I am puzzled by Facebook’s comparative lack of way to filter and organize your FB experience, specifically the central News Feed feature.  It essentially uses opaque, automatic methods to construct a quite filtered News Feed for you, out of many sources.  There are just a few, on/off user controls such as choosing to block particular apps or completely defriend people.   In the past they tried things like Lists (groups), and  “less of this” controls, but these features are either dead or largely unused.

The non-uptake of those past features may suggest that users generally don’t want or can’t be bothered to do “filtering” and such management tasks.  (much like how, as the software-design maxim says, at least 95% of people never change any default settings).

On other hand, perhaps FB just didn’t figure out the right way to give users filtering powers, and so it’s failing to serve many people who are tired of the unfilterable mess, or who don’t even consider using the service for that reason.  (long before FB reaches its goal of signing up everyone on earth, they’ll have to convince some billions of skeptical middle-adopters, i.e. most people, that it’s not just an unending stream of trivial tidbits which they don’t have time or interest for).

Personally, I think that better, user-controlled filtering can and must be achieved.  You often hear that Facebook “got it right”, i.e. social networking, after Friendster, Myspace, etc. failed.  But to me that shows a limited imagination, or historical sense.  I believe Facebook’s grand social experiment, fascinating as it been, has hardly mapped or mastered the potentials of social networking.  Google’s grand entrance into the space, Google+, will put a spotlight on that.

In fact, it seems to me this is a gaping wide opportunity for a competitor such as Google+.  Consider, there is a FB group, “Facebook, give us a ‘dislike’ button”, that’s existed for years and currently has 495,290 members.   (https://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=50153652583).  A half million users both annoyed and geeky enough to protest for a filtering feature!

It seems an obvious feature, yet various theories abound as to why Facebook won’t ever do it.   Some think that networking is inherently positive, i.e. is always link *building* rather than narrowing.  Others say the big FB would never allow such a capacity for public, negative feedback to afflict the corporations and brands upon which its monetization ambitions depend.

As to whether “Dislike” could get adopted by a mass user base, one problem is that although it the term is an obvious inversion of the existing “Like”, the meaning is ambiguous.   If a wall post reports that, e.g. New Jersey has voted to limit public employee’s collective bargaining, does a “Dislike” vote mean that you don’t like what New Jersey did, or that you think the FB user’s post was uninteresting / inappropriate?  Some people understand “Dislike” to mean comiseration with the post, some disapproval of the post.

Personally, I would suggest not only a “dislike” button (anonymous), but a user-set option to allow anonymous commenting.  (anonymous limited to those in your friend network).   Therefore, those users who wish to improve their Facebook posting manners, and learn what their friends actually find uninteresting or in poor taste etc., could do so.  This could be a quite socially educational, even *genteel* influence upon the chaos that Facebook can be today — a curious mixture of interesting, diverting, salacious, braggardly, irrelevant, tiresome, proselytizing, and oblivious (e.g. auto-posting your every pointless and contextless Tweet remark, or location check-in).

Facebook experience today.. a party to which not quite the right people showed up, with a few too many shouters and drunks, just not quite bad enough to leave?  yet.

The library said to be the greatest of all ancient Egypt was that of Ramses II — the Ozymandias of Shelley’s poem. It was built and assembled as part of his burial complex, and may not have long outlasted his death. (Lerner, 2009; Quibell, 1896). It was not built for the living, let along for the public. Just an example of how most libraries, throughout human history, have been quite different than the present-day public library model.
[testing post-by-email to WordPress].

the “Walkstation”, from Steelcase.  starting at $4,399.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how to unplug, particularly from desktop computer use.  I’m long inured to epic computer sessions — many-houred trance states, almost. Some people can go for 24 hours or more at this with just snack breaks, which can’t be good.

