Boyhood.

Tue, 8 Dec 2009
2 min read
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Sounds familiar, though it is a story that is not entirely of my telling.

The rule is that when you have been absent from school, you have to bring a letter of excuse. He knows his mother’s standard letter by heart: “Please excuse John’s absence yesterday. He was suffering from a bad cold, and I thought it advisable for him to stay in bed. Yours faithfully.” He hands in these letters, which his mother writes as lies and which are read as lies, with an apprehensive heart.

When at the end of the year he counts the days he has missed, they come to almost one in three. Yet he still comes first in class. The conclusion he draws is that what goes on in the classroom is of no importance. He can always catch up at home. If he had his way, he would stay away from school all year, making an appearance only to write the examinations.

Nothing his teachers say is not already written in the textbook. He does not look down on them for that, nor do the other boys. In fact, he does not like it when, now and then, a teacher’s ignorance is exposed.

— Boyhood by J.M. Coetzee, pp. 107 – 108.

Speaking in hushed tones.

Wed, 7 Oct 2009
3 min read
2 Comments

Something I’ve been thinking about recently – it’d be nice if developers at Facebook, Twitter, etc. came up with options to allow users to streamline their messages so that users can decide which messages they want to broadcast (general audience) or conversely, narrow-cast (specified audience).

I know someone is going to attempt to rebutt this idea by saying something along the lines of “But Twitter allows you to protect your feed” or “But Facebook allows you to create privacy settings”.

Well, that’s not what I’m talking about.

The features I mentioned above are very ‘all or nothing’ in that we only have the options of saying something to everyone or saying nothing at all, when in essence, we might be in situations where we want to say a particular something to a certain group of people at a certain point in time.

Let me illustrate with the example of my Facebook profile. My profile is protected in the following ways:

  • Only ‘friends’ can see my entire profile, so you’ve got to add me as a friend before you can view my profile, and
  • Only people who aren’t on my Limited Profile can see my status updates.

Now, let’s say I want to post something about work on my status. The colleagues whom I’ve added as friends can normally see my status updates. However, this time round I might  feel that this particular status update isn’t something I want my colleagues to see, perhaps because I’m afraid they might ‘view’ me in a certain way after they’ve read what I’ve said.

At this point, I’d like to be able to have an option whereby I can decide: alright, let’s publish this status message, but let’s exclude this person and that person from knowing about it, for the reason I’ve mentioned above.

Think about my idea this way – it’s the digital equivalent of speaking in hushed tones in the office, so that you get to control who gets to listen in to what you want to say, and who doesn’t.

At this point, someone else is probably gonna ask: “What about using private messages then?”

Well, private messages are precisely that – private. They have a different social connotation from status messages i.e. we’d only use private messages if the information was strictly meant for private consumption. In a face-to-face context, it’s the equivalent of whispering – and whispering to a few hundred individuals at one go doesn’t really make sense, does it?

So I think it’d be nice if social networking tools could start to reflect some of the nuances in face-to-face communication/social interaction that haven’t been duplicated in the digital arena yet. It’s probably one of the issues that will mark the next step forward in the evolution of the Web 2.0 landscape.