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Between Two Atlases

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I realize I have gone an awfully long time without posting any meaningful content here. While there are many good reasons for this, and many posts that were started but never published, I shall not go into that now. Suffice to say, my family has been through a lot over the last 4 years so this blog had to take a back burner to far more important fires I had to contend with. That said, I spent the last 8 hours (wow, I just realized what time it was) banging my keyboard to get this brain dump out of my head. I’m a little rusty, so please bear with me as I attempt to put some form to my free flowing thoughts. I apologize ahead of time for the length and the side notes. But hey, this is all straight from my brain to the page. I’m doing inline side notes because otherwise they will make very little sense if you wait until the end.

TL;DR

This post talks about emotions and technology. It talks about humans and AI. It provides insights into my opinions and observations on these topics based on my education, my understanding (which I’m always working toward improving), and my lived experiences. If you find your opinions, observations, understanding, or lived experiences are different from mine, great! Diversity in thought and perspective is the key toward a broader understanding of the human condition.

Note: My content and opinions are a form of my personal self-expression based on my lived experiences, education, and observations, which are in no way representative of my employer(s).

It’s the end of 2024 and as I update my books read challenge to complete my 30 for the year (1), I am amused by the fact that towards the beginning of the year I read Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience by Dr. Brené Brown and I have finished out the year with Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence by Dr. Kate Crawford (2). The juxtaposition of these two books defines my non-fiction reading quite well. They are both social scientists that lean in from complementary angles in very different ways. The first is all about uncovering truths about your emotive life and how you relate to the people and your lived experiences through various emotional states. The second uncovers truths behind the advancing technology that is slowly but surely inundating us and its impact both on us and the world that sustains us.

  1. A modest number really, but it’s a stretch goal for me given my full time jobs of leading a design team and parenting 3 children. It’s a little less than 1 book a week and I’m only able to accomplish that through listening at 2.5 time speed to my non-fiction and physically reading everything else. To be honest, I usually have one audio, one e-book, and one physical book going at the same time.
  2. This was one of seven books on AI I read this year but out of all, this and one other (see 3) had the most profound impact on me as it very eloquently put into a single volume many of the things I’ve tried often to share with others on what AI, at this time, really is and how it impacts people and the world around us through many behind the scenes ways.

Why I would recommend these books: Both authors go beyond the façade of their fields and expertise to surface information that lurks deep beneath and tugs at what it means to be human and retain our humanity in the rapidly changing experience that is this 3rd decade of the 21st century.

Why I personally enjoyed their works: They are both backed by research and they’re both written by women. As a woman who is a social scientist as well as a technologist, I find myself at their intersection.

Here are a couple of short descriptions on each.

Atlas of the Heart – Brown delves into the myriad of emotions and related experiences, 150 of them that surfaced in her research and 87 she narrowed that research down to write about, to map out how we move through life via many hues of feelings as we navigate from one moment to the next. Her intent, at least my perception of it, was to provide a guide to being able to find yourself no matter what your emotional state might be and then to find the path navigate forward from where ever you are to wherever you want to go.

Atlas of AI – Crawford explores all of the things that make up Artificial Intelligence determining that it is “…neither artificial nor intelligent … [it] is both embodied and material, made from natural resources, fuel, human labor, infrastructures, logistics, histories, and classifications (3)” (Crawford 2021, 8). In my experience, when most people think of AI, it manifests as some sort of mystical black box that performs magic to generate conclusions faster, better, and more accurately than humans ever could. Sadly, nothing could be further from the truth (4) and Crawford does her due diligence to show why that is the case.

  1. Another book to read on AI classifications and how they can be not only incredibly biased but also unjust is Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What is Human in a World of Machines by Dr. Joy Buolamwini
  2. Mini rant time: I have always referred to ‘Generative AI’ as ‘Derivative AI’ as algorithms do not generate anything on their own. All of their conclusions are derived from already existing data (usually stolen or biased or coerced or built on faulty origins – some without even knowing the source and many who do not consider consent an issue) that is classified or collected or maintained by exploitive human labor practices. GIGO – Garbage In, Garbage Out as the saying goes.