For many reasons, especially health in all forms.  As discussed in the recent NY Times article “Is Sitting a Lethal Activity”, new research suggests there may be a huge health issue caused by pervasive unhealthy sitting postures, and computer-use postures, and just the fact of pervasive *sitting* at all;  it may be a prime factor in the incidence of obesity in our society.  The article focuses on obesity and related issues, but in addition there’s the millions of cases of repetitive-stress injury, and who knows what in eyestrain, general stress, back problems, and general unhappiness.

I have a pet analogy:  in earlier times, scientists and technicians working on atomic energy projects would walk around carrying unshielded radioactive materials;  factory workers painting watch faces with radioactive luminous paint would routinely lick their brushes to sharpen them;  nobody knew, or knew for sure, that these were deadly activities, until the workers began to die of cancer at epidemic rates.

Likewise, I imagine that decades from now, people will look back at our time and be horrified that once, hundreds of millions of people in (mainly the rich) world would sit in a chair for 10-15 hours a day, directly in front of a monitor, typing or using a mouse.   They’ll say, but how could they have gone so long and not seen the correlation to ….  cancer rates. or perhaps epidemic obesity and metabolic disorders, or pervasive developmental and mental disorders like ADHD,  etc.   I know the bulk of humanity aren’t office drones, and may have other, more prosaic concerns such as lack of clean water, or AIDS,  but let’s focus on the leading-edge first world for now.

The obesity and developmental-disorders problems mentioned might more likely correlate to television watching.. but maybe the office computer is like a workplace version of television, from a health standpoint:  a great vegetating, obesity-generating, mind-numbing force.

Anyway so here are just some ideas, mine and others’, of ways large and small, symbolic and real, to reconnect virtual (inside your computer) with real world.

1) Weather webcam:  bring the weather / street to your desktop
Set up webcam at your office building, pointing outwards to show weather, daylight level, and street life.  (if you hopefully have street life, and haven’t been virtualized away to a lifeless office park or campus).  Then, on employees’ computers, set the default wallpaper  (desktop background) to be an regularly-updating view from the webcam — there are various free programs to do this. The reason is obvious:  in a lot of offices, a lot of people are getting very little natural light, or cue as to what’s going on outside.   I’ve thought about this one for year and years, since way back when I first worked in a cubicle in the ’70s.  But I haven’t heard of it being done anywhere.

2) Social webcam:  bring the lobby / atrium / cafe / bar to your desktop (a social variation on #1):
Set up or designate some communal social space — e.g. a break room or lobby area or part of the cafeteria — and designate it “live”.  Set up webcam onto this space.  Feed webcam stream into default employees’ computer wallpaper.  So, you can have some remote connection to who is hanging out, you can perhaps join your friends if you see them there, and you can go there yourself and have more chance of running into your friends.

A more public version of this is the bar or cafe that sets up a webcam and puts it on the Web, so presumably you can check out who’s there before coming down.  This used to be done occasionally, back in the day when webcams were relatively new.   Obviously, privacy concerns arise, so I think the practice faded.  I don’t know if anyone tried what I was thinking of, visibly designating just part of the venue as “live”.

3) Standing meetings
Borrowing a technique from agile software development, do meetings standing up when possible. Not only does it help keep meetings quick and focused, but it keeps people’s bodies in motion, and works against the relapsing into Blackberry / smartphone or even laptop use that can happen during a sit-down meeting.

4) Treadmill workstations
Actually quite simple:  mount a desktop over a treadmill, walk while you work.  These exist, are in production from leading office-furniture company Steelcase: the “Walkstation”, from Steelcase.  starting at $4,399.  (see photo at top of post).  The ones that exist are made for office environments, thus presumably walking, but I’ve been thinking I could really enjoy something like this at the gym.  Rather than five TV channels of trash that I have to choose from now, I’d be most happy if I could carry on my preferred news-reading, Web video-watching, Wikipedia-reading, and general Web foraying, while running or bicycling.  I see an opportunity for high-end, professionals-oriented gyms here.

The treadmill workstation (right, the vendors don’t call them “treadmills”, but I will) is greatly ironic:  it’s like a comically absurd symbolization of the modern office worker as poorhouse drone;  but in fact, might be a great gift to the employee.  Yes, and gift of employer to itself, by reducing health-care costs and health-related productivity loss.

