Technology for Humans

I have recently found myself a bit irritated by the way that current “web 2.0” startups are playing in people’s lives. This isn’t a, “technologists are evil and are trying to monopolize all our time” rant, but rather different: Is this it?

We have built these fabulous machines, and now, finally, some of us have begun to comprehend how they think — not in an empathic way, but an understanding of the abilities and limits these machines possess. This isn’t an easy faculty: the data junkies at Walmart process whether their ability to tell if you’re pregnant is scary for you, or Facebook engineers wonder where the line is between “creepy” and “expected,” once our own thinking is circumnavigated by the logic of machines, it’s difficult to see backwards through the eyes of the naïve. They have come to terms with the fact that machines will never think like we do, and we will never think like machines do. The conception of AI as a human actor is a 20th century anachronism; gone with it are those expectations in what we construct, and the futures we move towards. We recognize these machines will never be able to love, to prefer, to want, and so we go about hacking heuristics, ways for these machines to become things we can talk to, that can think, and can pass judgement for us.

It appears that we have not given up on this vision of computing in a very fundamental manner, neither in the mainstream, popular culture, nor the Ivory Towers, nor the meeting rooms of Silicon Valley. We have found that quantifying the essence of things is impossible — we can quantify price and size and weight, but how do we quantify all the pseudo-metrics along which we judge objects? Instead, we attempt to quantify humanity through technology: Which humans are like which others? If a human likes this object, will they like this object? If a human has this set of behaviors, what are they likely to do next? When we say “machine learning,” these are the sorts of questions the machines are learning to answer.

This seems to be what the world thinks of when we remember Steve Jobs’ infamous quote, “[The computer is] the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.”

Think about that interpretation for a minute: We believe in the computer as something that thinks, and seeks, for us. This is not all that dissimilar from how Vannevar Bush viewed machines in his seminal essay, As We May Think in, oh, 1945!

Really!?

1945.

Really?!

Have we not learned anything in 67 years?

But what if it’s not so much about the computer making our steps more efficient, but rather, the places that we can get to on a bike?

Our approach was very different from what they called “office automation,” which was about automating the paperwork of secretaries. That became the focus of Xerox PARC in the ’70s. They were quite amazed that they could actually get text on the screen to appear the way it would when printed by a laser printer. Sure, that was an enormous accomplishment, and understandably it swayed their thinking. They called it “what you see is what you get” editing, or WYSIWYG. I say, yeah, but that’s all you get. Once people have experienced the more flexible manipulation of text that NLS allows, they find the paper model restrictive.

We weren’t interested in “automation” but in “augmentation.” We were not just building a tool, we were designing an entire system for working with knowledge. Automation means if you’re milking a cow, you get a tool that will milk it for you. But to augment the milking of a cow, you invent the telephone. The telephone not only changes how you milk, but the rest of the way you work as well. It touches the entire process. It was a paradigm shift.

Doug Engelbart

I don’t have a problem with automation. I think it’s wonderful. But I’m sitting here in the valley watching start up after start up churn out bicycle after bicycle, watching them construct evermore ways to fine-tune our lives as they are, we’re having a hard time busting open the city walls, realizing that we can and should be traveling to entirely new places. We have a symbiotic relationship with computers, and that’s something that we just have to accept. But, that doesn’t mean that we can just let computers leech more and more from our worlds, we need to start leeching from theirs.

It starts with realizing the simple value in that — realizing that technologies can make us more human, not less. I adore Sep Kamvar’s latest work, Mastery, and point to this:

The flipside was that the applications themselves were underwhelming. Most of them allowed users to do things like rank the attractiveness of their friends, send virtual hugs and have virtual pillow fights. The substance of the applications reflected what the metric left out. If it were possible to measure the value of a user’s attention, or how enriching an application is to her life, the course projects would likely have been quite different. But sometimes, the important things can’t be measured.

