Hong Qu

in 1972, Italo Calvino had the prescience to describe social networking sites thus:

“In Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city’s life, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses, white or black or gray or black-and-white according to whether they mark a relationship of blood, of trade, or authority, agency. When the strings become so numerous that you can no longer pass among them, the inhabitants leave: the houses are dismantled; only the strings and their supports remain. From a mountainside, camping with their household goods, Ersilia’s refugees look at the labyrinth of taut strings and poles that rise in the plain. That is the city of Ersilia still, and they are nothing.

They rebuild Ersilia elsewhere. They weave a similar pattern of strings which they would like to be more complex and at the same time more regular than the other. Then they abandon it and take themselves and their houses still farther away.

Thus, when travelling in the territory of Ersilia, you come upon the ruins of the abandoned cities, without the walls which do not last, without the bones of the dead which the wind rolls away: spiderwebs of intricate relationships seeking a form.”

Italo Calvino from Invisible Cities

The Japanese in the Edo period
thought of the floating waves
that capture beauty
as a fleeting moment in reality.

It’s how you affix meaning
and interprete what you notice
that determines
how much beauty bubbles
all around your reality.

If you want to design a vibrant online community, you’ve got to read Mark Granovetter. I learned about his social theories in a Berkeley class called Analysis of Information Organizations taught by Professor Peter Lyman and TAed by danah boyd.

Here are my two takeways from Granovetter’s research. And they can apply directly to the design of online communities.

1. Information (trends, fashion, culture, news, job openings) travel through social networks of weak ties. If you want to learn new stuff ask your acquaintances, not your close friends, because your close friends know the sames things that you already know.
2. If you want to spread a message (marketing pitch, viral meme, political action, social movement) then make sure that message travels through as many bridges of weak links as possible. This is what marketers call “Word of Mouth.” Spreading a message through people, instead of mass media, is tremendously more powerful because the recipient is more likely to act on the message when someone they know tells them about it.

So how is this social theory relevant to the design of online social networks?

First, the designer has to make it easy for people to seek out, form, and interact with their weak links. A classic example is when a the user finds a friend of a friend to be an interesting person and decides to pursue a relationship with that third person. Another way this could happen is when two people who like the same band “chat up” with each other, become friends, and rely on the other person to find out about cool new music.

Second, the designer needs to encourage collective action by building tools for individual users to self-organize around a topic or cause. An “email this” link is not enough. A digg-like forum is good. One of the best implementation is eventful.com’s demand feature. This tool enables people in the same geographic region who share the same interests to get together at the same venue to experience a real-life face to face gathering. That is kind of like a spontaneous conference. It is the ultimate goal of community building: like-minded people getting together to share insights and incite sharing.

In the 20^th century, Alan Lomax traveled far and wide to record folk musicians whose art might have been lost forever had he not sought them out and published their work through the Library of Congress. Would his efforts have been even more impactful if he could’ve archived and broadcast using a service like YouTube?

In the 21^st century, there might already be hundred—nay thousands—of Alan Lomax’s running around the world recording videos of fading cultures and posting them on YouTube for posterity.

As the Sam Cooke once said, “What a wonderful world this would be…”

I went to a conference at Berkeley this weekend called “Does Humor Belong in Buddhism?”  I sat through lectures by some of the biggest names in Buddhist studies from all over the world and they were NOT funny. Their retelling of Buddhist stories was funny, but their delivery was very academic. 

Yet, their rigorious analysis of what it means to be funny at various junctures in Buddhist history was breathtaking.  Seeking Truth and Engightenment is tiring work, and would be arduous indeed if it weren’t for jokes and jokesters to keep those sleepy novices alert and attentive.

The retelling of Buddhist stories reminded of a book I read in Professor Pemberton’s class on the Harlem Renaissance: Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neal Hurston.  Trained as an anthropologist, she was definitely a trickster.  In the book she recounts the life of a black women in Florida. 

She writes in the vernacular, giving the reader a closer view into the thoughts and behaviors of the characters.  At first, I was totally overwhelmed by the incomprehensible dialogue, but once I got used to it I was rewarded with an amazing story that brought me inside a mesmerizing  culture brought alive with people whom I could sympathize with deeply.  It was the highest form of art that I’ve ever encountered, pure genius; well worth the $30k per year liberal arts education.

One thing that I learned from reading Zora Neal Hurston is that: “You got to laugh to keep from crying!”  Sometimes, life is tough going.  But laughing at, instead of bemoaning, the vicissitudes of life makes everything not so bad after all. I wonder if Buddhists would feel the same way about humor; since life is suffering, why not just laugh at it.