If you want to learn more about these books, I highly recommend them. I’ll leave it to their authors to fully inform you on their topics of expertise.

Switching gears now — while the rest of this post is inspired by my latest readings, it doesn’t directly relate to the books themselves. With that said, here’s a few of my hot takes based on my personal observations and experiences concerning AI as a social scientist and technology designer in 2024.

As the head of a design org (5), AI is both intriguing and terrifying. Neither in and of itself, rather, of how it is used and misused – especially considering my chosen field. Many see it as a shortcut, others see it as a necessary evil, and some see it as the death knell of their livelihood. My take is this, if you remove the human element out of design, you lack the ability to understand the human impact as well as the ability to embrace human innovation (6). Computers do not have a cognitive load, a culture, a spoken language, disabilities, emotions, or needs and wants. And, they cannot on their own create something out of nothing.

  1. I am the Senior Director/Head of Design at Blizzard for Battle.net, recently acquired by Xbox (Microsoft).
    • Reminder, thoughts and opinions expressed here are my own and are NOT representative of my employer(s).
  2. Helping humans innovate WITH technology has been one of the many focuses of my career. I was part of the inaugural group who helped pioneer SAP’s Innovation Services in innovation management and was accredited with the SAP Innovation & Advisory Skill granted to those who showed the ability to identify appropriate business models, processes, applications, and data as well as applicable intelligent technologies needed to bring them to life.
    • I worked for SAP Innovation Services in Blockchain where I led the design practice (the discipline rather than a team), helped design blockchain backed systems, and led workshops to help Fortune 500 companies identify where blockchain could be useful for them. This was a similar situation to AI where it seemed every company clamored for the ‘latest and greatest’ tech without fully understanding it. Most companies just needed a database rather than adopting blockchain technology and it was my job to help them understand that even if it meant we were not selling them our blockchain services.
    • I LOVE technology. I am not against technology in any way. That said, I believe technology should by made by humans, for humans, and should work with them rather than strive to replace the human contribution in any way. As the quote goes, “I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes”. – Johanna Maciejewska

When it comes to things like art, writing, or even product design — if you want to embrace homogeny and “be different just like everyone else” then AI will suit you just fine and before long people will start to recognize how what AI has produced for you is no different than what it has produced for the next person/project/organization. When it all comes from the same source material, be it the data sets or the algorithms (and believe it or not, most reference the same things as it’s very hard and costly to build a large categorized and classified data set) it will all start eventually looking, feeling, acting, and working the same. If you actually care about making something for humans to embrace with their multi-contextual origins, wants, needs, and differing abilities, AND you want to make something for them that is differentiated from all the things that have come before it, humans are integral to the process.

Relating back to the emotional part of this post a bit. The emotional labor involved in protecting my designers, informing them, assuaging their fears, as well as educating and advocating for the human side of all that we do is intensive, but worth it. This is part of the reason why such books have made it on to my TBR (to be read) list and will continue to do so.

As an anthropologist (7) and information scientist (8) who specializes in cyber anthropology and social informatics (where humans and technology intersect) I am especially concerned with the human element, specifically culture, context, consent, and exploitation. Humans are not binary code made up of 1s and 0s and our experiences cannot be distilled down to an algorithm (9). This is where most systems, including a lot of AI, fail a diverse population. As I addressed in my Ph.D. dissertation, systems alone cannot provide everything that humans need to understand or interpret or utilize the world around them. Lived shared experiences are a necessary part of the human condition and one that AI cannot recreate.