When I hear this, I can’t help but think to myself, “this is what a machine would do.” What are “virtual hugs” except an attempt to quantify the ultimate unquanitifiable, human affection? With the rise of the social web, in particular, we are so busy attempting to quantify and automate, that we forget that at the heart of this thing lies the human, a thing of follies and feelings and adoration and hatred. I have heard a cognitive scientist or two say that the conception of the human mind is driven by the technology of the day — Homo economicus isn’t just something that exists with economists, but something that has slowly slipped into popular culture, as we conceptualize ourselves this way more and more.

But we know now that this is false — these computers will never think like us, and we will never think like them. So where can we get together? Two things:

  1. The use of cyberspace
  2. The use of technology and cyberspace in the physical world

Firstly, cyberspace is a wonderful, wonderful place, full of things that just possibly couldn’t have existed before. It is full of ponies and unicorns and MAGIC! But in all seriousness, this isn’t just odd subcultures. This is a celebration of humanity, in all it’s strangeness. Technology, at it’s best, is something that gets us to see the world differently, and not in a New Aesthetic type lens, but in the way that it enables us to scale distances effortlessly, to release pieces of our own creativity and imagination that we never knew, and see humanity as a diverse and thriving cesspool. Computers have created a global urbanism.

We are so busy crying foul at the way that computers have made us think like them, have chipped away at our humanity, and caused a “flight from conversation”, that we don’t realize the immense opportunity in front of us. We have got to start taking cyberspace seriously. “IRL” is one fantastic source of relationships and richness, but “URL” is another opportunity for enrichment and giving. I find the person who spends their entire life sheltered from this fantastic place as depressing and sad as you find the person who spends their entire life in front of the computer. When I think of cyberspace, and I think of the places it takes me, I think of Github, and DeviantArt, and Wattpad. These are outpourings of human creativity and ability, and we desperately need more.

We cannot afford to attempt to commodify conversation, either. Increasingly, it is machines that are shifting through the cruft of Twitter, taking away its tradition as an open, talkative space, and replacing it as simply another way of ranking and finding information. The same goes for Facebook.

Secondly, the use of technology in the real world is truly getting somewhere interesting. The rise of custom manufacturing and DIY is bringing toolkits of immense flexibility to the average person’s hands. Tools like Makerbot, Arduino, and Techshop are just the first iteration, as we begin to explore what a world where the objects around us are not centrally designed and manufactured, but rather, reflect the true diversity of the populace. These objects will not just be useful, or self-expression appropriated from others’ vision, but rather, reflections of our own creativity and being. When we interface with the work of designers, we will do so not just as consumers, but rather, co-creators. In many ways, these objects will be even more human than when we built these objects on our own, because these objects will be social. These objects will be a conversation between designers, as socially influenced as our own thoughts.

Collaborative consumption is one of those buzzwords people have slowly fallen in love with — we’re sharing cars! Textbooks! Clothes! But that’s not very interesting to me; it strikes me once again as the “computing mindset” clouding our thoughts. Are goods the most interesting thing we have to offer one another? There’s a second type of collaborative consumption that begins to use the power of technology to connect people in more meaningful ways. The collaborative consumption poster child, AirBnB was driven by this, partially. The stories you hear aren’t just about visiting some place else, but rather, experiencing another person’s world. I believe this is the kind of motivation of startups like Kitchensurfing, Indiegogo, and HowAboutWe. These startups are ones that from the get go, struck me as being very human. Their humanity is enhanced by the way they embrace technology, not detracted from. Specifically, they bring things into our real-world interactions that are far more enriching because of the way technology has been used to streamline the interaction: never before could I sift through things so quickly, looking for the things that truly inspire me.

