Stowe Boyd

I recently wrote a post called Liquid Email, in which I made the case for a new paradigm of email, one subordinate to streaming media like Twitter:

Imagine a liquid model of email, based on Twitter being my preferred context for communication:

1. I receive email in Gmail. 
2. A new Twitter client (or a new version of Twitter) — let’s call it Liquidate — captures all my incoming emails from Gmail, and drops a shortened link into my stream for each, with the subject line as the tweet, and associating the email address of the sender to their Twitter handle, if known.
3. The fact that this is an email would be made obvious in the UI, and I could open the text of the mail — and bring it right into context — by clicking on a link.
4. I could read the email text, and then respond to the sender either by a Twitter message, direct message, or another email, depending on the circumstance, and based on various criteria, like whether the sender has a Twitter account.
5. If I opt to reply by email, the client would send that into Gmail, and I would always have Gmail as a repository, if I want to search there.

In essence, I would be treating email messages as just a long format tweet, and using Gmail as an appliance to carry that message from my streaming context out to a world that has not completely switched to Twitter or liquid media. But the activities associated with ‘email’ would be carried out in the streaming context, and the email would be just another sort of media pulled into and then pushed out of the stream. And again, I would always be able to go to Gmail directly, if needed.

Almost immediately after writing that post, Nick Reynolds commented on it, saying that Tweetdeck had something in the works along those lines. 

It turns out that Iain Dodsworth and crew had been working on Deck.ly, which bears similarities to what I was alluding to as liquid email, but not quite.

Deck.ly supports longer that 140 character Twitter messages, but does not integrate email in any way.

In the soon-to-be-released version 0.37.0 of Tweetdeck, when you type beyond 140 characters you are no longer warned that the message is too long. You will simply see the count of characters go beyond zero, as in this case below:

When other users of Tweetdeck see this post, it looks like this, with a ‘read more’ link appended:

When you click on the link it takes you to a Deck.ly page, showing the entire post.

Currently, the limit for Deck.ly posts are 5000 characters.

A non-Tweetdeck user would see the tweet slightly differently. Here’s the same tweet in Twitter, where a ‘… (cont)’ suffix is inserted into the text before the URL.

(By the way, I don’t think this is good microsyntax. Better would have been just the URL and the ellipsis, since the ellipsis can be encoded as a single character (option-; on Mac), with more of the original tweet showing.)

Oddly, Deck.ly doesn’t collate a strem of long posts under the user’s identity. There is no www.tweetdeck.com/twitter/stoweboyd, although all the long tweets I create are formed with that as the head of the URL, like http://www.tweetdeck.com/twitter/stoweboyd/~b47T4.

Deck.ly is a good idea, and workably implemented. I think that a fuller realization of Deck.ly will include an aggregated stream of all of a user’s long posts, but otherwise I like what I see.

Deck.ly could also form the basis of a liquid media communication solution incorporating email, too. But that’s not their aspiration at the moment, I guess, although I am hungry for that to be built by someone, if not Tweetdeck.

related

• Tweetdeck officially unveils Deck.ly, for tweets longer than 140 characters (the next web)

cloudhead:

Stowe Boyd is imagining a New Constitution that would transcend borders and unite the internet generation around the world … an Eighth Continent that we could all defect to.

But the truth is, the internet that I want to be a citizen of doesn’t exist yet. Not in places like Egypt where a flick of a switch can disconnect everyone; not in the remote corners of Africa where the infrastructure doesn’t exist, but even more so, not at home.

“Behind every information architecture a power structure lies hidden.”

Our corporately owned internet comes with its own hidden constitution that’s completely out of tune with the spirit of our emerging networked culture. It’s a constitution that supports censorship, concentrates power, and leaves us just as vulnerable to an internet blackout as Egypt.

In fact, the places that lack any modern communication infrastructure are probably better prepared to write the new constitution than we are: They aren’t carrying the political or technical baggage of 20th century broadcast era networks and they don’t have to wrestle with a growing addiction to the HiDef future that the telcos own. They”re ready to embrace a truly free and open network … even if it can’t stream 1080p.

In the 21st century, the network is the law.
Code trumps legislature.
And whoever controls the shape of the network controls the shape of our culture.

