesn’t happen by itself. Force its hand, and turn everyday life back into a joyous and unpredictable free-for-all.”

The Morgan Spurlock and Salman Khan videos-to-be are the don’t-miss talks I saw on the auditorium screen. Spurlock, the human guinea pig best known for a month of eating McDonald’s food, has a new project about product placement. Khan is a former hedge fund analyst who turned a few video tutorials for his math-challenged cousin into an open academy for self-guided learning. While Spurlock’s talk was highly entertaining, Khan moved me to the edge of my seat in providing inspiration.

Sal Khan explains the concept driving Khan Academy

Education reform is a major focus. Soon, TED will be launching a new forum—TED-ED Brain Trust—that will curate a community of visionary educators, students, organizations, filmmakers and other creative professionals to find ways to enrich education for the next wave of learners. On Day Two of TED—the same day Apple released another potential classroom game-changer—guest curator Bill Gates emphasized education as a theme for his session, including Khan and David Christian’s Big History project.

David Christian explains Big History

Khan didn’t just explain his website or his own origin story. He argued for a different way to support learning. There were two key insights I mined from Khan’s talk.

First, successful students learn at varied paces. Khan showed a chart of student achievement in the class, highlighting two common paths to success: the traditional fast-starters who get the material easily and move quickly to establish themselves as experts; and, the slow-starters who struggle to understand a few key concepts before taking off. The latter group wouldn’t be identified as “gifted” in most programs, many of which penalize early failures. In Khan’s self-guided program, failure is part of the process of mastery.

Second, there is value to flipping the role of the classroom to be about the homework and not the lecture. The video instruction of Khan Academy allows students to work through the material at their own pace and in protected and comfortable environments. The application of that knowledge can be shifted from home to class, creating more peer and small-group interaction with the instructor and moving away from a one-size-fits-all delivery of new content.

At the end of last semester, I iterated on my experience teaching Processing to undergrads. I was delighted to hear that Khan Academy is incorporating some game dynamics (energy points, badges) into their self-guided learning programs and classroom tools. If given another chance to teach programming, I may rely on video instruction and in-class coding assignments to better support the individual pace of learning.

I hope Khan’s talk is released quickly. For the moment, you can scratch your own TED itches by watching the Day One talk by Wadah Khanfar of Al Jazeera, on the optimism arising from events in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya:

The first part of my research is about understanding how people are talking politics right now. This will require a combination of examining existing artifacts—Twitter streams and the archived posts from two WebLab forums—and a inquiry built around new conversations. This summary will detail the plan for the conversation experiment.

Some inspirational music from Leonard Cohen: “Democracy“

“Lunch With Other” Experiment

Inspired by an activity suggested by Elizabeth Lesser—in which two polar opposites sit down over a public lunch with the intent of being curious, conversational, and authentic—I propose to explore the strategies and language used when two people engage in a discussion. This experiment will include four parts: a screening survey, a series of 1:1 conversations, pre- and post-conversation mood assessment, and follow-up interviews with participants.

Screening Survey

There are two key reasons for this initial survey. First, I can include a much larger participant group (in theory) than I’ll be working with during the later stages of this inquiry. This may permit some generalizations I won’t be able to get through the conversations I’ll analyze. Second, this serves as my primary means of slotting respondents into pair-able conversations.

The survey will include questions about:

• Self-declared affinity to political labels (e.g., “Conservative”)
• Indication of support for specific political issues (e.g., “How much do you support expansion of I-69?”)
• A short description of current personal politics
• A short description of a key political influence leading to current political philosophy

Since this initial survey is meant to help filter respondents for inclusion in the later stages, the questions here will have to reflect the dimensions being examined in those conversations (see below).

Recruiting for participation in this project will likely target local online forums (MoB Talk, Bloomington Online, local Twitter, and possibly the Herald-Times online comments) to focus on accessible participants who can easily be observed and interviewed. Because one key dimension for this work will be the effect of computer mediation, recruitment outside of Indiana is important, too. General social media, established political forums, and blog posts will spread interest in this initial survey across a wider demographic.

1:1 Conversations

From the participant group from the initial survey, a few dozen people will be invited to join the second phase of this study. Selection will specifically look for pairs of people showing polarized ideology and support of single issues. This will filter out moderate politics to allow me to focus on extremes during the conversations.

There are a number of possible dimensions to explore with each pairing:

• Affinity to ideological labels (liberal, moderate, conservative)
• Spectrum of support for a single issue
• Scope of single issues (local, regional, national, global)
• Age of participants (18-29, 30-44, 45-64, 65+)
• Locality (Indiana, Not Indiana)
• Mediation of discourse (face-to-face or computer mediated)
• Prior knowledge of Other’s affinity (i.e., does a liberal know she is talking to a conservative?)
• Deception (i.e., misinform people about the other person’s ideology)
• Purpose of the conversation (political issue, non-political topic, seeking understanding)
• Preparatory information (i.e., talk around a particular news article)

My initial strategy will look to capture information about eight kinds of conversations across three key variants: ideology, mediation, and purpose.

Each participant in this phase of the study will be asked to have four conversations over a span of a few weeks. In two of the conversations, they will be matched with someone considered a polar opposite, by virtue of ideology and perhaps other factors, such as stance on a key issue or age. In the other two conversations, they will talk with someone who is similar. Their conversations will either be primed—we’ll provide some article to discuss and ask them to match a picture with their presumed ideology and stance on the issue—or the pair will be simply asked to get to know one another. Future iterations of this study could delve further the nuances of presumption and the nature of the task.

The start of each paired session will be recorded, with a transcript used for content analysis. Conversations can last longer—I want to allow them to reach comfortable closure—but I’m most interested in comparing the first thirty minutes of discourse. For those in primed conversations, an article about the topic of conversation will be sent to them in advance.

