Danah Boyd and Dave Weinberger discussed profiles and context in terms of establishing relationships this week.  I don’t know that I agree with Weinberger that Dean’s grassroots members are establishing relationships without context; establishing that someone else is a like-minded, committed Democrat seems to be a lot of context in which to work.

Ask yourself this: if you’re told a person is a “registered Democrat” who lives in a particular state, don’t you already have a lot of information about this person’s socio-economic mindset in relation to your own?

Boyd’s not too keen on profiles, marveling that “it's such a miracle that profile-based dating ever works”; the profiles are a limiter in her eyes, providing so much information upfront that one might struggle to find an opener if the profile appears to preclude a potential date-seeker.

Somewhere between these two folks is the truth.  Context is something that is difficult to quantify, and profiling is one way we seek to establish quantification and qualification of the nebulous.  How do we establish context without a profile when operating in a virtual environment?

One observation I’ve made over a number of years is that we do a sort of primal “dance” of profiling when meeting each other face to face.  It’s more important in certain social structures; I find the “dance” to be essential and protracted for persons in communities of a certain size. 

Here’s a typical example: my mother-in-law who lives in a Midwestern town of approximately 10,000 people recounts a story about another townsperson she knows to myself and others in a gathering.  There are inevitably a series of data points exchanged that allow others participating in the conversation to triangulate the position in the community matrix wherein the subject lives.  “You know Sue?  She’s Bob’s cousin on his mother’s side?  Her family lived next door to the Smiths over on Maple?  Yes, she worked at the shoe store for several years, right after she got out of school…”  The appropriate response from conversation participants is acknowledgement or interjections which serve to correct the matrix of information or affirm its accuracy.  The actual meat of the story isn’t shared completely until it’s apparent that the participants are all locked into the same understanding of the subject’s relation to this matrix.

I’ve observed this countless times, in numerous locales, among many different people.  It even happens in corporate communities (Hey, you know Tom in Global Accounting?  The guy who used to work in Division Cost Accounting with Ed just a year ago?  He just made partner.), let alone in other social structures besides family and civic organizations.  What is it that is going on?  Why is this so essential to conversation?

It appears to be an exchange of context, a parsing of the six degrees between individuals and community that is conveyed in these exchanges.  It becomes incredibly important to the older persons I’ve spoken with in small communities; perhaps the need is predicated by increasingly difficult mental processing due to age-related dysfunction in mental processing.  Or perhaps older individuals have accumulated so large a network of relations that “recalibration” of a single individual within that network is necessary to processing new information about that subject.

Yet this same prefatory information is shared by younger persons as well; what are other reasons for this essential transfer of information?  Why does context, the matrix of data, matter so much to engagement?

10:47:08 PM    comment []

I’ll dispense with the niceties of a salutation here, to save us time (and to spare you the sound of retching on my part).

Butt the hell out.  You were NOT voted to represent the people of the 7^th District of the State of Michigan.  You do not even LIVE in the State of Michigan.  You are interfering with the government, of, by and for the people of the State of Michigan, obstructing their right to a representative federal government.

Get a damned clue while you’re at it.  If the people of the State of Michigan do not support the Medicare bill (among other things, like that lame-*ssed excuse for an energy bill), you ought to examine the reasons why rather than try and force it up the people’s behind through threats and intimidation. 

That’s plain old-fashioned extortion, by the way.

Since it came up, let’s talk about that pathetic attempt to railroad through that screw job you called an energy bill.  There’s another choice example of interfering with the representative government of this nation; you deny the right of adequate representation when you force the minority Democrats to vote on a 1200-page bill with only 48 hours advance notice for evaluation, after excluding them from the bill writing process altogether.  The filibuster should make it quite clear that a considerable number of people in this country saw through your attempt to bend them over in more ways than one. 

Your scorched earth tactics will not convert any Democrats or fence-sitting Independents and Libertarians here, and may likely alienate Republicans.  What a great time for a centrist Democratic presidential candidate – or is that what you really want, Republican converts in the State of Michigan?

11:04:48 AM    comment []