When a free and open internet finally emerges it won’t be bound together with words. It’s constitution will be written in code, a universal manifesto woven into the DNA of the network itself.

[This is a response to the California Dreams project at the Institute for the Future.

How it works

California Dreams asks you to imagine the future. Will California keep growing, start conserving, reinvent itself, or collapse? Put yourself in the future of one of these paths. Show us what a day in your life looks like and how you are living in this new world.

Why do we care? Because California is in crisis. Because pioneers with brilliant ideas live here. Because dreaming the future can change the future.

1. Send us your vision by January 31, 2011. The earlier you enter, the more time you have to gather votes for your dream.Enter here.
2. Vote for your favorite dream. Do you think it’s more likely that games will take over education, fast food will be taxed, or police will be privatized? Which dream do you like best? Make your voice heard - cast your vote.
3. We’ll help you build a better California. Up to 5 winners will be flown to the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, California in March, to present their dreams and connect to mentors and resources. One of these dreams will also win the $3,000 Roy Amara Prize for Participatory Foresight.

Good luck, and may those who dream most vibrantly win. In the end, we all win if we plant a seed for the new California dream.

I bet they want something positive and uplifting, but I don’t think that is the near future for California.]

The California economic crisis of 2011 led to a near cessation of public services in 2012-2015, as in nearly 20 other states of the US. Inability to maintain public services — police, highway, transportation, education, courts, welfare — led to the US intervention in California and 16 other states through the creation of the Territorial Services Agency of the US Interior department by President Biden in 2015. California was the most populous state to be put under Supreme Court ordered receivership by Chief Justice Barack Obama. (The legality of revoking the states’ statehood, and returning them to the status of “incorporated but unorganized” territories was questionable, but formed the pretext of direct federal control.)

The violent weather of the ’10s was especially devastating to southern and mountainous areas of California, based on strengthening of El Niño and global climate changes. A drastic increase of typhoon-like storms led to widespread and enormous mudslides (like the ones that buried Glendale and Santa Barbara in 2015), and an increase in summer temperatures by 4º-5ºC led to growing severity of wildfires, culminating in the near destruction of San Diego in 2018 by the Tijuana Fire. The growing heat, erratic summer rainfall, and decreased snowpack of the Cascades led to drought conditions in California for most of the ’10s, contributing to the Bee Famine of 2016.

Because of the economic collapse, federal takeover, drought, and violent weather, over 60% of the population of California emigrated between 2011 and 2020, the great majority of which were resettled in the former ‘Rust Belt’ area of Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, and Pennsylvania and the territory of Haiti as part of the 2017 Resettlement Act, where the government invested heavily in permatechnology and the ‘Foodshed’ agriculture initiative following the Bee Famine of 2016. The Bee Famine was partly caused by the California, Russian, Asian, and South American droughts, but mostly by the total die-off of domestic bees in 2016.

By 2020, California had a population of 14 million, mostly in the northern half of the territory. South California had transformed from a coastal savannah, with the new California Desert reaching past Santa Barbara on the Pacific, and to the foothills of the Cascades. The Foodshed movement had led the country away from the industrial agriculture that typified California’s central valley in the 20th century, with only wine, olives and fruit remaining as major food exports, and all of that located in the northern parts of the territory.

There is a plan to begin the return to statehood in some of the former states of the union, but California’s situation is still too shaky to proceed today, in 2020. President Michelle Obama has publicly stated that California could be on the path back to statehood in the next few years, so long as the turnaround continues, and the territory continues to assume control of public services.

See submission here.

Some new research on the wonderfully named ‘pluralistic ignorance’ shows that people underestimate other’s negative emotions. In a perverse aspect of the ‘grass is always greener’ phenomenon, we seem to think that others are happier than we are.

However, the author of a Slate article that starts with this research takes a few giant steps, following on the thesis of Sherry Turkle’s new Alone Together, that social networks are causing us to be unhappy.