5) Office computers that make you take breaks
Set up office computers so that every so often, say every two hours, the system will gently log you out for ten minutes or so.  It will be unavailable for that time, so you may as well take a power nap, do you calisthenics routine, or walk around the block once or twice.

Ok, there are some practical issues like not interrupting you if you’re on a conference call or Webinar, etc., but it can be worked out.  Perhaps, you can get a button to override for one hour, or the logout won’t happen during scheduled critical times.

6) Office computers that make you take musical chairs breaks
In offices where workstations and seating positions are relatively interchangeable, and people use thin terminals (i.e. their files and programs are on the network drive, not local), periodically the computers log everyone off for a period (as in #5).  However, in this version, the twist is that after ten minutes, your session with your open files and programs will become reavailable on a different workstation somewhere in the office. After doing your power nap or coffee break, you have to find out where in the office you’ve been transferred, which involves a fun game of everyone roaming around shouting out who’s where.  Then, you have to adjust your body to the chair settings, monitor position, different lamp, etc., of the workstation’s prior user.  Hilarious!  Alright this isn’t quite serious but the point here is to make us think people.

7) Shifty office furniture
The recent Mayo Clinic research from that NY Times article tells us that unchanging, sedentary body positions greatly impact our metabolisms.  Common sense and experience tells us that an unchanging position in a chair, or craning at a screen, is uncomfortable.  Yet, unchange and crane we do, as the research shows.  Concentration apparently immobilizes people, and so we really ought to keep changing our positions.  But why rely on us to remember to move, when we have machines to be clever like that?

So, the monitor:  mine, for example, sits on a little platform I made that rolls easily in all directions and fits the keyboard in underneath.  It would be quite simple to make a monitor stand (hello, Steelcase!) that was like this but had a few little motors attached to the rollers and randomly timed such that once in a while, it would gently slide left or right or forward six inches.

More sophisticated applications of this idea would be monitor arms that changed positions, or adjustable-height desks that changed.  You could also put your lamp on a timer so it would periodically conk out, and you’d be forced to get up to reset it.  (I know, neither your cubicle / table segment nor mine are big enough to require any “getting up” to change the lamp;  or, also bad, there is no lamp that you have any control over, just totalitarian ceiling fluorescents or whatever.  So plug something in whose outage will cause a reaction.  We’re just trying to get metabolism into the work environment, however how).

8) Change up the form factor:  smartphone, tablet, wallscreen
Different computing devices pull people into different physical positions and activities; and the more mobile a device, obviously the more it can be used embedded in the world
When people started using and got used to smartphones, especially the iPhone, often they were and are surprised to learn how many formerly “computer” tasks can actually be done with it.  Particularly with a beautifully-designed implement like the iPhone, people become attached to it in a way that they don’t generally feel about a desktop PC, and they want to use it instead of the PC, even perhaps for, say, tasks that seem to be large-screen oriented.

I find that I’ll walk over to my desk to check email, and pick up my iPhone to check on it rather than looking at the desktop PC.  The phone, I pick up and hold in just the position most comfortable to how I’m standing;  the PC demands that I stoop to it.  It’s like the old distinction between “lean forward” technology such as the PC and “lean back” technology such as the television.

Likewise, a common experience with the new tablet computers (led by Apple’s iPad) is to feel released from the desktop, or even a desk/table (i.e. as laptops are typically used on), and find oneself using it on the couch, in bed, or in new places on the go.

More speculatively, I also imagine devices / interfaces becoming widely available that are wall- or room-sized.  As perhaps most famously imagined in the 2002 movie Minority Report, in which the detective played by Tom Cruise uses a special room filled with panels of transparent LED displays, controlled by laser mice in his gloves, to rapidly explore ream of image and database data about his suspect.

(See Minority Report science adviser and inventor John Underkoffler demoing his current version of this at a 2010 TED event).  Note, in both cases, the user is standing up, and making significant body motions (arms) to work the display;  also, there is a social component, because the operator’s activity is displayed large enough for colleagues or an audience to watch and participate.