Mood Assessment

Due to the desire to assess mood and preserve as pristine the initial stages of discourse, participants will be separated prior to their conversation. As part of the paired conversations, a short survey will be administered to each participant—at the start and immediately following the discussion—to gauge each person’s mood and the perceived mood of their partner. Mood will be determined by selecting among eight faces, arranged in a circle, representing possible expressions and avoiding issues with semantic interpretation of terminology.

Those in primed conversations will also be asked to select from four possible descriptions of the politics of their partner, guessing which one is accurate. The options will derive from the mix of ideology and support of the single issue being discussed. This will be repeated at the conclusion of the conversation as well.

Follow-up Interviews

After the conversation and survey data has been analyzed, specific participants may be invited to individual or group interviews to explain their strategic decisions during the discussions and provide more insight into their own political philosophies and activities. The purpose of this part of the inquiry would be to clarify and deepen the understanding of key findings from the previous data.

Expectations

The findings from the survey will be most useful in trying to answer three important questions:

1. How strongly are single issues aligned with political labels?—My assumption is that, in our current political landscape, positions are defined by the affinity to a label, rather than contributing to a flexible definition of that label (e.g., conservatives oppose gun control).
2. What common influences lead to shared political views?—I expect to find some words, ideas and experiences expressed by participants will show strong associations with descriptions of one’s personal politics. This also includes finding links between political descriptions and labels.

I would love to add a third question, looking at potential shifts between political background and current politics, but I think that is a rabbit hole better answered by existing research that points to family as a key factor in social learning. That said, I do expect to find some examples of a negative experience leading to a political shift.

Analysis of the conversations will look for differences in the eight types of conversations (primed and not primed, similar and different ideologies, face-2-face and computer mediation) to see if any conclusions can be made about the effect these dimensions have on discourse. In particular, I’m asking:

1. What distinguishes polarized from kindred discourse?—I expect to see more aggressive and defensive language, a quicker declaration of position, and less willingness to change in discussions between polarized individuals than kindred ones.
2. What distinguishes computer-mediate discourse from face-to-face conversation?—My hypothesis is that the mediation has much less impact on political discourse strategies and language than polarized participants, but people will prove to be bolder and more task-oriented through the computer than in person.
3. What impact does focused purpose have on political discourse?—The conversations that prepare by reading a specific article to act as a catalyst for their exchange will be less diverse in the topics they discuss and less empathic in how they converse.
4. How is discourse affected by knowing the politics of your partner?—If polarization is the dominant factor, then being accurate in guessing the ideology and single-issue position of the other person will not dictate discourse strategy as much as which politics you assign. I expect that the conversations that aren’t primed will be more exploratory and adaptive than those where the participants are asked to assign a political view to their partners.

At this level, the expectations for polarized discourse will be tempered with the awkwardness of personal exchange between two strangers. The characteristics of the exchange won’t rise to the level of systemic polarization, as described by conflict theorists Dean Pruitt and Jeffrey Rubin. However, I expect that some of the seeds of systemic conflict will be observable, such as increased sarcasm, more generalizations, and diversity of tactics to prolong engagement.

The end outcome of this inquiry will be the ability to articulate some of the dynamics of political discourse, as they relate to the political labels, advance preparation, and relational language. Understanding these factors may help guide development of a framework for the design and critique of political forums.

Sustainability and Futuring: Collaboration over distance

Carbon dioxide is not a bad thing. To the plants using it for photosynthesis, it’s a great thing. Too much of anything can be toxic, however. The earth had to work a long time before the planet achieved a balance necessary to sustain life:

[T]he present amount of carbon dioxide taken out of the atmosphere every year by plants is almost perfectly balanced by amount of carbon dioxide put back into the atmosphere by respiration and decay. The carbon dioxide produced in this manner is part of a cycle in which new carbon does not enter the system, but rather it keeps changing in form.

source: “CO2 Pollution and Global Warming” by Barbalace, R.C. (2006)

In addition to decay, deforestation not only releases some carbon dioxide but it takes away some of the planet’s ability to remove it from the atmosphere. Warming oceans also contribute, releasing trapped carbon as their temperatures rise. The biggest hit, though, is the burning of fossil fuels, releasing all at once what would have taken millions of years to add to the ecosystem. This is largely what has accounted for the dramatic increase from 280 to 380 parts per million by volume between 1800 and 2005.

Of all the ways we burn fossil fuels, air travel is the worst. Internationally, it accounts for up to 5 percent of carbon dioxide emissions that are released. To help our planet remain or regain its life-supporting balance, addressing the problems of flying modern aircraft is the first, best target.

Telecommuting

George Monbiot’s book, Heat, claims that to meet (British) environmental targets for 2050, almost all flying will have to stop. That’s how bad air travel is for the environment. Climate groups have calculated that, in a sustainable world, each person can contribute no more than four tons of carbon emissions each year. One long flight uses almost all of that allowance.

The quickest way to slow down carbon imbalance is to stop flying. For many businesses, it isn’t practical, but it is possible to look for more ways to leverage computer-mediated communication to collaborate. Skype is just one of the tools that would allow for face time (through video chat) and file sharing between two people at remote locations. Finding more and better ways to work together over great distances is a big area of interest for HCI designers.

Solar Planes

The inevitability of air travel is underscored by the fact that passenger demand has continued to increase dramatically, despite the threat of terrorism and economic downturns. There are many changes airlines can make to improve fuel efficiency—including wing design, supplemental jet fuel, in-flight refueling, formation flights to reduce drag, and artificial intelligence to optimize flight performance.

In 2010, André Borschberg piloted a solar plane—Solar Impulse—for more than 26 hours, throughout the entire night. Solar power, harnessed through large paneled wings on light aircraft, is a young but promising path of innovation toward reduction of reliance on fossil fuels. Imagine commercial planes powered by the sun, providing all of the advantages of long-distance travel with none of the costly carbon emissions.

Carbon Offsetting

Until a variety of technologies exist to allow one to comparison shop based on carbon footprint, travelers don’t have many options for avoiding fossil fuels at the airport. Acknowledging the fact that our tech cannot yet support the increasing need for air travel, several organizations now offer registries to allow people to pay in advance for the carbon they will add to the environment by flying.