Libby Copeland, The Anti-Social Network

“Misery Has More Company Than People Think,” a paper in the January issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, draws on a series of studies examining how college students evaluate moods, both their own and those of their peers. Led by Alex Jordan, who at the time was a Ph.D. student in Stanford’s psychology department, the researchers found that their subjects consistently underestimated how dejected others were–and likely wound up feeling more dejected as a result. Jordan got the idea for the inquiry after observing his friends’ reactions to Facebook: He noticed that they seemed to feel particularly crummy about themselves after logging onto the site and scrolling through others’ attractive photos, accomplished bios, and chipper status updates. “They were convinced that everyone else was leading a perfect life,” he told me.

The human habit of overestimating other people’s happiness is nothing new, of course. Jordan points to a quote by Montesquieu: “If we only wanted to be happy it would be easy; but we want to be happier than other people, which is almost always difficult, since we think them happier than they are.” But social networking may be making this tendency worse. Jordan’s research doesn’t look at Facebook explicitly, but if his conclusions are correct, it follows that the site would have a special power to make us sadder and lonelier. By showcasing the most witty, joyful, bullet-pointed versions of people’s lives, and inviting constant comparisons in which we tend to see ourselves as the losers, Facebook appears to exploit an Achilles’ heel of human nature. And women—an especially unhappy bunch of late—may be especially vulnerable to keeping up with what they imagine is the happiness of the Joneses.

In one of the Stanford studies, Jordan and his fellow researchers asked 80 freshmen to report whether they or their peers had recently experienced various negative and positive emotional events. Time and again, the subjects underestimated how many negative experiences (“had a distressing fight,” “felt sad because they missed people”) their peers were having. They also overestimated how much fun (“going out with friends,” “attending parties”) these same peers were having. In another study, the researchers found a sample of 140 Stanford students unable to accurately gauge others’ happiness even when they were evaluating the moods of people they were close to—friends, roommates and people they were dating. And in a third study, the researchers found that the more students underestimated others’ negative emotions, the more they tended to report feeling lonely and brooding over their own miseries. This is correlation, not causation, mind you; it could be that those subjects who started out feeling worse imagined that everyone else was getting along just fine, not the other way around. But the notion that feeling alone in your day-to-day suffering might increase that suffering certainly makes intuitive sense.

As does the idea that Facebook might aggravate this tendency. Facebook is, after all, characterized by the very public curation of one’s assets in the form of friends, photos, biographical data, accomplishments, pithy observations, even the books we say we like. Look, we have baked beautiful cookies. We are playing with a new puppy. We are smiling in pictures (or, if we are moody, we are artfully moody.) Blandness will not do, and with some exceptions, sad stuff doesn’t make the cut, either. The site’s very design—the presence of a “Like” button, without a corresponding “Hate” button—reinforces a kind of upbeat spin doctoring. (No one will “Like” your update that the new puppy died, but they may “Like” your report that the little guy was brave up until the end.)

Any parent who has posted photos and videos of her child on Facebook is keenly aware of the resulting disconnect from reality, the way chronicling parenthood this way creates a story line of delightfully misspoken words, adorably worn hats, dancing, blown kisses. Tearful falls and tantrums are rarely recorded, nor are the stretches of pure, mind-blowing tedium. We protect ourselves, and our kids, this way; happiness is impersonal in a way that pain is not. But in the process, we wind up contributing to the illusion that kids are all joy, no effort.

Facebook is “like being in a play. You make a character,” one teenager tells MIT professor Sherry Turkle in her new book on technology, Alone Together. Turkle writes about the exhaustion felt by teenagers as they constantly tweak their Facebook profiles for maximum cool. She calls this “presentation anxiety,” and suggests that the site’s element of constant performance makes people feel alienated from themselves. (The book’s broader theory is that technology, despite its promises of social connectivity, actually makes us lonelier by preventing true intimacy.)

Ok, so the researchers may have been sparked to do their study based on thinking about Facebook, but remember: the study did not involve Facebook at all. It was research that shows people underestimate the degree to which others have negative emotions (hence the wonderful ‘pluralistic ignorance’ that is one of the psychological keywords for the research).

It seems that we are socially blind in this way, to varying extents. And who would be surprised to learn that people naturally talk about the sunshine and flowers in life, and leave out the mud puddles and mosquitoes? In general, isn’t seeing through that social fog a part of maturity? A sort of cultural wisdom?