  1. During my mixed undergrad degree (anthropology, philosophy, and psychology) in the early 2000s, I did my ethnographic field methods research on the Motivations of Guilded Players in World of Warcraft – where my research was entirely online. This led me to getting my M.S. in Applied Anthropology with a focus on Design and Business where I studied the Fedora Project (the group behind what is monetized as Red Hat Linux) and their online experience for my Masters Thesis in my research on How to Grow, Maintain, and Sustain an Online Open Source Development Community.
    • While I use the term Cyber Anthropology other people have used Digital Anthropology or Digital Ethnography to describe this work. Though I was not the first to do this, I was one of the first to do it in World of Warcaft or MMORPGs in general.
  2. My Ph.D. is in Information Science and my dissertation is An Ethnographic Study of Parental Information Behavior when Assessing Video Game Content for their Children where I researched how American parents did or did not use the ESRB (video game rating system) when making decisions about video game appropriateness. I developed a model of how a parent’s interaction with information on behalf of their children changes as their children age and what to do to develop a healthy relationship with their children and their children’s evolving media interactions over time.
    • Funny enough, many parents in my study wanted to see other humans interact with the content via play-throughs over trusting a system like the ESRB or simply reading reviews. With the advent of sites like Twitch this is much easier to do today than it was when I was researching this topic 2010-2016.
    • Why mention my degrees at all? I mention them for two reasons. 1) As a woman, I find I’m taken a little more seriously when I show that I have credentials in relevant fields, (See book: The Authority Gap by Mary Ann Sieghart) and 2) To show that while I embrace technology (I’ve worked in technology all my life) I focus on the human-computer partnership where the two collaborate together for work and play rather than putting humans second or treated as an expendable after thought on the path toward unsustainable profit growth.
  3. This is where Dr. Buolamwini’s book finds its place. Other books to consider are Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Dr. Cathy O’Neil and Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism by Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble. These last two are on my 2025 TBR list along with several others.
    • While all of the books I’ve mentioned so far are by women with Ph.D.s, that is not a criteria for being on my TBR list, it just so happens that women with Ph.D.s make up a large majority of the people calling out the industry. I’ll leave it up to you to decide why that might be.

Humans are messy and chaotic and regardless of their perceived similarities, are highly complex and individual beings who all have their own unique wants and needs that are sometimes chaotic and contradictory. This is all part of the human experience, which is why inclusive design, open design, universal design, and accessibility are so important to me as a designer. The very notion of letting an AI design something for humans on its own is the exact opposite of inclusive and open design. Not to mention the fact that accessibility and universality are often second thoughts for most able bodied humans. How do we expect an algorithm to make them a priority?

Given I’m a human who depends on this planet to sustain me, my family, and my loved ones, I’m also highly concerned with the the impact AI has on our environment. Just like how electric cars aren’t truly environmentally conscious choices when you consider where all their parts originate (especially those used to create the lithium batteries) or where they get all the power that charges them — AI also has a way of hiding its huge impacts on the environment. The biggest limitation on the technology behind AI today lies with its dependency on ecologically unsustainable amounts of energy and water to power it. Companies are consuming enormous amounts of these resources putting a strain on the infrastructure that humans depend on to live. The additional human health impact is multilayered from those who work in the mining and smelting side to others having to contend with power hungry data centers in their back yards causing a myriad of illnesses they are powerless to fight against (10).

  1. A few relevant articles on this topic

To put this in perspective, Crawford discusses a paper (11) that calculated the carbon footprint of one natural language processing model (NLP – think ChatGPT) which “produced more than 660,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions, the equivalent of five gas-powered cars over their total lifetime (including their manufacturing) or 125 round-trip flights from New York to Beijing” (Crawford pg. 42). Is the cost to our planet worth it to have a conversation with a bot? What about the cost of the exploited human labor that was used to input the data into the NLP so it could work? All of a sudden that “free” AI art or prose isn’t so free after all, is it? As a note to employers, it may not be cost saving to you either as a recent MIT CSAIL study revealed there are economic limits to trying to replace humans (12). Given AI is largely not ecological, environmental, or economical, I have to wonder when the price (monetary and beyond) to create and run it will finally outstrip any perceived future profits companies believe they will glean from it.

  1. Energy and Policy Considerations for Deep Learning in NLP: https://aclanthology.org/P19-1355/
  2. https://www.csail.mit.edu/news/rethinking-ais-impact-mit-csail-study-reveals-economic-limits-job-automation

In the end, I’m not trying to be a doomsayer here. I think there can be a time and a place for humans and AI to work together, but that’s the crux of it, working together. Here is why I was inspired to even begin this now way too long blog post. While AI has already started to find a place in the ‘hard’ sciences (13), I think we in the social sciences can also find our place in this ever changing landscape. Especially since even the use of AI in hard sciences can be detrimental if it is based on biased or skewed data sets and there is a lack of awareness on how this might be an issue for under represented populations.