With carbon offsets, organizations can offer ways to financially support projects that reduce as much greenhouse gas emission as an air traveler would add to the atmosphere. These credit bundles allow the traveler to alleviate the guilt of flying by simultaneously supporting something that directly contributes to restoring some balance in the ecosystem. Recognized carbon offset companies that can be trusted include: The Gold Standard, The Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX), Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), Voluntary Carbon Standard (VCS), Green-e, and the International Carbon Reduction and Offset Alliance.

There are questions about how effective such programs are. Some believe the guilt relief leads to more flying, compounded by offsets that do not reduce carbon emissions enough.

Students in my HCI Design class this semester at the School of Informatics & Computing HCI program are being asked to work up weekly components (research or a grounded concept) to gain experience in making and communicating good design choices. I’m going through the process with them, devoting the minimal amount of time (2-3 hours) that I expect of them each week.

The portal works both ways, however, and organized protest is a universal activity. Just as Americans paid attention to the events in Cairo, Egyptians are paying attention to the unions in Wisconsin, sending pizzas to feed the protesters.

Somewhere in between the utopian promise of global connectivity and the dystopian fear of losing humanity lies the practical truth about the value of technology in politics. A key part of this puzzle is microactivism, the small-scale, many-to-many communication that facilitates political expression.

Microactivism includes activities such as retweeting links and joining Facebook groups, interactions that reflect political intentions without necessarily rising to the level of political mobilization. There is value in this low-barrier, low-effort form of activism, according to CLU’s José Marichal, who recently examined how Facebook groups are formed. Such spaces are useful to communicate who a person wants to be, as an extension of their identity rather than a separate self. “Political Facebook groups allow for the performance of these ‘possible selves’ through the formation of idealized political identities,” Marichal writes.

Adopting a view of politics as a meaning-making process gives greater importance to microactivism as an important step toward realizing an idealized political self. Particularly since a platform like Facebook encourages sharing of your own identity, contributions to groups and other spaces attached to that identity allow political choices to strengthen ties to everyday life. Microactivism offers a middle ground between full activism and disengagement. Marichal considers it an open question whether or not this behavior leads to advanced forms of engagement.

Much of this activity takes place in the “filter bubble”—content aggregators that inhibit exposure to contrasting points of view—where cross-cutting conversations don’t often take place. One concern with microactivism is that it reinforces homogeneous views of the world.

In a University of Bremen study of how scientific paradigms are adopted, researchers discovered a relationship between adoption of ideas and innovation:

Overall, the model shows how new paradigms have a tendency to quickly rise to dominance, to decline slowly, and to quickly be replaced by other paradigms. When the innovation rate is high, the takeover process is chaotic, with many new ideas competing for dominance.

In this model, the researchers have defined innovation as something that occurs in a vacuum, essentially, with the competing method of idea adoption coming from peer endorsement. “Our model suggests that herd mentality makes a larger system less innovative than several smaller ones,” Stefan Bornholdt says. “In short, for innovation it’s better to listen to yourself than to others.”

While I take issue with the oversimplification of that definition, the dynamics of a political system are a tension between exposure to socially-supported ideas and those derived from one’s own experience. The herd mentality leads to fewer new ideas and more dominating adopted ones. For politics, that could help explain the extreme polarization we are experiencing: Social endorsement of ideas has greatly outweighed our personal meaning-making.

What would be the impact on political discourse to have a social network present discrete issues endorsed by a mix of ideologically-diverse friends? Would microactivism suffer because the political identities of friends have been muddled, or would the same activity continue with the benefit of exposure to diverse ideas?

A Pew Internet study revealed that 22% of all online Americans used social media for politics during the 2010 campaigns.

In covering this report for Web Pro News, Mike Sachoff highlighted these statistical tidbits:

• The “political social media user” group represented by these 22% of internet users voted for Republican congressional candidates over Democratic candidates by a 45%-41% margin.
• Among social networking site users, 40% of Republican voters and 38% of Democratic voters used these sites to get involved politically.
• Tea Party supporters were especially likely to friend a candidate or political group on a social networking site during the 2010 election—22% of such users did this, significantly higher than all other groups.

Which all underline the idea that, while the motivations and use of social media may still be partisan, there is no longer a gap between major party use of these tools for political engagement. As we collectively develop our digital fluencies, these skills become a common platform for potentially escaping partisanship, too.

Back in 2003, Americans officially shifted to networked communication for their political engagement, when email became the best channel for political campaigns. Now, mobile devices are becoming increasingly important, with about one-quarter of Americans using them to engage with the 2010 mid-term elections.

The research team, a collaboration between Warsaw University of Technology and the University of Wolverhampton, analyzed the number and sentiment of posts written by individuals contributing to the BBC online forums. They collected almost 2.5 million posts from the Religion & Ethics, World News, or UK News message boards, spanning more than 4 years (2005-2009) and authored by over 18,000 people. The data set includes posts from almost 100,000 separate threads.

The first finding is not surprising: Scale-free distributions occurred both in each thread as well as overall activity. As the threads grew longer, though, the number of unique users decreased. In other words, longer threads were the result of a prolonged exchange between a few people, not an indication of a broader appeal. This makes sense when considering the “80-20 rule” that says most of the work is done by a few operators.

The second major insight from this study is more interesting. The sentiment analysis showed that most posts were emotionally negative. The same is true of the most active users in a given thread. Put together, threads are sustained primarily through negative discussions between a few participants.

A couple new questions arise:

How necessary is negativity to generate a lot of visible forum activity?—These forums are more likely to produce polarizing topics (e.g., religious beliefs) than, say, Flickr photos or social media conversations, so this shouldn’t be taken as a universal behavior of online discourse. If there is comparable activity in other forums, do they also reflect massive negativity? Even within the researchers’ graphs, there seems to be a point at around 100 comments where the emotion spreads. The fitted line extends the scale-free properties, but it would be interesting to look at 2-3 different trajectories that arise at that condition, like a triple point in phase transitions, and examine the differences between those states.