Yes, many of these design ideas have been villified by other interface designers as unusable, clueless fantasies.  Yet I can imagine the room-as-interface (what Underkoffler calls the “luminous room” concept) having important applications.  For example, in collaborative meetings and videoconferences, where groups of people must gather a lot of visual materials, brainstorm, decide, perhaps working from far-separated geographic locations.  Or, educational software (including training materials, in the corporate context) that employs large-scale interfaces — and perhaps gamification (use of game-play mechanics) — for a more effective and healthy whole-body experience.

Some of the above techniques assume that computer immersion is a problem requiring interruption.  Others propose integrating motion into immersive computer activity.  Ultimately I think the latter has more potential, because obviously it’s not disrupting the user’s concentration.  It suggests a new definition of unplugging:  being plugged in to the computer while still thoroughly plugged in to your body and the physical world.

Unexpectedly, there is a lovely and funny foodie moment in the 1973 dystopian sci-fi Soylent Green, with Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson. (based upon the 1966 novel Make Room! Make Room!, by Harry Harrison).  In a fictional world where there is almost no real food, the two characters stumble into a bit of it and turn it into a comically rapturous feast: Soylent Green lunch scene on YouTube. (2:09).

The film is set in NYC in 2020, where 40 million mostly starving and desperate dwellers fight for their food rations.  Environmental devastation has largely destroyed the food supply, so people live on Soylent brand food cakes, said to be made of plankton and vegetable extracts.

In this scene, Heston and his elderly roommate (played by Robinson) sit down to a meal Robinson has prepared from some precious “real food” that Heston has stolen from a crime scene earlier.  Robinson brushes aside the plastic fork Heston has taken out, and instead proffers a treasured single set of real metal cutlery from an old leather case.  Old school.

Then begins a meal of a piece of lettuce each, a tiny saucepan of beans or stew, and two small apples.

In a balletic interaction over a soundrack of chamber music, in a conversation wordless but for appreciative grunts and noises, we see Heston discover the miracle of real food for the first time (literally), including (almost) how to shine and eat an apple.   Robinson goes from rapt anticipation, to ecstatic imbibing, to astonished recognition, to imploring Heston’s shared appreciation, to mellow afterglow, on one lettuce leaf. Both men are transported by their tiny serving of beans.

It does inspire one to enjoy the bounteous and exquisite world of real food that we have.

Soylent Green lunch scene on YouTube. (2:09)

[if you got this by email, and it’s garbled or missing images, please try reading it at https://tjm.org/2011/03/29/snobbery-filtering-for-email-overload].

Oh Gmail.  We’ve come a long ways, over the years.  I shared with you my deepest secrets, you gave me filters and keyboard shortcuts and Gmail Labs.  I love you.. but darling, you must, you MUST, you must stop constantly introducing me to your random uncouth friends.

Thackeray, The Book of Snobs (1848) Ch.3 engraving

Dear, it’s called a boundary.  I will entertain, I will invite in our friends and acquaintances of quality; but I will not live outside in the gutter.  I expect there are some very nice persons among your.. people, but the rule simply must be, I shall invite chosen acquaintances to my home;  rather than having all comers wandering in through our wide-open front door, and using the facilities.  I cannot be spending my time sorting through this horde of interlopers, and worse, having to strain and scheme trying to force this human muck back out the door, an effort often futile and unchaste.

Accordingly, I must ask that from now on we observe certain standards.  Such as, oh, DOORS:  unless I invite in one of your people, he shall remain firmly outside.  Further, in these mixed and foul times, we must insist that anyone whom we have not chosen to address, shall have no claim upon us, nor shall we look upon them or deign to hear them, unless we so decide.

. . . . . . . .

Analogously to the indignant lady-of-the-house speaking above, maintaining a proper household, I’ve been thinking about the perennial problem of how to block unwanted strangers (or acquaintances) from your inbox.  Typical email systems have a presumption of validity, delivering any email that is not filtered out e.g. as spam (which, of course, follows the normal practice of pre-digital mail systems, that basically, deliver to you whatever has been mailed to you).

