This post was triggered by a comment that Jofish made where he made the claim that “Popperian science just *doesn’t* exist”. I understand where he’s coming from (especially in light of that post, where I was describing how our lives are often re-interpreted after the fact), but I believe that Karl Popper’s principle of falsifiability […]
Category: thoughts
Fractal identity
When I was reading Latour last weekend, I read the following quote: To say ‘culture forbids having kids out of wedlock’ requires, in terms of figuration, exactly as much work as saying ‘my future mother-in-law wants me to marry her daughter.’ (p. 53) Latour goes on to point out that, although it’s obvious that “culture” […]
Communities of identity
I was talking with a friend over the weekend about his workplace, and he mentioned that one of his coworkers was from MIT, and I asked where they had lived at MIT. He told me which dorm, I said “Oh, so they’re like this!”, and he said “Yup!” We both found it extremely amusing that […]
Option-full technology
This post was sparked by Jofish posting about some of the material he’s preparing for his A-exams. In particular, he’s researching the process of evaluating and measuring qualitative experiences. Examples he used to illustrate difficult-to-measure phenomena included MySpace and texting, where users are not necessarily using these technologies in any way that was originally anticipated […]
The Art of Project Management, by Scott Berkun
Amazon link I first learned of Scott Berkun last year, when I followed a link to one of his essays and found it thoughtful and well-written. I started reading his blog, joined his mailing list. and kept my eyes out for new content from him. So when I saw his book, The Art of Project […]
Mysterious connections
Jofish was visiting last week and we had a fabulous time – at one point, we ended up at the screening of a short film that starred Jofish’s friend’s coworker’s sister. Afterwards, we went out with some of the folks that had worked on the film, and they were asking us what we do, and […]
Multiple social identities
Follow-up thoughts on identity inspired by Jofish’s comment that we each have a spectrum of identities ranging from multiple personal identities to multiple public personas, and an Economist review (subscriber-only unfortunately) of Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny, by Amartya Sen (see the P.S. for a relevant quote from the review). I should have […]
Remixing the private into the social
I really like this concept of identity construction being balanced between our private conception of ourselves, and the public perception of who we are. There are a bunch of obvious consequences that fall out of that split. For instance, when one’s desire to be maintain a certain social identity is strong, it can overwhelm one’s […]
Direct from Dell, by Michael Dell
Amazon link I was kind of skeptical of this book when Joel handed it to me, but it was surprisingly good. It doesn’t have any original ideas, and didn’t change how I think, but the book was well-written (apparently by Catherine Fredman) and did a good job of describing how Dell had taken some basic […]
Identity Construction
I finally got around to reading Jofish’s CHI paper on archives a couple days ago, and an observation that really struck me was that one of the goals of archiving is identity construction. In other words, they observed that some people collected books and papers not to read them or use them, but merely to […]