What is the relationship between bursts of activity and negativity?—The selected forums were populated by members who collectively with an average post count of 137. That translates to about two comments every three weeks. The reality is that active members come and go, entering and exiting periods of heavy activity. I would love to know the distribution of individual burstiness and how that relates to emotional content.

Although I’m excited to read their book, I have to wait a while. The book is due out in 2012. However, it was introduced at MacWorld last month:

“Make It So” was introduced at MacWorld 2011

In their planned book Make It So: Interaction Design Lessons From Science Fiction, Shedroff and Noessel intend to glean practical lessons from the many interfaces depicted in science fiction television shows and movies. They take a perspective that the production designers of these entertainment projects are empowered to develop “blue-sky” systems that require some consideration of how humans (or aliens) interact with these fictional devices. This can translate to real work insights about the design of mobile, online or other pervasive interfaces. “SciFi is a design tool like any other,” they argue. “All design is already fiction, until it gets built.”

The MacWorld talk covers the introductory content they plan for the first chapter, including defining their area of concern, how the real world and science fiction inspire each other, and comparing timelines of technology advancement in both worlds. They narrow the focus down to interaction design culled from 3D and live-action, screen-based science fiction. To begin, they catalogued and tagged 10,000 images from science fiction shows fitting this definition to generate a tag cloud that described the entire corpus of interactive artifacts. The biggest term was “glow.” The best insights, though, came from the interweaving timeline showing how these two worlds—real and fictional—work together to advance design. “The real world establishes the paradigm that science fiction then extends,” explains Shedroff. (The video is well worth an hour of your time, btw.)

Noessel is a Director at Cooper, designing for a variety of domains that include museums, health, and counter-terrorism. A pioneer in experience design, Sherdroff is chairing the Design Strategy MBA program at CCA, aimed at applying design to business practices. Through their publisher (Rosenfeld Media), the authors will be blogging their progress as they write their new book.

TED launched a new forum to help spread ideas

The new social media craze is Q&A. Quora, launched in 2009 and opened to the public last summer, is collection of questions and answers created and managed by its community. It joined a field that already included Yahoo Answers and Answers.com. Although TED Questions isn’t quite the same structure, it will overlap the knowledge management domain by trying to become an online authority for specific topics.

My impression of Quora is poor, partly because of the expectations I had going in to my first use. According to a report from Experian Hitwise, the people who have flocked to the site are college-educated or ready-to-graduate young professionals. While any early community is going to be dominated by a particular demographic as it grows, Quora gives off a needy job search kind of vibe. My rejection of the service, though, comes from not allowing its use to grow organically. Rather than being an open community of Q&A, Quora is heavily moderated to accept only certain kinds of questions (e.g., no survey inquiries).

Presumably, TED Questions is also curated from above—much like the TED and TEDx events themselves—by virtue of the video archives that will be catalysts for discussion. It remains to be seen if, like Quora, the site will remove posts over wording. Conversations will take three forms (Questions, Ideas, and Debates) and have the option to be tied to up to 10 video talks. The posts will also include an important setting. As TED describes its service:

We believe that conversations, like talks, benefit from time constraints. So just as TEDTalks are limited to 18 minutes or less, TED Conversations are set to last one day, one week or one month. When you start a conversation, you also decide when it will end; afterward, you can summarize the discussion with a closing statement.

This is key. Ad-hoc communities who come together knowing when they will disperse are more likely to be meaningfully engaged while they are together. This was definitely true for Web Lab’s Small Group Dialogue forums a decade ago.

Since each discussion includes participation by the thought leaders who have taken the stage, there is a level of expertise around each topic that is enticing. That can be a double-edged sword. As with Quora’s high-profile question-askers, access to someone like game designer Jane McGonigal is a big draw to get participants involved. If the resulting conversation evolves into an online press conference—with people deferring to the expert—it becomes less valuable as a discussion forum than as a supplement to the video talks.

The timing of this works out well for our local TED initiative. Bloomington will host a series of TEDx talks on May 14, 2011 around the theme of “Wisdom of Play.” (Apply to attend the main event at Buskirk-Chumley.) The lineup features a mix of locals and national speakers, many with ties to Bloomington and Indiana University. We will also be running events around the mainstage conversation, including some simulcast sites that Saturday and an unconference activity—”Playing With Wisdom”—on Sunday, to process the content in the previous day’s talks. With TED Questions, there is a potential to better connect our event with the rest of the TED community and give people a destination for continuing conversation.

On Tuesday, the local internet spontaneously combusted with a promising new use for Twitter: Cheerleader.

Using Twitter and Facebook to brainstorm gameday chants

From a new blog for Hysterical Hoosiers, the organizers explain the project:

Those of you students who have been to games this year, our atmosphere has been awesome. However, we can create an even more hostile environment. Each game, we will look players up on facebook, twitter, etc, and try and get some more personal info and dirt on a lot of thems. A couple days before each game, I will post chants we need to start up when certain players touch the ball, are shooting free throws, during time-outs, etc. Spread the word so we can make Assembly Hall the most hostile place to play in the country!

In a sign of the evolving value of media channels, the blog showed up after the Facebook and Twitter pages. By the end of the day, the Facebook page already had over 100 “likes” and the Twitter account had almost 400 followers.

The Hysterical Hoosiers Twitter account has caught the attention of the IDS, an IU newsman, a local sports bar, sports podcasts, the Crimson Guard, and the Big Ten Network. They are all dwarfed by Tom Crean, who is an active Twitter user himself (although he tends to tweet in bursts). This project would get a shot in the arm if he passed a link along to his 25,000 followers.

The suggested crowd actions will be curated and displayed on the new blog. The few visible in the timeline only reference Tijan Jobe and referee Jim Burr, but there is time to get the crowdsourcing in line before Saturday’s game against Northwestern. My big concern is a lack of good taste.

