October 28, 2003
odd new dislocations
Over on his personal blog Relevant History, Alex Pang has entered conference land.
I'm at a conference today in San Francisco, so am in that odd social and physical space that I've come to think of as Conference Land: the postmodern knowledge enterprise equivalent of a medieval market, or a circus. On the edge of normal life, occasionally checking in with reality via voice mail during breaks, then diving back into the slightly disorienting world of conference room flooring and Power Point. Like an evening in Las Vegas, only without the excitement of gambling.
His post highlights for me some of the disorienting aspects of our increasingly intertwined physical/digital existence, and the way that our life roles continue to blur across their former boundaries.
Dislocation 1: I'm at the same conference, but as a client of Alex's organization (IFTF). While I'm entirely sympathetic to his description of conference life, it still feels odd to parse his slightly weary gripe around an event that I'm supposed to find stimulating and thought provoking. Since I have a robust sense of humor, I find this juxtaposition pretty amusing. YMMV. And I'm still not sure where my own employer stands on the blurring of personal blogging and professional territory. Note to self: find out.
Dislocation 2: I'd met Alex a couple of times in person, as part of the ongoing interactions between our organizations. But I didn't know much about him until I stumbled on his blog while cruising my GeoURL neighborhood. Since he's an articulate and thoughtful writer who puts a lot of energy into blogging, I now have a very different measure of his background and interests. When we met again today, I had a bunch of new contextual data in my head that I might never have picked up from hallway chats in conference land. So follow the bouncing ball: from detached, work-related physical encounters, to chance discovery on the net/in the physical neighborhood via personal blog infrastructure, back to the professional/physical world, and once again into personal blogspace. That's kind of a new game, eh?
Dislocation 3: Strangely, although Alex chooses to publish many things openly on the net, I can't help but feel that I have trespassed across some unseen boundary. Would he have chosen to reveal similar things about his personal life to me in casual conversation? If my own writings are less open or *gasp* less articulate, is that an unfair asymmetry that manifests in the f2f interactions? What responsibilities do I have in the emerging social contract among bloggers who also have physical connections, both professional and personal?
Dislocation 4: I don't usually like to get all chatty about people I don't know that well, to say nothing of publicly using them as a proxy for a discussion of concepts I am not completely clear on. Yet here I am. It's kind of odd. Alex, hope you don't mind ;-) Or if you do mind, then I hope you'll let me know.
No problems at all. Anyone who publishes a blog that isn't password-protected has to assume that it's going to be accessible, and read, in ways that cross professional boundaries. In some ways, that's part of the point. But the real test of being an intimate is having access to my blog about my children!
The fact that I've now split off the technology-related stuff to Future Now does mean that I've crafted more of a strictly professional identity on that blog; but I still find that there's a lot of overlap between the two. The Mitchell book that I've been reading, for example, will eventually make its way to Future Now, but since right now I'm writing more about my experience of reading it, I'm posting to Relevant; when I'm at the point of doing a more formal review, that'll go on Future Now. By the same logic, the conference land posts, which were about that curious-- though not unpleasant-- feeling of being in the separate world that a conference creates, went on Relevant; posts from the sessions themselves would go on Future Now.
Speaking of which, if you've got a connection this morning, feel free to write about the session! (Now that you're revealed as a fellow blogger, you're in danger of being asked to blog our future conferences. I find conference blogs to be very interesting, when done well.)
In a way, this divide-- call it actual work, versus observations about working-- is one that many of our generation wouldn't recogize as useful. But I've no particular desire to turn into Glove Girl....
Posted by: askpang at October 29, 2003 08:02 AMInteresting observations & issues!
We were attempting to bridge the physical / digital gap, and to explore what types of information (professional / personal) people would be willing to reveal in a particular instantiation of "conferenceland" (UbiComp 2003, ubicomp.org/ubicomp2003). We deployed a suite of proactive display applications to enhance the conferenceland inhabitants' experience of the conference (and each other) by sensing them (via RFID tags) and responding them in different ways in different contexts. Most relevant (in my view) to the current discussion was Ticket2Talk, which ran on a portrait-mode plasma display near the coffee break area, and which displayed images that people explicitly uploaded with the intention that it would represent a topic they would be happy to talk about with people at the conference. A little more info can be found on our web site (www.proactivedisplays.org), and we are now in the process of crafting a survey to send out, and collecting observations from people who were at the conference. Gene, if you have any observations to share regarding your experience(s) [of the proactive displays] at UbiComp 2003, I'd enjoy learning about them.
Thanks.
Joe.
Posted by: Joe McCarthy at October 29, 2003 11:49 AMJoe, I didn't get a lot of time to try out the various use models, but I do recall that T2T facilitated one good conversation with a person I had never met. My topic picture was a panorama from the 1IMC conference I attended in Tokyo this summer (curiously, John Thackara's in that picture ;-), and it turned out to be a useful bit of conversational tinder.
T2T and similar concepts do in fact raise similar issues to the physical/digital blogging questions. What am I willing to expose in a public situation? What is appropriate to the context (in this case, a professional community of people with common interests, some friends, some strangers, some pre-competitors etc)? How do I maintain control over how much I reveal to whom, and how can this be made dynamic to account for the ways in which relationships and contexts evolve over time? All very curious questions for the new human condition.
BTW I met some of your colleagues at the IFTF conference and had a good chat. Are you involved in placelab?
Posted by: gene at October 30, 2003 09:38 AMI'm involved in PlaceLab (www.placelab.org), but most of my cycles have been consumed by UbiComp (between chairing the conference and working on the proactive display applications) over the past several months.
Posted by: Joe McCarthy at October 30, 2003 06:40 PM