Jon Jones has a really excellent write-up of how to set up a solid LinkedIn profile, and why you should. While the opening context is game industry related, 100% of the information he covers is relevant regardless of what career path you’re following. Well worth the read — also, check out the rest of his blog and tweets, there’s a ton of really solid information about resumes, portfolios, and getting into creative industries.
Category: Social Computing
Writing about social computing (digital media, social media, cyborg anthropology, online communities, et cetera).
Link: Open for Business
Laura Kalbag nails transparency in business and social media in her post Open for Business over at A List Apart.
In particular, I’d like to note this:
Being open as an individual isn’t just saying everything you think without caring—that’s called being a sociopath! If you want to be transparent, you still need some kind of filter. It’s like how we might not swear in front of our grandmothers; it’s not good manners. Or how we don’t use Twitter to broadcast every meal we eat, because we’d bore our followers. Diplomacy is necessary too. Very few of us want to be honest to the point that we hurt other people.
I sometimes talk about choosing transparency in our lives, and I feel like her explanation here really describes two key points of what I’m trying to say: tact and diplomacy are not antithetical to transparency; transparency does not mean opening a firehose — you can still strive for a good signal-to-noise ratio.
Online Psychotherapy May Be More Effective
Psychotherapy Via Internet as Good as If Not Better Than Face-To-Face Consultations: I think this is fascinating, and look forward to seeing more research into this going forward. (I’d like to see the experiment replicated as well as a more thorough tear down of the paper, but I appreciate the research nonetheless.)
“In the medium term, online psychotherapy even yields better results. Our study is evidence that psychotherapeutic services on the internet are an effective supplement to therapeutic care.”
I’m both pleased and unsurprised by the findings, when you take into consideration some prior research that’s been done (thinking about some of the comments in the IRC Francais paper published back in 2002: I think it allowed us to get to know each other better. […] You learn about [the others] as people. We would talk about relationships and all kinds of things that you wouldn’t talk about in class.
). It helps validate my feeling that online interaction and community serve very real, very valid roles, in ways that can be just as effective (or more) as in-person interaction. That’s not to say there aren’t issues that also need to be taken into account, but there IS value there.
Toxic Communities: Behavior vs People
Toxic Behavior in League of Legends: A nice summary of some of the research coming out of Riot Games about toxic behavior in gaming communities, over at Nelson’s Weblog. You should really go read it (and watch the talk it’s based on), but the quick takeaway is: most toxic behavior comes from people who are usually upstanding community members but end up having a “bad day.” As Andy Baio points out, the solution for toxicity in your community isn’t (always) banning, but rather having moderators and community managers available to intervene and check in on users when toxic behavior first starts manifesting. (This mirrors my own observations doing community management work — the people acting out are rarely bad people, and the more you can treat them like humans having a bad day, the more you can smooth out toxic behavior before it becomes overwhelming.)
More on Cognitive Load and Decision Making
8 Things You Don’t Know Are Affecting Your Decisions Every Day: As a follow-up to the article I posted yesterday, here’s another article about cognitive load, and how we end up making worse decisions over time, over at Buffer. The more choices the user has to make, the more likely they’ll simply choose the default/easy/safe (but not necessarily correct) choice as time progresses. (Hat tip to Felicia Day for linking to it.)
Depleting Cognitive Resources
Your App Makes Me Fat: a neat essay over at Serious Pony discussing research into cognitive load and why it makes sense to avoid branding noise in your user experience.
But if it’s “content” designed solely to suck people in (“7 ways to be OMG awesome!!”) for the chance to “convert”, we’re hurting people. If we’re pumping out “content” because frequency, we’re hurting people.
Hypersigils, Identity, and the Internet
Back in 2010, I ended up having a really rewarding Twitter conversation with some very smart people, talking about hypersigils and how they apply to the internet. I’ve been thinking more about the topic lately, and wanted to expand on what was said before.
Let’s start with the term hypersigil. The term was coined by Grant Morrison, but the concept has been around for a lot longer than that. The term has a certain magickal [sic] connotation because of its origins, and I know that some folks get squicked out about that. If it makes you feel any better, just think of it as a psychological focus used to affect personal change, in the form of creating a narrative. If that’s still not enough, come up with a better term that does an even better job of wrapping a complex concept into a compact term, that does an even better job of packing loads of exformation into one word, and then popularize that instead. I’d love to hear it.
Continue reading “Hypersigils, Identity, and the Internet”
Clay Shirky's TED Talk about SOPA and PIPA
I completely agree. I also feel the online protests today are invaluable: it’s not enough to defeat these bills. We need to make it absolutely and abundantly clear that these sorts of laws are unacceptable.
I’d go farther than that, though: I sincerely hope that this pushback will cause dialogue to be opened up about revisiting the nature of intellectual property and copyright — and I mean REAL dialogue, not just specific industries with a vested interest in locking in more power and restrictions. We need to acknowledge that the idea of the Commons has grown. Scrap what we have and go in with no preconceived notions, go back to the original discussions of copyright (and patents and trademarks…) and ask the question of what exactly we need to protect and how much.
John Scalzi on Blogging
[N]o one wants to read your blog if you’re boring. You don’t have to be crazy not to be boring. You just have to be not boring. John Scalzi
Sherry Turkle on Social Media
Social media, for all of it’s bounties—and I’m very enthusiastic of all the bounties of social media—it also gives us an opportunity to hide. We perform ourselves on social media, and that is different from being ourselves on social media. That ability to perform yourself is also an ability to hide. It leads to something that I call “Fear of missing out.” You’re always watching what other people are doing and you begin to be jealous because they’re showing their best selves and you’re showing your best self. You almost become jealous of the life you live on Facebook. You have to remind yourself that it’s your life because you’re showing your best self. Sherry Turkle