I’ve lamented this before: fans have great potential to be boors. Having more people swearing at referees or being classless in targeted taunts would not be a good outcome for Hysterical Hoosiers. More intimidating than being clever with words (mean or otherwise) is having a large crowd do complex things. I’d love to see this evolve into using the crowd to play Tetris in the stands, passing large blocks down the rows instead of waving Big Heads during free throws.

I think this is a creative way to elevate participation in and enjoyment of the games in Assembly Hall, as long as this is about crowdsourcing and not mobsourcing.

UPDATE 2/16: Founders Zach Litzelswope and Tony Adragna added a podcast explaining the project. They credit Bill Simmons with the idea, set their sights on being better than the Cameron Crazies, and talk about how some of these ideas might debut on Saturday. On a more ominous note, there may major fuzziness area about what is inappropriate (e.g., statutory rape) as a chant topic.

Songwriting uses technology to help the creative process

These assignments are intended to be ambiguous, to encourage some ownership of its interpretation. My initial inquiry focused on how music connects people as a social object. I identified three possible tensions to explore: Mobile vs. Fixed; Creating vs. Consuming; and, Public vs. Private. As I thought about how songs moved through the music ecosystem, I began to evolve this into a study of those who create the songs.

On Sunday night, I was able to interview Five Year Mission, an Indianapolis band with the goal of writing a new song for each of the 80 episodes (including pilots) of the original Star Trek television series. While the impetus for the interview was to support a forthcoming article in Wired‘s GeekDad blog, I devoted a little time asking them about their creative process as it relates to these three tensions.

The group divides up the season among 4 songwriters. The details of how they each approach the assignment vary, but in general they go through a process of watching the episode, re-watching it for notes, composing musical themes, and then writing lyrics. At some point, the result is a demo tape shared with others, for later collaboration.

Personal—Private composition is a product of available time. The band members talked about times when they write music just for their own pleasure, but that time to do so is limited by the number of other things they are doing. Between other jobs, families, and playing in multiple bands, time is scarce for personal projects. When such music is created, it eventually will find its way into a social sphere, such as transitioning from private to public music by uploading to Last.FM.

Creative—Listening is as vital to the creative process as performing. Every songwriter has a unique creative process, but more than one touted the value of iPhones. With voice recording applications, the iPhone allows for quick capture of music and lyrics for later playback and remixing. This is valuable both as a means of sharing (the recordings are used to create demo tapes or send as a raw example of work-in-progress) and for cognitive offloading to help remember ideas. Not everyone has an iPhone; some work with paper, which is as portable but less expensive. Though they work individually at first, the band continues to work through ideas by iterating on the initial demos, sometimes dramatically changing the song. New insights about the songs are learned through live performances and recording sessions as a group.

Mobile—Music making gravitates to familiar spaces. Retreats for working on new songs are constructed by convenience—this is where the equipment is housed—not necessarily for reasons of comfort or solitude. In some cases, due to a combination of time scarcity and pervasive thoughts about music, the songwriting takes place throughout the day in a variety of places. The instrumental work, however, is dependent on having the equipment at hand to perform. Keyboards, drum sets, and even guitars are not easily transferred from place to place. Even to transition from an interview to a practice session in the next room, the setup (equipment and soundproofing) took about 30-40 minutes. Controlled and predictable spaces also accommodate those not in the band, whether it is neighbors or family members, to allow them to anticipate noise levels and change behavior (e.g., leaving the vicinity).

Resources:

1. Original photos by Kevin Makice, taken at a rehearsal (2-13-2011)
2. Interview with Five Year Mission band members (Noah Butler, Andy Fark, Patrick O’Connor, Mike Rittenhouse, and Chris Spurgin), conducted during a rehearsal on February 13, 2011.
3. Five Year Mission website banner (downloaded with permission at http://fiveyearmission.net/ on 2-13-2011)
4. “002/365 Time,” photo by Venn Diagram (downloaded at http://www.flickr.com/photos/venndiagram/4238905532/ on 2-13-2011)

Students in my HCI Design class this semester at the School of Informatics & Computing HCI program are being asked to work up weekly components (research or a grounded concept) to gain experience in making and communicating good design choices. I’m going through the process with them, devoting the minimal amount of time (2-3 hours) that I expect of them each week.

Due to the topic and depending on your own experiences in the world thus far, the links might lead to insensitive, inappropriate, or even traumatic commentary. I’m mostly going to focus on this as an example of negative participation in public discourse.

The previously-on-The-Internet scenes that are relevant include:

• Courtney Stanton is a producer for DINO Interactive Studios, a storytelling and game application publisher in Boston. She also graduated from Indiana University back in 2002, so yay!
• Penny Arcade is a webcomic about video games and video game culture. Creators Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik also put together an “semi-annual” conference (PAX).
• In August 2010, Penny Arcade publishes “The Sixth Sense,” which references rape by creatures called dickwolves.
• Some people objected to the frivolous use of rape as humor, and then a bunch more objected to PA’s sarcastic response.
• Mike draws a dickwolf at PAX (NSFW), leading the following month to a t-shirt of the creature for sale on PA.
• Courtney objects, offering a survivor’s guild t-shirt for sale.
• A few months later, Courtney is asked to speak at PAX and declines, citing all the above. She is immediately griefed on social media channels, most notably her blog

Although the story continues, that was how Stanton got her data.

Setting aside the important catalyst for all this activity, the high-level (but presumably tedious and probably painful) analysis Stanton conducted on her blog comments led to some interesting data-driven insights. She divided all of the comments up into groups, first separating based on agreement with her post and the level of aggression shown by the commenter. The final grouping looked at whether the comment tried to share information or hurl personal attacks. The result was a definition:

Troll (n.): 1. One who contributes nothing but noise to a conversation. Often disagrees aggressively and insultingly using personal attacks.*

Stanton acknowledged that the comments she is most likely to want to block are the ones attacking her.