  1. A few hard science examples:

And here’s where we begin to circle back to my previous statement about considering culture, context, consent, and exploitation when it comes to AI systems and how they are built and powered. As an information scientist and cyber anthropologist focused on the intersection of humans and technology, I find that myself and people like me, are in a prime position to be able to elevate the human side of this partnership that has largely been ignored or downgraded as an after thought. Both Dr. Crawford and Dr. Buolamwini point out in their books that content and data without context and consent can lead to technological failures and biases that directly affect people in the general population every day, whether they know it or not. And while I’m a proponent of inclusive and open design, I cannot ignore the fact that this can also cause problems for marginalized people who may be exploited as a means to an end of making a ‘better data set’ which could in turn be used against them. As I always stress to my designers, it is our job to not only think of how the things we design can help all people. It is also our responsibility to fight against ways they can be nefariously used as well.

The field of AI needs us more than it knows. We’ve moved past the time period of being ok with the field moving fast and breaking things to get a product out to market as quickly as possible, as the things moving fast are the depletion of our natural resources and those being broken are people caught on the exploitive labor side or the wrong end of an algorithm. While there may be short term profits for a few, the long term consequences will come for us all. And no, I’m not talking about some sentient robot uprising. I’m talking about ethics and sustainability. I’m talking about the ways not that AI can impact humans, rather the ways that humans can impact AI. While I’ve mentioned quite a few amazing humans above who’ve already had various impacts on AI, they are but a small part of a growing movement (14) that could always use a few more.

  1. A few social science contributions:

Though it may seem like I’m a bit late to this conversation, it’s something that’s been brewing in my mind for more than a decade. My work history includes IBM who acquired the company I worked for in 2013 (4 years after I started), which was the largest privately owned hosting company in the world before the acquisition. We specialized in infrastructure as a service including managing severs in large data centers which is one of the myriad of things I designed the interfaces for. They used our infrastructure as the basis of their cloud computing offering, for which I also designed interfaces and researched uses in its early stages (and I am a rare designer with an OTAA to show for it — IYKYK).

As previously mentioned, I was also a design consultant at SAP in their innovation services utilizing edge technologies (Blockchain, IoT, ML, and more). Thus, I’ve peripherally touched on this throughout the better part of my career. Now that I find myself over a large team of designers working for a company which was recently acquired by yet another large technology corporation, and one that is putting big bets on AI, I find myself squarely at one of these intriguing intersections of people and technology yet again. So, I’m doing what any good researcher does, I’m diving in and consuming everything I can (15).

  1. Books I’ve read this year on AI or related topics:
    • Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella Meadows (while not AI specifically, I felt it was related enough to include)
    • The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century’s Greatest Dilemma by Mustafa Suleyman
    • AI Ethics by Mark Coeckelbergh
    • Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control by Stuart Russell
    • The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think freely in the Age of Neurotechnology by Anita A Farahany
    • Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust by Gary F. Marcus
    • Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What is Human in a World of Machines by Joy Buolamwini
    • Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence by Kate Crawford

If you’ve made it this far, thanks for sifting through this brain dump. It’s been a while since I’ve been inspired to write something like this and I’m glad I’ve been able to take advantage of my company’s imposed time off to do so.

Now, back to my TBR list.

p.s. The irony is not lost on me that the program I wrote this draft in originally kept trying to get me to use AI to “improve my writing”. For better or worse, this is all human made and no algorithms were involved in its creation.

#luckywelivedhawaii

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Having lived in Hawaii for almost four years this article in the Washington Post on people leaving Hawaii hits home in multiple places.

This picture is one of the last I took, December of 2016, while we were living on the island of Oahu. It was a beautiful place to live and as the hashtag states, #luckywelivehawaii, we felt lucky indeed. But, that luck only went so far. Working in the technology industry as a remote worker for an off-island company (we had one office on the island that I never visited – it was mostly for transient workers going between the far east and the US) I was able to continue to work in my field. Had I not had my remote job, however, I would have never found work on the island.

