Social media is like...

Speaking of metaphors (now that I've just been reading Sylvia Scribner's "Literacy in Three Metaphors" article in ED140 recently, I was struck by the article in the Chronicle of Higher Education's recent Wired Campus blog, "Professor Challenges Students to Turn Off, Tune Out, Drop In". Apparently, Trinity Western University professor Robert P. Doede, who teaches philosophy, challenged students in his "Issues and Ethics" class to stay off traditional and new media, including TV and of course social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

The article goes on to talk about students' reactions to this challenge, and of course while I wondered (while writing this blog post) whether I'd be able to do such a thing, I was struck by the metaphors that were used to illustrate the giving up of media in one's life. Is checking e-mail like eating that frozen yogurt, you know, the kind that you just have to have? Yogurt Park, anyone? Is using Facebook like taking a drug?

Or, to put it more directly, is media a drug that we take, or a food that we eat? Do we taste, consume, ingest, and digest the networked media in our lives?

This passage, quoting professor Doede, is interesting to me in how it uses the language of "fasting" and "addiction", suggesting these organic metaphors may be right on:

“Most who do take on the fast begin their journals confessing that, though they have invested more time in these technologies than they feel good about, they doubt that they will find it all that difficult to complete the fast,” he says. And nearly all the students who keep up the fast until the course ends conclude that they used to be addicted. “It's interesting to identify in their journals some of the tell-tale symptoms of addiction withdrawal,” he says.

So maybe social media really is like...a chocolate cake donut with colored sprinkles dipped in Peet's coffee? Man, I'm getting hungry.

Cutting along the bias

It’s funny how translation can bring to light meanings in familiar words that you never knew were there. The last few days, I’ve been working on a document in Japanese—or, I guess “document” might be too formal a term. It’s an advertisement for a thermal blanket with different layers that are supposed to retain the heat, while being light and compact.

Not having much experience with sewing and fabrics and clothing and the like (yet another area where modern people depend on the collective achievements of humanity for the fundamentals of daily life), I came to a halt when I got to the line that described what color the blanket is:

ホワイト、バイヤス／オレンジ

I could read “white” and “orange”—both of these are used as-is in Japanese, phonetic transliterations of the English color words, most often (in my experience at least) used to describe the colors of non-Japanese objects, things, etc.: Howaito. Orenji.

But what was the term in the middle? Written in the katakana syllabary, which is commonly employed to represent borrowed words from English and other non-Chinese languages, “baiyasu” had an English ring to it. Bayas? Byeas? Not really knowing how to read the slash separating it from the color word orenji, I assumed baiyasu must be some kind of color word too.

But no. A quick search in the dictionary revealed the word “bias”, whose first definition in the dictionary was not the familiar “tendency toward a particular ideology or world-view”. The “bias” is, in woven fabrics, the direction at a 45-degree angle to the fibers of the cloth, the “cross-grain”. Fabrics tend to stretch more easily along the bias, Wikipedia told me, and clothing designers used this property to their advantage in designing more form-fitting clothes with the “bias-cut”.

なるほど。Although the origins of this word might not have anything to do with the more familiar (to me) meaning, the two couldn’t help but play off each other in my mind; the fabric bias suddenly becomes the source domain of a metaphor for understanding one person’s bias about, what else, other people.

Why should the bias be a different color, I wondered? Is the bias the dividing line between white and orange in this layered thermal blanket? How could it divide two colors from each other, when the fabric’s bias is just a direction that exists everywhere fibers intersect at a 90-degree angle? It shouldn’t be a visible line in itself, should it?

Somehow, though, it started to make sense. The social fabric we make together might be like the fabric we wear after all: easier to stretch, and more easily manipulable along the bias that exists in every place that two threads intersect, the place where two trajectories cross.

And somehow it’s comforting to know that anyone who wears clothes is covered in biases most of the time. I just wish they were a little easier to see.

Wordcamp 2009...the backend

So I'm sitting in the Mission Bay Convention Center right now, listening to Matt Mullenburg, leader of Wordpress in his Q&A session at the massively-attended WordCamp in San Francisco. And there are whole lot of bloggers here, doing their blogging thing, and more knowledgeable about all things blogry that I'll have little hope of ever comprehending. So instead of trying to address the 'technical' side of the conference, here are some of the lighter highlights from the 'backend' (backside):

• Hey, I finally learned how to pronounced "Akismet"!! (a-KIZ-met, the anti-spam plugin that's standard on Wordpress blogs)
• There was this cool moment when everyone squeaked their chairs at once. Even the people checking their email and updating their twitter and not really listening to Matt.

And some key quotes of the day:

• "Passion beats polling and focus groups"
• "Every single byte counts"