This is not an attempt to say that the things that all of the things that are being done shouldn’t be done, by any means. I appreciate the computing, seeking, and thinking that machines have begun to do for me. But we’ve got to realize that this isn’t the most exciting technology is offering us. To make technology truly rewarding, we’ve got to realize our differences, and find a way to create a relationship that highlights what both partners are good at. I also truly believe that this is the technology that will win in the long run as well — the technology that helps us create meaning in our lives will end up being more rewarding in the long run, as well. We get tired of spending time with false friends, and we will get tired of trying to fulfill empty promises. The challenge is trying to make technology that is worth running towards, not from, when that moment comes. As a designer, and in whatever capacity I can be considered a “technologist,” this is what I aim to do with my work. For now, we are still filled with awe, for the most part: “Look at me sharing this photo of me and this hot girl I talked to for thirty seconds at a party!” But I have enough faith in humanity to believe that we will tire of this eventually, and that it is already happening at the fringes. So, those that want to create futures aren’t looking to the here and now, but rather this entire paradigm shift of the dominant role technology will play in our lives.

Since the invention of the desktop metaphor, computers have drawn inspiration from that old standby, paper and pencil. But paper and pencil are a tool and technology, one that interfaces with us so well that we don’t even think of it as such. This is a technology that does not do our work for us, but rather, makes us better. Practically every technology has arisen from this first: our human ingenuity, combined with the way that paper and pencil have enabled us to take it faster, further. Technologists should draw inspiration from that, as well: building tools that enable us to do more with this endless source of creativity.

Is it a tech bubble? - Chris Dixon

I accidentally ended up in the comments and produced this giant wall of text that basically sums up my problem with all those arguing that a bubble couldn’t possibly be happening, so, I will copy pasta it here because, as I said there, THIS. 

I’m just having a hard time with this argument - I don’t think he (or anyone else I’ve seen) is arguing about large, established companies. Some people are questionable about the later-stage *startups* (different from *established companies*), but I think there has been consistent concern about the issues in early stage startups.

We are spending a lot of time comparing this bubble to 1999, but I’m pretty certain that they are not similar in any way. The comparison between the two is useful and accurate in the same way that say, the Great Depression is useful for understanding the Great Recession. Which is to say, in limited, critical doses.

Furthermore, a bubble is one of those things that is ridiculously hard to prove the existence of during it’s growth period. The entire point is that we won’t see failures until we see them start happening at an alarming rate. I suspect that if we see that occur here, it won’t be companies that are failing spectacularly, but investors.
Again, all these points are related: bubbles happen most frequently when the value of the goods is not clearly discernable. This is a period of uncertainty - no one really knows how the social internet will play out, just like no one knew how big search or e-commerce would be in the 90’s. Now these quantities are a bit more known, so it’s harder for these companies’ values to inflate as much.

chris dixon raises the point in this thread that startups are now being seen as a viable career path, and I suspect that these things are fairly related. However, it makes a certain amount of sense that during a bubble, accompanying the over investment of [monetary] capital into a space is the over investment of human capital into the space. My concern is that being geared towards a career in *startups* is as worrisome as a career in *finance.* Both do certain crucial things, but more important than either of these things is a commitment to certain types of work. I am far more interested in a generation of people that have educated themselves to create, build and innovate - whatever institutional vehicle that facilitates it best for the skills that they acquire.

Still, as painful as bubbles and bubble bursts can be, they’re crucial to innovation - the cyclical nature of Silicon Valley is that they take on industries with high uncertainties, whose value is as of yet undetermined. And it takes that exploration to determine what works, and what those values are - I compare it to the periods of boom and bust in evolution, that result in diversity and efficiency in turn. (I once tried to write an ill-fated college paper on this).

xposted

GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism « Not The User’s Fault

Oh, fun. Let’s play a game on designer arrogance, guys! 