When looking at how the comments were threaded and directed, she discovered that two-thirds of all comments were responses to other comments while only 17% of the comments by trolls were focused on others. In other words, most blog conversation doesn’t involve the original poster, yet the overwhelming majority of trolls ignore the conversation entirely.

The text visualizations are also informative. In a word net, rape is the most used word among all comments, but it is a word with peers (including: penny, arcade, culture, people, dickwolves, people, comic, shirt and more). For trolls, however, the message is all the same: It is overwhelmingly a one-word message. The word trees for “fat” and “I hope” are equally supportive of Stanton’s definition of troll. “The trolls only have one hope,” she said in her talk, “and it’s like they’re reading from a script.”

Jiwon Shin (Columbia University) theorizes that it is the absence of an online morality reinforced through education that allows a troll to exist. Susan Herring and other researchers examined the strategies of trolls almost a decade ago. Their work pointed to a few suggested interventions to mitigate the effectiveness of trolls. These included killfiles or other controls that allow one member to mask the contributions of another, and education, to improve members’ ability to recognize trolling tactics. Strong and clearly-worded policies also can establish a framework for discourse that establishes the boundaries of acceptable behavior.

* One of Stanton’s commenters pointed out that trolls might also agree with the original poster. Jaishankar and Sankary might classify such people as “Love Rats.” If not trolls in the way described above, then perhaps we can call them jötnar for their wisdom, or think of them with a flop of pink hair. Of course, the correct etymology refers not to the Norse creature but fishing, as in “trolling for newbies.” In that sense, both positive and negative are acts of trolling, albeit for different fish.

Technology allows us to re-think governance

In a 2005 First Monday paper, Beth Noveck examined the benefit of collaboration in political decision-making. She claimed technology helped with “collective visualization,” in particular, of a big picture of ideas. This drives a new understanding of the assets, issues, dissent, and coordination around political topics. In rejecting the arguments of anti-group advocates, Noveck suggests that technology has afforded us the opportunity to re-think where the center of power is situated. By adjusting law to support a lower level of decision-making and self-governance.

Regardless of what one views as the causes, there is general agreement that there are problems. Our legislative decision–making processes suffer from what Carl Schmitt termed the “motorization of law.” Slow institutions, designed for a different temporal reality, rush to keep up with the pace of modernity.

The past pushes for e-democracy are designed to make current systems more efficient, rather than re-thinking how technology can innovate how we conceive of governance. Specifically, Noveck suggests “a model of consociational democracy premised on the collective action of small groups working on a scale enabled by technology.” A few years ago, Noveck described a wiki government filled with experimentation and X-Prize kinds of challenges to bring innovation to citizen feedback and policy making.

Expertise is part of diversity

Cary Coglianese noted, however, that access to information and participation is not sufficient for good governance. In discussing the role of information, Cary points out:

One of these barriers is the specialized knowledge needed to participate meaningfully in the often highly technical decisions raised by rulemaking. Improving the accessibility of regulatory information on the Internet provides no guarantee that a significantly greater number of citizens will actually be able to process that information well.

This is one of the insights that came out of the “Wisdom of Crowds” research that examined the ability for groups to accurately predict the future, describe the unknown, and make good decisions. Some of the agents have to be able to bring their expertise into the equation to make the collective sufficiently diverse, and thus smart. For politics, this means not only that existing leaders have to engage in these kinds of communal brainstorming, but that the improved reach needs to bring in other experts with the goal of raising everyone’s ability to understand the nuances of policy-making around a given issue.

Behavior change requires social reinforcement

Network size and diversity clearly impact the spread and direction of information flow, but what is good for information isn’t always good for behavior. Although there is evidence that political action is helped by the political activity of your social network, work has also been done to distinguish between the advantage small-world networks give to information and what is required from a network to spread changes in behavior. The threshold for behavioral change requires multiple sources of social affirmation. As the connectedness of the world increases, the level of local social reinforcement decreases: Social clustering is as important to political change as long-range ties to information.

Having a few things in common triggers empathy

This tension between weak-tie information and strong-tie behavior becomes more interesting when considering a recent study on the development of empathy in strangers. In experiments conducted by Stanford psychologists, 70 women were asked questions about their birthplace and favorite things (like books and movies). Under the pretense of meeting a fellow participant in the study, each woman chatted with a confederate of the research team, dropping references to a variable number of things mentioned in the initial questionnaire. In addition, the confederate described a stressful situation. After the conversation, the participating women were debriefed to gauge their own stress levels. Another version of the experiment included men and women, and replaced the stress trigger with one of physical exertion (i.e., running in place while the participants watched).

The researchers demonstrated that those with at least three things in common showed elevated levels of stress and physical signs of exertion, even though they were not the ones put in those situations. This is interesting for political networks because it suggest that empathy—a key element of relationships—doesn’t take much in common to be triggered. Systems that facilitate ways to find some commonality among diverse members might benefit from both increased information flow and behavioral change.

In the talk, Lesser laments the “otherizing” of people in different political camps. When our goals are to persuade, or failing that cripple the beliefs of others, frustration tends to surface in the form of hyperbole and presumption about the motivations and expectations of others. Too much of that leads polarization, a deep rut of ineffective conversation in which semantic labels squawk at each other.

To combat this, Lesser suggests lunch.

She invites each of us to find a person we might consider an Other, someone who’s politics are what motivates you to scream into the wind, and meet with them over good food. In that public discussion, forget about being defensive or lining up your logic for debate. Don’t interrupt. Instead, be curious, conversational, and authentic. Listen.

“[U]buntu work is slow, and it’s difficult. It’s two people dropping the pretense of being know-it-alls. It’s two people, two warriors, dropping their weapons and reaching toward each other. Here’s how the great Persian poet Rumi put it: ‘Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing, there is a field. I’ll meet your there.’”

For me, lunch may have to be splitting a package of Pop-Tarts—or perhaps in between sessions at TEDxBloomington on May 14—but I would love to have this kind of discussion with my Other. Who will it be?