If, on the other hand, you accept mail only from pre-approved senders, you have a “whitelist” or “trusted sender” system. This takes a less democratic or trusting view: that anyone not my friend or acquaintance is presumptively, my enemy.

Given the “toilet that is email”, as a friend aptly put it, my suggested approach is what I’ll call Snobbery Filtering, a derived, exclusive, whitelist system:

1. exclusive whitelist in that only mail from whitelist senders is accepted; strangers are preemptively diverted;
2. derived, in that whitelist is mainly inferred from to whom I’ve sent email

So, concretely:

1) In my Inbox, show me only email from addresses which:

a) I have previously sent email to  (spoken to…); or
b) I have manually whitelisted, i.e. designated as a permitted sender. (see 2) below).

2) For all other email, divert to either

a) a Holding folder, where mail can be periodically reviewed and the sender tagged as whitelist or blacklist; or
b) a Spam folder for anything that triggers general or personal spam filters.

It seems too simple, yet it seems like the above Snobbery Filtering would address the key problems that most people have with the medium.  I really can’t figure (without more research..) why this is not widely implemented and available. I’d be happy to turn it on for my email:  despite years of frustrating filtering effort, there are still rubes walking through my (inbox) living room with muddy boots, regularly.

Maybe people too often do want to invite strangers in;  or perhaps it’s that such filtering requires a lot of calculation — examining each email relative to each addressee, rather than just examining the message in isolation.  But computer power is ever cheaper, and I think a bit more of it to keep strangers out of my living room is a no-brainer.

I know there have been various related efforts in the past, such as restricting incoming mail to senders in your Contacts list (AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail? one or more of them), but it’s never seemed to be implemented well enough to be adopted on a large scale, that I know of. For one thing, your set of accepted senders is not synonymous with your Contacts list — we have aggravating, chain-letter-sending cousins, and we have newsletters we want that aren’t sent by a “Contact”.

Plugins like Xobni, or enterprise mail filtering services like Postini probably use something like Snobbery Filtering as a factor, but as far as I know they still work mainly via probabilistic rules, not a solid “front door”.  In all, I’ve never used a consumer or corporate mail system that wasn’t obviously, if occasionally, letting in strangers.

Thackeray - The Book of Snobs - XXVI - page_99

Gmail’s recently-launched Priority Inbox feature aims to do filtering something like what I’ve described, and I’ve been testing it out. But, not surprisingly for a Google service, it is algorithmic, i.e. is about “training” various rules to identify Important mail.  Unfortunately, you as user are enlisted in this “training” efforts — so we now seem back to the presumption of email validity (show mail to addressee unless it is filtered as spam or, in this case, as not Important).  It’s still letting a lot of people in to your house, off the street, and asking you to throw out the ones you don’t like.

Then there is filtering by your ISP (Internet Service Provider).  This is a bit like a security post at the entrance to your subdivision or private street, looking out for ne’er-do-wells.  It might be helpful, but on one hand, you can’t trust it enough that you’ll leave your house’s front door open; and on the other hand, some of your friends you do want to visit might get hassled or shut out by the guard.

Also, bad guys, or salesman, might bribe the security gatesman.  That’s the case where a large-scale email sender, e.g. marketer, makes a deal with an ISP to let its email through.  In a widely controversial 2006 case, AOL and Yahoo made a deal to use Goodmail Systems’ CertifiedEmail system such that mail from senders who prepaid 1/4 cent per message would be delivered directly to users’ mailboxes without being subject to spam filters.

Well so much for your ISP preventing spam!  It turns out, they may have an interest not only in letting in spam, but in overriding your local spam barriers!   The gatesman might not only take bribes for letting unscrupulous salesmen through, but he might give the salesmen keys to your house.