  1. “The featureless white void: the old interface had colored borders and variations in background color which served to deliniate navigation from content and provide visual landmarks that helped me find my way around the page. It had visual ‘texture’. The new interface lacks that visual texture. Without borders or landmarks, everything blends together into a featureless sea of white and light grey. It requires more work for me to parse visually, to figure out what I’m looking at or to find the link I want to click.”
         Ok, I actually think this is great. I absolutely want a “featureless sea” because actually, the only thing I care about on the page 95% of the time is the content. So, quieting down the stuff around the content is actually a great improvement. Let me focus on the text, and don’t create all this visual cruft that drives my eye away. 
  2. “The “importance” marker is now right next to the stars. I find the (algorithmically-applied) importance marker completely useless and would remove it if I could, but I use the stars quite heavily. In the old interface the importance marker was to the right, so I could ignore that column and scan the left column for stars. In the new interface, the two markers — being the same size, color, and location — blend together visually. I can no longer scan for stars; i have to look closely at each line to tell stars apart from importance markers.”
     Uhhmm… Ok. Let’s get one thing out of the way. Go to Settings > Inbox > Importance markers. Say, “No markers.” Boom, done. I don’t really use importance markers, and they don’t bother me when they’re in the inbox, but that’s just a personal preference. 
    Secondly, get out of your own head. Just because you use the product this way, doesn’t mean everyone else does. I imagine for people who use this feature, having the stars and the importance markers right next to each other really helps them quickly sort their inbox, since the two things are linked conceptually. 
  3. “The new icons are inferior to the old text buttons. The text buttons were self-describing. The new icons are not. I’m not usually a fan of toolbar icons; they’re never as self-explanatory as their designers think they are, so they usually need text labels to be decipherable. At that point, why not cut out the middleman and just show the text label instead of the icon?”
    This is actually the only valid criticism of the whole post. I disagree that these icons are particularly hard to understand - trash, folder and label are really the main ones that I use. They’re consistently placed in the same places, and so I always know what to expect where. Still, if it bothers you, you can go to Settings > General and turn the buttons to labels. 

 Ok, I’m done with my complaints about this particular case of “designer arrogance.”

“Tumblr, on the other hand, is not a place for my thoughts and feelings. Tumblr is about my feelings, making them trite and contagious. There is a beauty in the way that I suddenly feel like a small point in a mass of humanity, the kind of thing you feel when you live in a city like New York. But, the things that I would like to lay claim to as being original and my own are things I’d rather keep to myself, for fear of being misappropriated: taken through the odd contraptions that make up other peoples’ brains, the gaps in what I meant and what I can say filled with whatever they’d like to think. Sometimes it feels as if the reblog button is a building machine that strips something of its’ meaning with each iteration.”

Ninakix’s Posterous - Better bring a battle axe.

I wrote this yesterday. I’m excerpting this part of the post because gbattle asked why I no longer post blog posts to Tumblr. I guess it just comes down to a general sense that the platform, its’ social conventions, doesn’t feel like a place for or respectful of the things I actually spend time on. 

Touching and the Story of 10 Lolcats

It’s sort of a nonsecret that I’m not really a fan of the iPad. I have tried, and every so often I continue to try, to fall in love with the device. And I never really am able to. I really just find that all I really want is a keyboard. And anything beyond taping at a button or a few basic gestures (swipe, pinch, and that opposite-of-pinch gesture) feels awkward. As I use the awkward device, I can’t help but think back to an interview with Doug Engelbart (the inventor of the mouse) in Bill Moggridge’s first book, Designing Interactions. 

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It’s my birthday and I want the wild wild west

It’s my birthday, perhaps you’ve heard on Twitter or Facebook. So I decided to do a birthday post. What do I want for my birthday? It’s simple: I want my interwebz back.

It used to be that the Internet was something of a wild wild west - sheer anarchy was everywhere. But if you’ve ever watched a western, you realize there’s a certain sense and ebb and flow, even pattern to the way these ecosystems work. That, of course, is built and maintained by the logic of human desires and emotions and logic.