Since I’m also trying to re-establish a long-term pattern of public writing, it seems appropriate to post my weekly work here. Although the School of Informatics & Computing HCI program has freed me from the need to perfect my work before sharing, I still am apprehensive about doing so when work is in a rough state. My caveat, therefore, is that the self-imposed time limit does constrain me from the kind of depth I hope some of my students attempt.

Wave is a concept for comfort control system

The design challenge for this week was to use prior design research—the class of 120 just submitted research on the topic of comfortable spaces last week—to motivate and inspire a new concept for an interactive digital system. This system should address a human need for controlling personal or collective comfort.

Wave is my concept for controlling physical and social comfort through swimming. Small pools are rigged with sensors that interpret water-based interaction to control local and remote environmental systems. Patterns of activity then connect you to those with similar patterns for follow-up socialization.

Background

One working definition of comfort is relief from pain or trauma. My initial research focused on spaces that provided such relief:

• Panic rooms claim to provide safety from an immediate threat at home by essentially entombing the residents in a protective cave stockpiled with necessities and armed with digital surveillance and communication technology.
• An endless pool is a small-footprint pool for water exercise, aquatic therapy, and relaxation. Unlike larger recreational pools, this space is meant to be intimate, usually meant for a single person to use at one time.
• A meditation chamber is a room dedicated to the practice of gaining awareness. It is furnished with pillows and special chairs, with soothing music, art, and incense to help distance one’s self from the noise and pressure of the outside world.

I also conducted a quick online survey that asked about how and where people find relief. Although the number of responses I could get in a short window were small (N=5), a theme that seemed to emerge is that comfort is an escape from reality. The respondents did this with food, sounds, and natural spaces and by doing activities like watching a movie, listening to music, or literally running away.

“I seek comfort in cool places under blankets, with some sort of media to help me turn my brain off.”

Further research expanding this notion of comfort as relief from pain to include social disconnection. Humans are hardwired to connect. It is a biological imperative for us to form ans sustain enduring relationships. When we are rejected or suffer from prolonged detachment from others, our brain endures what is the chemical equivalent of physical pain.

When the focus of the assignments shifted from comfortable spaces to comfort controls, I opted for a combination of the endless pool and meditation chamber, but also wanting something that facilitated social connection.

Explanation

In this case, Wave is not a failed collaborative tool by Google but a social pool connecting you to others through your motion in the water. Interaction with water can be detected through light, flow, texture, temperature, and sound to trigger digital controls of pool environments.

The pool room has is tricked out with ambient cues that someone else is using their own pool. Lights change colors, the temperature of the room becomes more inviting for swimming, and gentle sounds of music or nature play to entice you to get in the water, too. Prolonged absence from the pool when others are swimming elsewhere in the world can spark uncomfortable conditions (dissonant noise, temperatures that are too warm or cold, and all-but-seizure-inducing flashing lights).

Once in the pool, you are encouraged through similar environmental cues to find your own pace for exercise, relaxation, or even physical therapy. From the community of other people using the pool system, similar patterns of movement and pace are detected and used to form an ad-hoc, anonymous social network. In the future, when these people use the pool, the ambient cues are more inviting to encourage stronger connections and mutually supportive sessions in the Wave pool. These social networks can be further nurtured online by accessing your Wave system’s personal contact list.

Resources:

1. Endless Pool (downloaded at http://www.endlesspools.com/gallery/detail.php?id=399 on 1-25-2011)
2. How a Panic Room Works (downloaded at http://home.howstuffworks.com on 1-25-2011)
3. YMCA of USA (2010) Hardwired to connect: The new scientific case for authoritative community. Ed. Stephen J. Bavolek
4. Zhang, Z., Bao, X., Rennie, C.D., Nistor, I., and Cornett, A. (2008). Water wave frequency detection by optical fiber sensor. Optics Communications, 281(24), pp. 6011-6015.
5. Rudomin, I., Diaz, M., Hernandez, B., and Rivera, D. (2005). Water, temperature and proximity sensing for a mixed reality art installation. Intelligent Technologies for Interactive Entertainment Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 3814, pp. 155-163.
6. Toon, J. (2007). New sensor detects direction of sound under water. Optics+Photonics@Georgia Tech (downloaded at http://www.op.gatech.edu/ on 2-6-2011).

10questions asks voters to select and critique candidate Q&A

10Questions invites its community to pose and vote on questions to ask candidates, and then critique on the quality of their responses. The philosophy is that this process fosters broader involvement of voters—potentially gives voice to traditional also-ran candidates—and bypasses the bias of media machines and campaign spinsters by allowing the content to be framed from the bottom up. Through the candidates’ video responses, voters are exposed to answers and scrutiny that might be difficult to extract from a live debate.

Iterating on the CommunityCounts project, the site is the product of partnerships between Personal Democracy Forum, The Knight Foundation, Google, YouTube, and a number of national media partners, like the San Francisco Chronicle and the Miami Herald.

When 10Questions launched in September 2007, the experiment was about the Presidential campaigns. During the mid-term elections of 2010, 10Questions identified 43 competitive races in 11 states. The site has focused on the two major American political parties, but minor candidates could participate, too, if they met base criteria (ballot status, have a website, competitive in polling numbers). The results varied, but the organizers behind this method of political discourse are encouraged about its potential as a platform.

There is a little road-not-traveled undercurrent for me here. Some of the people associated with 10Questions and projects like it were part of the RootsCamp meetings in SecondLife in November 2006. My academic interests deviated from politics by the time 10questions was launching in time for the 2008 elections, but it is the kind of project that could have been a focal point of my dissertation.

In the feedback session that followed, the discussion of polarization politics suggested a nice high-level framing of my research interests. Namely, the reason for being interested in facilitating a relational approach to talking politics is that it may be a way of mitigating or reversing the violent consequence of polarization.

A Polarized America

In America, polarization is peaking. A Gallup poll revealed Obama’s second year of his current term of office was the most polarizing since 1953. Aside from two re-election years for Reagan and Clinton, the Bush-Obama decade has split Americans since the Iraq War entered Year Two.

