Continuing to mull over this whole social media thing

I realized something yesterday, in the process of figuring out what I needed to do to extricate myself from teh Amazonia. The big powerhouse websites like that one work really hard to convince a person to outsource her thinking. Along with one-click shipping, they've provided a "wishlist" service, which is quite convenient and lets a person add things even from other websites. This feeds into use of the site, and creates a barrier for self-extraction; if I want to divest, well, what about the stuff on that "wishlist"? I just made a text file and swapped things into the text file. I already keep a handwritten "List of Things to Acquire," so in some ways having a separate wishlist just makes me more scattebrained. And nobody other than me owns my List of Things to Acquire, so it currently can't be datamined. Take that, people who want to turn me into a consumerist whore! :-P

With respect to the Book of Face, its uses for organizing people and events are hard to ignore - also, for hearing tidbits from friends I want to keep up with. But I had to stop and think - why is it so difficult to "unfriend" people? There are multiple elements at play. By keeping a friendslist, I can theoretically outsource the project of remembering the people I know and how I know them (meanwhile, the "service provider" can try to take advantage of my personal connections to advertise to me and them). If I delete someone off of a friendslist, I'm at risk of forgetting that person! And that can be hurtful. But, then again...when I started, there were over 450 people on my list. From a social-cognitive standpoint, it's impossible to do a good job of keeping up with that many people; connections become superficial. The Book of Face has tried to 'help' me with this, by auto-filtering what shows up in my 'friends' feed. They've been tweaking this for a long while, now, in a whole lot of different ways. Frankly, however, I'm a tad control-freakish, and would prefer to remain in charge of what I see and don't see (as on livejournal, which has always been small enough that I can go out of town for two weeks and still catch up with everything when I get back; it's gotten smaller as peoples' attention spans wander and they stop blogging, too - ahem, sytharin).

Book of Face also really, really doesn't want me to remove people from my list. It has developed a number of ways to make this more difficult. It wants me to nurture my addiction, so it can include me in its captive audience list, unaware that if it dares to try showing me video advertisements it will seriously piss me off. First, it's fairly simple to 'unsubscribe' from someone, without removing that person from the master list. But when I clicked over to the actual list, the order of display is confusing, and changes - the people I interact with the most frequently appear at the top, and it takes time and effort to scroll down and scrutinize the people I rarely interact with.

On some level, I want to remember everyone. So I just made a list for myself, and made notes on who I've removed. I suspect this project will take multiple passes; I've just gone through and made the easier decisions so far - people who live in other states who I haven't personally interacted with for months or years, and whose lives are so different from mine that I'm unlikely to interact with them anytime soon unless I go to some school reunion somewhere.

I think the next step is going to be thinking about how I know the remaining people on the list, and what that means to me, and what utility there is to continuing to interact with them in that fashion. For instance - I use it quite a bit to crowdsource, and often my friends have great ideas or solutions. I've also appreciated the chance to keep up with family members I see infrequently. It can also be great for plotting adventures with adventure-friends, although I found myself growing resentful of this when the nature of my adventures changed with moving to Texas and I couldn't participate in Arizona adventures anymore.

So that's where that project is.

I'm kind of thinking of going through my e-mail contacts, too, as I don't particularly want Google to know too much, either. I still keep a paper address book that has the contact info of most of the people I'd like to stay in touch with.

Unsolved mysteries

I'm slogging through some data analysis today, for the next cricket manuscript. I've managed to send two ant papers back over to my advisor, and we're waiting for the next generation of crickets to reach adulthood before we start more experiments, so I'm finally back to a cricket manuscript. It's about time. This stuff needs to get analyzed, written up and published.

Putting data together to tell a story is an artform, and I often get mired down in the process. Today I've been struggling to connect measurements of cricket flight muscles and ovaries to what those crickets ate and their weight gain across diets that contain different amounts of protein and carbohydrate. This is something humans wonder about, too: when we eat food, where does it wind up going, and why? (e.g. why fat instead of muscle?)

When I get mired down, I try different, mostly futile and distracting things to get unstuck. My almost-instinctive behavior loop involves checking e-mail, the book of face, and here. That's been happening incessantly today. Today I've also tried going to the building's atrium and lying down on a bench. I have also been going through and clearing out my e-mail inbox, which mostly means reading the tables-of-contents for prestigious journals, which get e-mailed to me on a weekly basis. At least that feels intellectual and there's a measure of progress.

Just now, one article's title caught my eye: How do organs know when they have reached the right size? (I'm hoping the short summary isn't buried behind a paywall). Somehow, this seems related to my current puzzling, and it also seems related to my research on growth in leafcutter ant colonies (there are questions about what determines adult colony size in social insect species). But this article is mostly about genes and gene expression in fruit flies.

And yeah, writing rambling livejournal posts is another strategy.