As people navigated this world, their actions were perpetuated by a search for more: more around an interest, around a passion or flight of fancy just not supported by the rigor and order of the real world. The same anarchy that gave birth to things like 4chan meant that a 12 year old girl could go about designing webpages with a bunch of 16 year olds. It forced everyone to rub shoulders with everyone else, to defend their actions and passions. Somewhere in that crazy melting pot was a community of people who thought like you - it was simply a matter of searching them out. And once you found them, you could retreat into a little group of fanatics, desperately analyzing the stitches on the fabric of the world that fascinated you. Crazy reigned supreme, in a good way. You formed real and new friendships as you dug deep in a flurry of keyboard clicks, conversing back in forth in mini-essays.

It’s too bad that this wild west, so dependent on pioneers moving into the space, seems to be falling apart. Facebook seems to be slowly bringing the tyranny of the real world to every corner of the web. Twitter (bless its heart, possibly one of the more “webby” of the latest generation of web products such that I’m inclined to love it dearly) takes lengthy conversations of fanatics and breaks them into bit sized bits. Tumblr just does away with conversations completely. Corporatized “communities” take what was once little oases of like minded people and turns them into raging plazas with everyone screaming back and forth, and no one able to find anyone else. The new direction of blogging pushes everyone into their own silos, imposing their message and “brand” into the world. It’s a tragic dismemberment of the sense of citizenship that once existed on the web.

So, put simply, I want my wild west back.

christmasgorilla: The thing I really can’t get over: The photo filters are too homogeneous. It’s true that the cameras on phones only perform well in certain conditions and that filters are probably the most easily accessible crutch. But there’s something really odd about having a small selection of filters. On other services, users can aspirationally represent themselves in many ways—curation of taste and fact, images. To requote Chuck Close “Now, having said that, I think while photography is the easiest medium in which to be competent, it is probably the hardest one in which to develop an idiosyncratic personal vision. It’s the hardest medium in which to separate yourself from all those other people who are doing reasonably good stuff and to find a personal voice, your own vision, and to make something that is truly, memorably yours and not someone else’s.” Instagram really brings out the sameness in the images, which is strange because you’re looking at moments captured by many different people—you would hope that a service based around photos would be more individual than templated bits of text. It will be interesting to see if this ever becomes a problem for Instagram (or maybe phone cameras get better too quickly)—but maybe people will continue to be smitten with the 70s aesthetic. It’s also possible that it takes a while to understand the signal. When I first started using Twitter, it took a while for me to be able to piece together themes, narratives, and feel for the various people that I followed—at first it was a lot of noise. It makes me think of the fact that when using a new service, the way we read and translate content around that service becomes refined - that is, the culture we have surrounding the tool increases. I think of, for example, telling my friend how annoying it was to have to log into Facebook to publicly congratulate one of my friends on getting engaged (I hate Facebook that much, not the congratulating part), even though we’d already had a conversation via text message. Or, the way in which five tweets about a subject emotionally conveys something very different than one or two. Or, the way a quote or photo on Tumblr speaks to the ephemeral moods of the particular day someone posts it. The actions we take within the service can be imbued with meaning. Which makes me wonder if having too many “actions” (say, having 20 Instagram filters leading to a variety of potential “actions”) would make it harder to understand and build culture around that service. As a side note, perhaps that’s why we see “patterns” of Tumblr posting - it easily and quickly communicates in a shorthand Tumblr users have developed themselves.  I don’t use Instagram myself, so I’m not really able to comment on the particulars of that service. High-res

christmasgorilla:

The thing I really can’t get over:

  1. The photo filters are too homogeneous. It’s true that the cameras on phones only perform well in certain conditions and that filters are probably the most easily accessible crutch. But there’s something really odd about having a small selection of filters. On other services, users can aspirationally represent themselves in many ways—curation of taste and fact, images.

To requote Chuck Close

“Now, having said that, I think while photography is the easiest medium in which to be competent, it is probably the hardest one in which to develop an idiosyncratic personal vision. It’s the hardest medium in which to separate yourself from all those other people who are doing reasonably good stuff and to find a personal voice, your own vision, and to make something that is truly, memorably yours and not someone else’s.”

