Embracing the Social Scatterplot

fekaylius — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 21:56:40 +0000

You have a checkin tool as part of your webservice, don’t be embarrassed, everyone does. You also don’t have to be shy about the fact that you are passing the user’s lat long over to Google, Yahoo, PublicEarth, or even foursquare, for a list of potential places they might be at, because, let’s face it, these place databases are not just growing on trees. It would make sense for you to pay attention to the coordinates sent over and which place the user ends up picking as “the place they are at”, to build up a user generated scatter plot of GPS points that might be used in future candidate offerings, but sometimes we all simply depend on the longevity of benevolence from our chosen API providers, no harm in that.

I think the only harm done in this situation would be to continue to assume that a Place has a singular, static, defined relationship to a cartographic framework. If we aspire to understand what Places people are talking about, as they connect to these places with a growing variety of devices and standards, we might do well to move from a vector based polygonal model to something more pointillist.

If we can establish an array of coordinates as the historical collection of points that have been used to define, or to reference, a Place, no matter how askew they may be from our sense of the real boundaries, then we can actually start talking about the same Place, regardless of each tiny, singular, gadget or app specific definition. This methodology is conceptually related to the common notion of subjectivity, in which we learn to understand from early childhood that a toy, or a person, or a Place, looks different from different perspectives, or as seen through different media. We eventually learn that we are talking about the same kitten, even if your photograph looks different from my drawing. The concept of the kitten is just a collection of all the successful references to the physical object. Even in the act of trying to capture, or document, that actual objective nature of the kitten, we are simply creating more subjective references to it. The need, and ability, to objectively define and describe a physical object only becomes increasingly ridiculous and futile the more one tries. The same can be said of Places. The harder we strive to objectively define exactly where a Place is, or what happens at a Place, or what category a Place falls into, the more we realize our measurements and descriptions add to the collage of data they are hoping to clean up.

It’s time to put down the minimalist fallacy of Place Objectivity, and embrace the polymorphic cloud of the Social Scatterplot for Subjective Place Definition.

photo from gps insight

Into Something Formless

fekaylius — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 23:13:40 +0000

Leon Botha talks about identity, vibrations, and formlessness.

I came across this guy researching Die Antwoord

Loosely Assembled » subjectivity

Embracing the Social Scatterplot

Into Something Formless