Last Sunday in Richmond
I brought a phone card.

Asked the Chinese lady
Sitting at the street corner in Chinese:
“Can I get a $5 card?”
“Where are you calling?  Hong Kong, China?”
“No,” pause… “Thailand”
She whips out the 88 Asia card.
I nod, “Hao” Ok.
She takes my $20 dollar bill
Gives me $16 dollars in change
Begrudgingly handing over the extra dollar
A little surprised, I just smiled
And said “Thank you!”

Later, I saw from across the street
A big sign: ”Phone Card, 20% off.”

Today’s search technology is very much a mind reading game.  The user types in two or three words and scans the search result for the information they need.  Oftentimes, the results are not what she wants.  So she reformulates the query typing in another search query with slightly different words.  This can go on for perhaps five rounds, until at last the user gives up, thinking the search engine is too dumb to understand what she is asking; instead, she goes to ask a friend.

Here’s a real example of when a search engine failed.  I needed to know: How much is the price of a stamp?  First, I search with the words postage price US and clicked on the third result “USPS - USPS - Calculate Postage” which was not helpful.  I modified my query to US postage rate and being a loyal Wikipedia user clicked on the fourth result “United States Postal Service - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia” but page that didn’t have the answer.

Finally, I tried searching for first class postage and clicked on “First-Class Postage Rates since 1875″ but that page was out of date, only listing stamp prices to the year 2002.

This example demonstates the primative state of search technology.  In the future, a search engine should be as dependable and understanding as a real person.  It should comprehend natural language queries which are asked in a conversational style.  For example,

Question: What is the price of a first-class stamp?

Answer: 39 cents 

A Better Answer: Starting January 8th, 2006 first-class postage is 39 cents.

I’m no expert on Postmodern critical theory, but I have read enough of Habermas for Dummies (why hasn’t someone written this book yet?) to attempt to explain the dynamics of YouTube’s participatory culture as theorized by Habermas’ concept of the Public Sphere.

YouTube is part of a bigger trend of online conversations by bloggers and other non-professional media players bypassing the major media outlets in order to bring issues to the general public.  The Internet’s minimal production and distribution cost has enabled individuals to engage in many-to-many, peer-reviewed discussions over whatever cause they care to vent about.  Basically, mass media is being disintermediated by social media—since online media has proven to be more transparent, dialectic, self-correcting, long-tailed, and viral; sometimes more entertaining; and exhibit greater sincerity and truthiness as a whole than traditional media.

Elsewhere, researchers have applied critical social  theory to elucidate the dynamics of online communities.  Danah Boyd, a classmate of mine from School of Information at Berkeley, wrote a paper about MySpace and the Public Sphere.  Randall Rothenberg, a management consultant, wrote a thought provoking article about YouTube as a place for self-expression for every individual.

A must-read summary of how Habermas’ philosophy extends into the digital age is by Pieter Boeder, titled Habermas’ heritage: The future of the public sphere in the network society.

I have been reading and re-reading Thomas Merton’s Mystics and Zen Masters and came across this amazing passage where he compares enlightenment in Zen to the Christian notion of grace:

If he is capable of “illumination,” he will at that moment taste the delight of recognizing that his own incommunicable experience of the ground of his being, his own total acceptence of his own nothingness, far from constituting a problem, is in fact the source and center of inexpressible joy; in Christian terms, one can hardly help feeling that the illumination of the genuine Zen experience seems to open out into an unconscious demand for grace—a demand that is perhaps answered without being understood.  Is it perhaps already grace?

Merton puts the relationship between the self and the cosmos in such vivid, delightful prose that I can only nod peacefully in my heart at the wisdom contained in these words.

My friends always ask me where to go for good Chinese Food in San Francisco. Here are a few of my favorites:

• Great Eastern Restaurant — I recently discovered this place. It’s got the best dim sum in the Bay Area.
• House of Nanking — I bring all my tourist friends here to try its unique taste of Chinese food with fusion flare. Expect long lines.
• Hing Lung — I go here when I feel homesick because it’s got the most authentic Cantonese food at a cheap price. It’s open late until 2AM. If you like thousand-year-old egg and intestines in your congee, this is your place.
• Lychee Gardens — Another good dim sum place. It’s roomy and the service is quite good for a Chinese restaurant.
• Spicy Sister — This chain restaurant offers spicy, snack-size dishes cooked in Szechuan style.
• Great China — I used to go to this restaurant in downtown Berkeley when I was a student there. Its menu is full of tasty northern Chinese cuisine. Be sure to order the Peking Duck.

And just for fun, tell them that Hong sent you…