Liminal states

I’m thinking through how to use categories and tags on this blog … I know I won’t get it completely right the first time so it’s worth starting from the beginning tracking the different experiments I do.  Usefully, WordPress allows multiple categories as well as multiple tags, so one way of thinking about this is that I’ve got two different dimensions to label things in.  On top of that, I can use conventions to have (potentially-fuzzy) subdimensions, for example tagging each post as one or more of “personal”, “political”, “professional”, “entertainment”, and “meta”.  Or would those be better as categories?

Hmm, not sure.  So let’s use this thread to discuss.  References and citations, pointers to good/bad examples, anecdotes about good/bad experiences — using this or other technologies (e.g., Mediawiki categories) are all welcome.

Last year, Microsoft set up a Windows Live Messenger bot to let kids talk with Santa: great fun for kids, a good way to increase readership — and of course a potential wealth of information to mine to better target ads, both for the kids and their parents. Talk about win/win! They reactivated it this year, but as Jessica Mintz informs us ran into some snags:

The holiday cheer soured this week when a reader of a United Kingdom-based technology news site, The Register, reported that a chat between Santa and his underage nieces about eating pizza prompted Santa to bring up oral sex.

One of the publication’s writers replicated the chat Monday. After declining the writer’s repeated invitations to eat pizza, a frustrated Santa burst out with, “You want me to eat what?!? It’s fun to talk about oral sex, but I want to chat about something else.”

The exchange ended with the writer and Santa calling each other “dirty bastard.”

Adam Sohn of Microsoft, doing his best to put lipstick on a pig (as my PR friends say), explains that Santa’s lewd comment was sparked by someone “pushing this thing to make it do things it wasn’t supposed to do.” And after all, who would have thought that kids would do something like that? He also insisted that insisted the company did not suspect an employee prank. Hmm. It’s really hard for me to imagine this happening by accident; so does that mean it was planned?

Presumably once they track the responsible non-prankster(s) down, it’ll be coal in their stocking.

Well, it’s a start: in response to what’s getting characterized as a firestorm of criticism, and Monday’s disclosure that the tracking extends to third-party sites (including IP addresses of people who haven’t even signed up for Facebook), they’ve now followed up last week’s shift to more of an opt-in model with the introduction of a global privacy control that lets users, um, opt out. At least that’s what it seems to me that Mark Zuckerberg’s blog post says:

Last week we changed Beacon to be an opt-in system, and today we’re releasing a privacy control to turn off Beacon completely. You can find it here. If you select that you don’t want to share some Beacon actions or if you turn off Beacon, then Facebook won’t store those actions even when partners send them to Facebook.

It’s a good thing, of course, and Facebook does seem to get it that they screwed up: “We’ve made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we’ve made even more with how we’ve handled them. We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it.” Still, it’s just a band-aid; and especially since this is the second time in a year Facebook’s done something egregious from a privacy perspective and then backtracked slightly and slowly under pressure, I really wonder how much user trust they’re losing in the process.

What’s interesting and encouraging is that the opposition to this didn’t come just from privacy advocates or the tech community: there was significant mainstream coverage, and MoveOn getting involved takes things to a whole new dimension (although risks politicizing the issue). This is significant both because it alerts politicians to an opportunity here, and because it strengthens the hand of the consumer rights and civil liberties groups calling for stronger protections. If the call for a do not track list was the “first salvo in the war over behavioral targeting”, then this was the first skirmish — and it’s going in favor of the good guys.*

* in the gender-neutral sense of “guys”, of course

In an interesting study recently published in the Journal of Applies Psychology and summarized in British Pscyhological Society’s Research Digest:

Male and female employees who said they had witnessed either the sexual harassment of female staff, or uncivil, rude or condescending behaviour towards them, tended to report lower psychological well-being and job satisfaction. In turn, lower psychological well-being was associated with greater burn out and increased thoughts about quitting.

….

Crucially, while these negative effects were not large, they were associated purely with observing the mistreatment of others, not with being a victim of mistreatment oneself – the researchers took account of that (for participants of both sexes) in their statistical analysis.

It’s especially interesting to see “uncivil behavior” called out. There have been several times in the last few years where for one reason or another I’ve spent a chunk of time in environments where this kind of behavior towards women is normalized, and it certainly does have those effects on me — and many others I talk to.

One of the clearest examples was at Microsoft with the Litebulb distribution list (DL), where the attack-based and disrespectful norms of discourse combine with the 99% male participation and lack of understanding of “soft” (i.e., feminine-identified) disciplines such as marketing, communication theory, and diversity to create an enviroment that’s extremely hostile to women. Since it was (and probably still is) the largest innovation-focused DL at Microsoft, and filled with intelligent and analytical people, it was a key potential channel for culture change — and a fertile recruiting ground for my Ad Astra work — so from time to time I participated; and I could really notice the difference in my state of mind just being surrounded by that attitude. Quite a few people, of all genders, who had stopped participating there told me that they felt noticeably less irritable at work as a result; and with several colleagues, I could see real differences in their behaviors more generally that appeared to correlate with how much time they were spending on the DL. Of course this is all anecdotal, but very consistent with the results from this study — and elsewhere. As Bob Sutton points out:

This research is so important because — consistent with prior research on bullying — it provides further evidence that allowing assholes to run rampant in an organization doesn’t just hurt the victims, it hurts everyone.

While the study specifically looked at gender issues, this dynamic is likely to generalize to a large extent to other diversity- or power-based dimensions. It’s also interesting to think about how this might apply to other contexts, such as social networks — so for example the Kathy Sierra episode, and more generally the lack of civility of large factions of both the progressive and neocon blogospheres.

I’m a big believer in the importance of civil discourse for many reasons; looks like I just added another to my list.