Vex Appeal is a weblog and collection of projects by Guy Parsons, a game designer, online community and digital strategy dude in London, England. Read more about the saucy butcher boy here.
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projects:
101 things in 1001 days
psychopatch
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vexy young things:
jey biddulph
mike jewell
roo reynolds
dan hon
adrian hon
naomi alderman
steve peters
previously on vexappeal:
Game aesthetics and combination Nulympics HATDUCK IS HERE A thing that happened Facebook Theme Choon Alice Is Lost Behind the final curtain Benford's Law on Twitter Left briefly unattended... Everything is an alternate reality (apart from rea...
Cut it out
Tuesday, June 05, 2007
One of the interesting things about social networking is how it makes the invisible visible - and from a user perspective, how it makes the natural deliberate.
I find people leaving groups and deleting interests poetic, where poetic is of course a euphemism for depressing.
The in-joke that's stopped being funny. The favourite song that cloys and irritates. To look at a list of what you thought mattered - getting more people from your halls to join a group than all the people from the other halls, to identify as "kinda geeky but kinda rand0m too", to ironically worship your Biomathematics lecturer - and to find these things no longer resonate, but jar.
Online, things don't fade. They're deleted, pruned, scoured, until we're left with no trace that anything of import happened here.
The tracking and deliberatization of these behaviours might be unnatural, but not necessarily bad. Take biofeedback:
Biofeedback is involves measuring a subject's bodily processes such as blood pressure, heart rate, skin temperature, galvanic skin response (sweating), and muscle tension and conveying such information to him or her in real-time - ny providing access to physiological information about which the user is generally unaware, biofeedback allows users to gain control over physical processes previously considered automatic.If social networks can reach a tipping point of ubiquity and pervasiveness, and data-mine the results in the right way, the possibilities for sociofeedback are promising. To take one example: you can see yourself lose touch with people, see your connections weaken and wither. And there is a choice, then, to restore and nourish these ties, and to intervene. Or, on the other hand, to accept change, and re-examine that relationship, and maybe even mourn for a moment. A choice to hold on tightly, or let go lightly.
Last.FM for people. Merciless, unflinching bar charts of friends fading in and out of view, romances crashing into your life before crashing out again six months later, those who said "Keep in touch!" but never did, the friend introducing you to a friend introducing you to a friend becoming a community, something tight-knit, and constant. You can see it - the constant lines, the level chart of the ties that bind. And so can they.
(Incidentally, very beautiful Last.FM data visualisation here - again, I can't help but imagine it representing relationships, not just music.)