A few years ago, Pietro Nivola of the Brookings Institution (a Washington think tank) argued that party polarization “is the historical norm, not the exception.” It even has some advantages, such as giving voters a greater self-confidence because the candidate choices are easier to distinguish. Nivola cited a number of system properties that contributed to the current polarization, including geographic separation, “safe seats” in incumbent districts, and Internet communities that allow people to self-select ideas they want to hear. President Bill Clinton once said he thinks the Republican Party believes in polarization (a claim that itself is polarizing).

Another explanation is that, instead of the two parties growing apart, they are in fact more similar than ever. Polarization is a necessity to differentiate two groups who have voted together on a number of divisive issues, such as tax cuts (2001), Iraq (2002), and abortion ban (2003). Counter-intuitively, it is easier for centrist voters to pick a side when the distance between their ideologies and practices is not as great.

In the March 2008 issue of Journal of Politics, a debate raged over the cause of polarization in America politics. Alan Abramowitz (Emory) and Kyle Saunders (Colorado State) published an article debunking the assertion by Morris Fiorina of Stanford that polarization is a myth:

Fiorina argues that twenty-first-century Americans, like the midtwentieth-century Americans described by Converse, “are not very well-informed about politics, do not hold many of their views very strongly, and are not ideological” (2006, 19). However, our evidence indicates that since the 1970s, ideological polarization has increased dramatically among the mass public in the United States as well as among political elites. There are now large differences in outlook between Democrats and Republicans, between red state voters and blue state voters, and between religious voters and secular voters. These divisions are not confined to a small minority of activists—they involve a large segment of the public and the deepest divisions are found among the most interested, informed, and active citizens. Moreover, contrary to Fiorina’s suggestion that polarization turns off voters and depresses turnout, our evidence indicates that polarization energizes the electorate and stimulates political participation.

source: “Is polarization a myth?” (March 27, 2008)

Their conclusion is that polarization is a product of and results in an engaged electorate. In a response, Fiorina criticized that view (and many of their measures), arguing that polarization is driven by the elite down to the electorate. Whether or not polarization is real, there is little denying that our language used when talking politics is polarizing.

Avoiding Violence

A times of peak polarization, the threat for an outbreak of violence increases. Conflict theorists Dean Pruitt and Jeffrey Rubin identified five changes that contribute to escalation:

1. Parties move from light tactics (e.g., persuasive arguments and promises) to heavy tactics (e.g., threats and violence).
2. The conflict gets bigger, both in terms of the number of contentious issues and the resources invested in the struggle.
3. Issues move from specific to general as party relationships deteriorate (e.g., the other side is “evil.”).
4. More and more people and groups are drawn into the conflict.
5. Goals switch from “doing well” to winning to hurting the other.

There are two big considerations about this cycle of polarized politics. First, is it inevitable? Is it human nature to seek conflict and evolve our discourse until something explodes? Or, is this escalation a self-fulfilling prophecy, brought on by a feedback loop that reinforces our polarizing behaviors? Second, if it is not an inevitability, would a different mechanism of discourse—relational politics—serve to disrupt the escalation to conflict?

Focusing on human relationship in political discourse is not the current expectation of American politics. Adopting and facilitating, through our designed systems, a relational focus could alter the goals of discussion, moving away from consensus and convincing toward understanding. When I look at the five changes of Pruitt-Rubin, I see areas where a relational approach can have impact. Imagine the following:

1. Through collective moderation, participants avoid heavy tactics in favor of light tactics.
2. Contentious issues are humanized through storytelling and empathy.
3. Accountability instituted through personal introductions and group trust prevents generalizations by asking for specific experiences.
4. Multiple threads allow for self-selected small interest groups to form within a forum.
5. Goals switch from convincing to understanding.

These are a few of the key properties of the WebLab small group dialogue forums of the late 1990s and early part of this century. While the designers may not have intentionally set out to facilitate a relational approach, their well-chosen constraints had these effects.

While some of the information is out-of-date or even pointing to missing links, the collection I assembled on the topic of building and leveraging an online community is still relevant today. In particular, I have been enamored with the following:

Weak Ties are Key to ROI

Joshua Porter’s explanation of weak ties includes a couple references, including the original Mark Granovetter work on the subject and a contemporary article by Andrew McAfee. The motivation for these works is the eternal question of ROI with social media (i.e., What do I get for letting my employees waste time?). My work at SociaLens repeatedly tells me this question hasn’t been answered for most people and that it won’t without some first-hand experience to give one the fluency to see new value.

Leadership Must Engage

A wonderful analysis by Karoli of a meltdown in the MacSerial Junkie community in 2007 yielded four insights:

1) Visibly manage volunteers
2) Stay active and visible in the community.
3) Don’t let resentments fester
4) Define community boundaries, communicate them, and enforce the rules

We see many instances of initiatives failing not because of poor strategy, tools, or content, but because those with power don’t participate or empower people to take ownership of the effort.

Be a Thought Leader Who Facilitates

David Wilcox has some advice on reaching out to bloggers in an acceptable way, but the most interesting nugget is a simple graphic showing the importance of facilitating conversation. The traditional mindset about online publication is to control the content (i.e., the message) and make it the center of all interactions (i.e., drive traffic to the blog). An alternative take is to become a respected thought leader who helps community members connect with each other.

Simulate Community Dynamics

This is the one of the last links I looked at back when I was doing my Relational Design dissertation topic the first time. Now that I’m back, I’m looking at Aldo de Moor’s work on system dynamics in community design as a foundational part of my research. In this paper, de Moor identifies a few building blocks for building a model. Stocks are resources that provide system memory. Flow is a change to a stock over time. Feedback loops reinforce or counteract what is happening in the system. A delay is a process whose output lags behind its input. These elements are arranged to simulate community dynamics by adopting a design theory (problem, hypotheses, components). I think this is a great approach for both analysis of a community and the design to adjust problematic behaviors.