Nonetheless, Copeland goes on to connect this work with Sherry Turkle’s new anti-social bandwagon. Turkle is one of the newest social web naysayers, making the case that the social relationships we are involved with online are illegitimate and false, and they keep us from ‘real’ relationships, by which she means unmediated offline interactions. (Note: I have yet to read her book, but, without being overly dismissive, let me suggest that I have heard these arguments before.)

I submit that the real message to take away from the research that hypothetically forms the basis for this article is not that Facebook and other social tools make us unhappy, but that we make ourselves unhappy when we believe that others are happier than us. Blaming Facebook is like throwing the telephone out the window when it brings us bad news. Or, as Shakespeare has Cassius say in Julius Caesar:

‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.’

I have attended SxSW Interactive a few times, and I’ve found it to be a high-tech Woodstock, without the mud or the music. Just lots of people milling around, and queued up for the parties, the after parties, and the after-after parties.

The selection approach for the talks is all about popularity, and there is no obvious thematic control, and no MC, so the sessions are very uneven. Some can be great, but the majority are a rewarming of shopworn topics. The most popular talks are too crowded to admit all those that want in, so you’re lucky if you get into one in five of those.

Austin is also not scaled for an event of the size of SxSW. The venues are too small, so it’s almost impossible to breathe at the cocktail parties. There aren’t enough hotels downtown for the crowds, and so people have to stay at the airport, or out at the lake and travel miles to get to the event, and the only mass transit is the bus.

I hope that we finally get around to developing a distinctive New York-based, but international tech conference (‘TechNYC 2012’), one that stands in distinction to SxSW. One with a wide scope, covering the most critical topics in technology. It could have a combination of invited speakers and an open and public proposal approach, but one where the final selection of talks would be worked out by a small group of organizers, to diminish the artifice of the popularity game (‘please vote for my proposal!’). 

New York is the perfect place for a giant event like this: plenty of hotels, good public transit, a growing tech environment, great universities, and a location where everyone whats to visit.

And no mud.

gracemcdunnough:

Liquid modernity is Bauman’s term for the present condition of the world as contrasted with the “solid” modernity that preceded it. According to Bauman, the passage from “solid” to “liquid” modernity has created a new and unprecedented setting for individual life pursuits, confronting individuals with a series of challenges never before encountered. Social forms and institutions no longer have enough time to solidify and cannot serve as frames of reference for human actions and long-term life plans, so individuals have to find other ways to organise their lives. Individuals have to splice together an unending series of short-term projects and episodes that don’t add up to the kind of sequence to which concepts like “career” and “progress” could be meaningfully applied. Such fragmented lives require individuals to be flexible and adaptable — to be constantly ready and willing to change tactics at short notice, to abandon commitments and loyalties without regret and to pursue opportunities according to their current availability. In liquid modernity the individual must act, plan actions and calculate the likely gains and losses of acting (or failing to act) under conditions of endemic uncertainty.

Are we experiencing a societal phase shift?

Wow. Amazing to see this right after writing Liquid Email.

We are rapidly detouring into the web of flow, leaving the static web of pages behind. (Or more accurately, covering the web of pages with a layer of liquid media, so that we will increasingly not notice the static URLs down there, except as IDs that can be used to fetch content, and yank it into the liquid context of the web of flow.)

Paradoxically, the places with the strongest flow will seem the most calm, because we won’t be jumping from the stream to the browser and back again a hundred times a day: we will stay in the stream: media content will be harvested, and pulled into context for us.

I am using the term liquid media to represent this new soupy, swirling, turbulent cascade of various media types being pulled into the streaming mess of today’s social media. We see images resolved in Twitter clients without leaving the Twitter stream, and Flipboard yanking articles free of their moorings on the NY Times or Wired, and previewing them for us in the article stream. Every sort of media will be pulled into the flow: soon, television will be repurposed as yet-another-media-type and played in the stream like audio is now.

This is all happening because we will naturally gravitate to the place with the fastest tempo, because the best stuff appears there first. Paradoxically, the places with the strongest flow will seem the most calm, because we won’t be jumping from the stream to the browser and back again a hundred times a day: we will stay in the stream: media content will be harvested, and pulled into context for us.