So, we are back to our Snobbery Filtering — simple, user-centered, and under our control.  What interests me really is, how much of email’s main problems, for how many people, could be addressed with Snobbery Filtering?  As compared to the far more complicated systems used by Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, Gmail, etc.?  Or, how many people might prefer this arrangement than their present one?

I think email services should have, long ago, built and evolved trusted-sender systems like this.  The services seem to have settled on aiming for mostly right, and for thinking mostly in terms of spam vs. non-spam, rather than in terms of filtering by use of discoverable social relations — e.g. deriving filters from your email usage patterns.  To me it is quite remarkable that only now has Gmail come out with their Priority Inbox feature, which takes a Snobbery approach — think if they’d launched it five years ago and actually product-developed it until now, to learn all the nuances of how to do it well.

"the 'Gmail Killer' Facebook Email system...replaces the internal message system and now incorporates emails, Facebook messages, SMS, other chat clients....will also feature the Social Inbox."

Unfortunately, while email services have been fiddling, Rome has burned:  much of the online world’s momentum is moving to trusted, comparatively closed systems such as text messaging, Twitter, and Facebook.  There, for the most part, one deigns to communicate to people;  rather than they deigning to walk right into your inbox, right in your front door. However, these systems lack many of the virtues of traditional emails:  inherent opennness to all comers, transparent technical standards, extensibility to all computing environments, etc., which made email the greatest universal medium ever.

But a tide is turning:  already, plenty of people I know are not reachable reliably or at all via traditional email;  they are, by Facebook or Twitter or SMS.

Email was an exercise in democracy that, for many people, has failed — in large part, for its lack of manners, its social mixing of friend and stranger:  in short, its lack of snobbery.  To maintain this world-changing and essential medium, what we need is renewed separation between the classes, and widespread unkindness to strangers.

…

Images:  W.M. Thackeray, wood engravings for his The Book of Snobs (1st edition,1848).  scan of book copy from the Bodleian Library, Oxford; via Google Books, France.

I admire this cover design (above left) for Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget, Vintage paperback edition 2011.  It uses the familiar “tag cloud” design to convey author, title, promo blurb (in blue) and subject matter (grey).  Has someone else done this for a book cover?  It seems almost obvious, in retrospect, since we see tag clouds all the time;  yet here it seems fresh, clever, and effective.  It’s a common observation about well-designed things, I think — that they’re obvious (and obviously good), but only in retrospect.  The “why didn’t I think of that” phenomenon.

I also like the cover (above center) of the “Hard-Cover – Text Only” edition (whatever that is).   It cleverly invokes the visual language of circuitry and of digital pushbuttons, i.e.  the visual methods of signifying depth on a flat screen, by outlining, shadowing, etc.

Not to mention, the UK hardcover cover (above right): which has popped up on many designs sites online.  The whole cover is a real-size reproduction of a Kindle-like e-book reader, with the opening  paragraph of the book showing.

Amazon has an interesting interview with Lanier, on the book page:

“Question: In You Are Not a Gadget, you argue that idea that the collective is smarter than the individual is wrong. Why is this?

“There are some cases where a group of people can do a better job of solving certain kinds of problems than individuals. One example is setting a price in a marketplace. [….] There are other cases that involve creativity and imagination. A crowd process generally fails in these cases. The phrase “Design by Committee” is treated as derogatory for good reason. That is why a collective of programmers can copy UNIX [to make Linux] but cannot invent the iPhone.

“In the book, I go into considerably more detail about the differences between the two types of problem solving. Creativity requires periodic, temporary “encapsulation” as opposed to the kind of constant global openness suggested by the slogan “information wants to be free.” Biological cells have walls, academics employ temporary secrecy before they publish, and real authors with real voices might want to polish a text before releasing it. In all these cases, encapsulation is what allows for the possibility of testing and feedback that enables a quest for excellence. To be constantly diffused in a global mush is to embrace mundanity.”

complete interview.

http://www.amazon.com/You-Gadget-first-Text-Only/dp/B004P5BF3M/?tag=provisliteraclas

bonus points:  to what Ohio-based band’s first album title does this post’s title allude?