Instagram really brings out the sameness in the images, which is strange because you’re looking at moments captured by many different people—you would hope that a service based around photos would be more individual than templated bits of text. It will be interesting to see if this ever becomes a problem for Instagram (or maybe phone cameras get better too quickly)—but maybe people will continue to be smitten with the 70s aesthetic.

It’s also possible that it takes a while to understand the signal. When I first started using Twitter, it took a while for me to be able to piece together themes, narratives, and feel for the various people that I followed—at first it was a lot of noise.

It makes me think of the fact that when using a new service, the way we read and translate content around that service becomes refined - that is, the culture we have surrounding the tool increases. I think of, for example, telling my friend how annoying it was to have to log into Facebook to publicly congratulate one of my friends on getting engaged (I hate Facebook that much, not the congratulating part), even though we’d already had a conversation via text message. Or, the way in which five tweets about a subject emotionally conveys something very different than one or two. Or, the way a quote or photo on Tumblr speaks to the ephemeral moods of the particular day someone posts it. The actions we take within the service can be imbued with meaning. Which makes me wonder if having too many “actions” (say, having 20 Instagram filters leading to a variety of potential “actions”) would make it harder to understand and build culture around that service. As a side note, perhaps that’s why we see “patterns” of Tumblr posting - it easily and quickly communicates in a shorthand Tumblr users have developed themselves.

 I don’t use Instagram myself, so I’m not really able to comment on the particulars of that service.

Why is Farmville so addicting?

Alright, I know you’ve been secretly wondering: What about Farmville, exactly, makes it so addictive? What about Farmville draws people in that they spend hours clicking away to plant, harvest, plow? Perhaps you’ve even tried the game. 

The other day I was thinking about Farmville, and it suddenly clicked to me. Farmville is becoming a hobby to some people. Yes, yes, you say, and a shitty one at that. But think about that for a second. People are creating something, tending to it everyday, in an online space. The key word I’m going to talk about is creating. 

Creation has become a relatively rare feeling in our culture, but it’s still one loaded with meaning and endorphins. We’ve moved to more and more consumption - those hours in front of the TV or computer that Clay Shirky hates. In the past 10-20 years, some of us have managed to start using these amazing technological tools to create amazing artifacts that could never have existed before. Others of us have used these new tools to accelerate our “old” hobbies by bringing communities of people together whom would otherwise never have been connected.

But that’s really old news. We’re pretty special for having done this, but what have the majority of internet users been doing? Up until five years ago, I’m willing to venture the average creator might have uploaded their family photographs to Snapfish and made a mug, but not much more than that. The majority of the internet was reading, watching Youtube videos, emailing, and more recently, Facebooking. 

Ah, Facebooking. In the midst of Facebooking, many of these adventurers might have stumbled upon Facebook games, and sensing something new to add to their online social repertoire, might have started a farm. At first, the farm may have looked boring. Perhaps you start out and want to be the richest, biggest farmer on your virtual block. So you may have built a fairly practical farm, maximizing harvesting area, that looked something like this: 

Then, you keep planting, maybe you start to acquire a few buildings, a few animals and trees, so you start trying to find a layout that works better for what you’re doing.

Perhaps you realize that you can throw a little fun into it, and create something that looks like this. 

Fantastic. Maybe you decide you like trees way better than plants, or you far prefer animals and you start collecting exotic ones to show off.

 

Says the owner of above farm: It’s so cute! You collect animals, plant seeds and trees, harvest the crops, and you can use the money to buy STUFF. Like, a grain silo. Or a bike! Who doesn’t want more virtual STUFF?!? But I have noticed something about my little farm. First of all, I prefer the trees over the seeds. Second, and rather disturbing, I am so OCD about my farm that EVERYTHING — little animals included — has to be in neat rows. All the apple trees with the apple trees, cherry with cherry, pomegranate with pomegranate. Cow with cow, sheep with sheep, rabbit with rabbit. There’s no casual intermingling of free-range animals on MY farm, thank you very much!