I think this is going to happen next with email.

Email has its own context: the inbox, the email apps, Outlook. The metaphor is now second nature to us: email comes in, from anyone having our email address, maybe is filtered and categorized, but mostly is shown as a chronological list of discrete messages. If we are lucky, our email tool ties together email threads, although that mechanism is semantically flawed, because a single email can deal with many topics. As a result, email is as messy as we are. But more structure won’t help email. The problem is the metaphor, and as a result, how the metaphor channels our thinking about communication.

Using a beta version of Nimble has caused me to think about a fusion of Twitter and email. That product manages to support both email and Twitter, but not in the way that I am envisioning, although the app is inventive and likely to be a good social CRM offering.

Imagine a liquid model of email, based on Twitter being my preferred context for communication:

1. I receive email in Gmail. 
2. A new Twitter client (or a new version of Twitter) — let’s call it Liquidate — captures all my incoming emails from Gmail, and drops a shortened link into my stream for each, with the subject line as the tweet, and associating the email address of the sender to their Twitter handle, if known.
3. The fact that this is an email would be made obvious in the UI, and I could open the text of the mail — and bring it right into context — by clicking on a link.
4. I could read the email text, and then respond to the sender either by a Twitter message, direct message, or another email, depending on the circumstance, and based on various criteria, like whether the sender has a Twitter account.
5. If I opt to reply by email, the client would send that into Gmail, and I would always have Gmail as a repository, if I want to search there.

In essence, I would be treating email messages as just a long format tweet, and using Gmail as an appliance to carry that message from my streaming context out to a world that has not completely switched to Twitter or liquid media. But the activities associated with ‘email’ would be carried out in the streaming context, and the email would be just another sort of media pulled into and then pushed out of the stream. And again, I would always be able to go to Gmail directly, if needed.

The question of how much of this email should be public and how much kept private is a very complex one. I am not advocating a general policy of taking all emails and automatically sharing them with all followers, per se. On the other hand, I might start using slight Gmail-supported variants of my email address for different constituencies — like stowe.boyd+public@gmail.com versus stowe.boyd+private@gmail.com — and at the same time tweeking Liquidate to take the appropriate actions with the associated messages. 

Imagine the scenario of an interaction with customer support at Cablevision. I might want to have that discussion completely in the open, with all tweets and emails available for my community to observe. On the other hand, my interaction with a bank or my realtor might be better kept confidential.

And in such a situation, I would want the email text to be publicly available, or published to a public location. Today, Gmail doesn’t support that, but Liquidate could do that: taking emails — that are all private today — and publishing those that I have marked as public.

And I will just close with an observation: this scenario of use makes sense because the continuity of communication is more important than the communication mode. If I am having a Twitter conversation with a pal, and I need to write something six paragraphs long, it’s annoying to write ‘taking this to email’, and then switch to my email tool. The thread of discussion is broken, and is never tied back together.

I think Google, Microsoft and Apple would both be well-served to implement liquid clients like this, well-integrated with their email services, and also coupled to winning social streams like Facebook and Twitter. Google should have done something like this instead of Buzz, I think. But I bet that the email giants will wait too long, and some upstart, like Nimble or Tweetdeck, will hit upon the right combination of features that comes to define the next generation of email tools, based on a metaphor along the lines I have sketched out.

Anyone working on a product like this should certainly contact me.

Althea Erickson, Freelancers Union

What do freelancers in L.A., NYC, and Topeka have in common? That’s what Freelancers Union wants to find out! While independent workers constitute a considerable segment of the workforce, there is limited information about these workers. Freelancers Union aims to fill that knowledge gap through their Annual Independent Worker Survey. They use the survey results to inform the public (2009’s survey results covered by The Wall Street Journal andUSA Today) and policymakers about issues that affect independent workers and to shape their advocacy agenda to push for legislative changes. Their 2009 survey results showed that 40% of freelancers had trouble getting paid in that year alone, and Freelancers Union was able to push policymakers to introduce legislation (The Freelancer Payment Protection Act) in New York State to help combat client nonpayment. Needless to say, the more respondents, the better the data, so take a few minutes to complete the survey.