Ah, so there’s something kind of fun about that layout, no? So perhaps you start playing some more. You start collecting special buildings and items, arranging them in fun ways, making a little bit of “design.” 

Hmm. There’s something vaguely expressive about these things, isn’t there? Perhaps you start exploring some, and come up with a few things. 

These are from Skull-a-day, a blog where the author makes one skull everyday.

So, then you start to realize you can maybe get a bit more in-depth. Maybe you create a simple scene. 

And that’s when stuff starts to get a bit crazy.

…

But seriously. Do other people do this? Maybe you start to spend some time on a site like Farmville Freak or one of the others, and now you know about the rare animals and the crazy tips and tricks. Well, then…

If you’ve spent the past few minutes ignoring these photos, maybe you’ll miss this point. People are legitimately creating things on Farmville. Perhaps Farmville is the digital version of Legos. For many people, Farmville may very well have been the first time they have repetitively come back to something, learned something that might vaguely be called a “skill” (in this case, more of a sense of the type of accessible artistry within the confined toolset of Farmville), used this to express themselves or personalize their space, and finally maintained it. 

If you’ve ever made anything, you know how addictive the experience can be. The experience of looking at something and being able to say, “I made that.” It’s undeniably self-affirming, it makes one feel competent and proud. And you can imagine how, for those who have never had a sense of it, it might be completely exhilarating. Many of these people have probably never felt that they were smart enough to create anything on the computer, but they have very slowly and carefully duped into creating these magnificently expressive spaces.

It might be easy to jump to how huge and important this experience might be, how it might teach people about entirely new ways to act online, but I won’t jump there. Just now, there’s no “easy” way for people to take this experience into something “similar” that might just be a little further up the totem pole to what is commonly respected as “artistic.” Perhaps they do make a jump, and become masters of photoshop or javascript extraordinaires. Perhaps they just stay obsessed with Farmville, constantly clicking and harvesting, maybe jumping from Zynga game to Zynga game. More likely (to me), they get bored with it. Maybe they go back to knitting or scrapbooking, or maybe they just keep printing souvenir mugs on Snapfish. 

Perhaps we’ve done this group a disservice. Some of us think Zynga and other Facebook games are inane, and ignore the area completely. Others think this is the next big money maker, and pour our time and effort into Facebook games. But how many of us have stopped and wondered what is really going on here, and if, perhaps, Zynga is creating a cultural force that we can take just a bit further? 

The 10 Friends You Need

I’m not saying each is a different person, but you need a friend sometimes, and you need someone to enjoy life with. 

  1. Your squeal-y, giggly friend: Because so much of life is the little things, if you don’t have someone to laugh with it over, someone that’s in on the inside joke, well, you ain’t got much. 
  2. Your friend who’s known you forever: The long lasting friends tend to drift and fade, but the longer a friend has known you, the more they can tell you that comforting thing with authority. The more you can enjoy watching each other grow and learn, and smile when you grow up to be someone completely unexpected, but someone totally fitting. 
  3. Your past-times friend: The friend to go to the gym with, the friend to go to anime festivals with, the friend to go skiing with, the friend to hold LAN parties with. It doesn’t really matter, but whatever you enjoy doing is better enjoyed together. 
  4. Your online friend: In the past this might have been called a penpal, but today you most likely find this person online. Having someone around whom you have to describe yourself to, to describe your life to without any real common anchoring teaches you more about yourself than you would think, and bonus because you get a different point of view, too. 
  5. Your professional friend: A friend who’s in the same “profession” as you are. What that really means is, someone who gets your passion, gets the impact you want to have on the world, and can share the gossip and viewpoints you might have on the world. Someone you can talk shop to, really.
  6. Your partner in crime: The most illusive friend of all, but potentially the most rewarding when you get it: someone who shares your passion, someone who’s on the journey with you, and pulling all the stops out with you. Someone who’s the ying to your yang, compliments your skill set and thinking.
  7. Your live-in friend: The person you can spend day-in and day-out with, in the same room with for hours on end without wanting to kill them. Just someone who’s good company and good conversation.
  8. The cry-to friend: The friend you call when things are going absolutely crazy, when you don’t think you can take it anymore. The friend that hears all the drama in your life, and patiently offers you (probably the same) advice (over and over again). 
  9. The mentor: Ideally wiser, more experienced, and not at all cultish, someone you can trust to answer the questions you have that could use an older mind. Someone who believes in you and invests in you. 
  10. Your parents: Who else will always tell you what you didn’t want to hear, take your phone call and ask you questions you didn’t want to answer? Who else will always make space and time? 

Up & Out

It’s when the times get hard that you really begin to understand things. As many of you know, and a story for another time, I was a ski racer back in the day. Many people think this is very cool, and it very much is/was. I had loads of fun as a ski racer, as I would tell you any day. But for me, it didn’t come without its struggles. Myriads of them, really. Back then, I pretty much did school, and skiing. School, and skiing. In the off-season, I did school and training. Being stuck between San Francisco and Park City, Utah was not an easy deal for a high schooler, either. I did not attend a single party the entire time that I was in high school, and there was time and time again that I found relationships falling apart because by definition, everything was long-distance with me (no one wants to be friends with the girl who won’t hang out once the school bell rings). Aside from that, I absolutely sucked at skiing. I wanted very very badly to be good at this sport. Not just kind of or decent, but yearning so badly to be the best it hurt somedays. My (relative) mediocrity made it hard for me to fit into a community where social order was determined strictly on your “points” - that is, your ranking compared directly to the best skier in the US (or the world, if we get into FIS points) (s/he sets “0.0,” and everyone else adds up from there). 

When things got hard, there’s one thing that kept me afloat. I used to think, not about that bad moment right then, not about the thing that was upsetting me or making me cry, but I would transport myself to think about this thing that mattered to me - skiing (I still do this when I get upset). Somehow, just thinking about this goal helped me focus, focus not on the things that were hard, but the thing I wanted to do. There were many times I found myself thinking about the sport, only to buck up and do whatever the hard thing was, or to get through a painful moment, whatever it was. After bad races (which were most of them), I would disappear onto the mountain while the other kids chatted in the parking lot or the lodge. Being driven, motivated, passionate was something that was comforting to me, because somehow everything felt OK, everything would be OK, as long as I kept trying. Giving up was just not an option to even be considered.

Things got off-track in college. I didn’t really know why I was there, in a more personal context than “because that’s just what you do.” Although I managed to cut a deal with myself (such an unruly thing, one’s id), I still felt vaguely confused. Things started getting better after a while, but it’s only been till recently that things really started making sense. 

Recently, when things start to go bad, or when I feel overwhelmed by despair (hey, it happens to all of us), or when I just want to give up and crawl back into bed and never come out again, I’ve begun to think about something new. Tonight, I realized that I can do this, that it can make me feel better, it can distract me away from anything and everything that chips away at my outlook. So I guess, despite being upset at the moment, I’m actually a little heartened. I no longer have a choice, folks. I need to do this. And I couldn’t be happier that this feeling is back in my life. Many of you know what I am thinking about next, and I hope you’ll support me in my journey forward (and if you don’t, well, you can’t get me down (for too long), anyways). Let this be, in my own weird way, a declaration of a new period in my life. I’ve never been more excited. 

*I want to thank Andy Weissman for starting this realization for me, for seeing it before I did. Andy said to me a few weeks ago, “You have to do this, because you can’t stop thinking about it.” And he’s right. It just took a month of repeating that phrase to myself to really believe it.