I interviewed for a job before moving out there, hoping that I’d be a great fit coming from the mainland with all of my experience and expertise (which by the way you should never do – Hawaii has her own way of doing things and it should be appreciated). The problem was, though the cost of living was at least 3x what we were used to in Texas, they paid a 3rd of what I was making to do the same work. In all my time living on the island, I never saw another job available in my field. And yes, I did look.

What I found instead were other workers like me who worked for mainland offices, on mainland hours, from our tiny island in the middle of the Pacific. There weren’t many of us, but we did exist. Other technologists, I found in the tech startup community, mostly tried to develop opportunities that focused on capitalizing on the tourist market, because it was the only market.  Either that or they did like Hello Makana, a company that ships Hawaiian delicacies all over the world, and catered to the people who had left and wanted a reminder of home.

Still, others who were once the white-collar workers of the mainland fell so much in love with the island that they found a way to make it work by doing things like becoming bee-keepers, tour guides, or were a part of the service industry in jobs like bartending and masseuses.

What I will never forget is the disparity between the tourists, the rich who make money off the backs of the tourists, and then the natives who were either exploited for the tourists or forced to work menial jobs because that’s all there was available. In the worst cases, they were destitute or completely homeless. Of those who were able to afford homes, they did so because they had multiple extended family members or multiple families living under one roof. Those homes they could afford were dilapidated, old, and generally unkept due to the cost of doing so.

Now, this is in no way meant to be representative of every possible Hawaiian experience on the island, just a snapshot of what my experience was there and one that falls in line with what the article reports. The natives will always have a soft spot in my heart. During our time there we did our best to avoid most of the tourist trappings and instead sought out experiences of the beauty and the nature of the island that helped the islands in one way or another. That will always be my recommendation to anyone who visits. Skip the tv dinner version and find a way to support the local culture and community any way you can.

Would I have stayed had I been able to find equal work for equal pay? It’s a possibility. What was more important were the opportunities afforded to my children, not only as children but also as adults. While we had to leave the island, part of it will always live within us. My children are better for having experienced their early childhood there. And, though they may never remember it, I have a lot of photographic evidence to help them relive as much as possible.

Relevant links:
To read more about the cultural perspective of native islanders here is an interesting piece I recently came across from a cultural anthropologist.
Here is a perspective from native Hawaiians on their culture versus the culture that is sold to tourists.
Here is yet another cultural look.

 

scientists-arent-arrogant

Arrogant Scientists?

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An interesting article on how scientists are so easily dismissed.

“Becoming a professional scientist takes, on average, four years of undergraduate studies (note: science majors are usually rated among the most difficult/time consuming), 6–10 years of intense graduate training (most grad students work/study 60+ hours a week and rarely take holidays), and several years of doing a post-doc. Further, after all of that training, you spend your life actually doing science, which means that you are constantly gaining experience and new knowledge. The idea that reading a bunch of blogs and non-academic books will put you on par with that type of training and experience is the epitome of arrogance and hubris. It is just about the most pretentious thing that I can think of. Of course scientists know more about science than the average person on the street, just as plumbers know more about plumbing than the average person, and mechanics know more about cars than the average person. We intuitively expect that anyone who goes through that type of training will be extremely knowledgeable.”

Facebook Messenger and You

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My readers, please take a moment to read all of the TOS in every single social app you have downloaded and used over the last year. This includes all of the updated TOS you automatically agree to because you’ve already had it installed. They ALL ask for some setting you’re not going to be comfortable with if you are caught up in the hysteria over the new FB messenger application.

If you are not installing the FB messenger app because of the latest and greatest in sensationalist headlines, then you should follow through and uninstall every single other app that utilizes any of your social networks (twitter, tumblr, instagram, skype etc). After you’ve done that, you should revoke all access of those applications to each other (i.e. any app that is connected to your Facebook account).

Then, if you really want to protect your privacy, you will delete your Facebook account altogether, along with every other social network profile you’ve ever created. Just don’t forget those companies still own all of the data you gave them over the last 10 years (if you’ve been on FB as long as I have). You already sold it to them when you signed up and they can do whatever they want with it whenever they want to. Most importantly, it’s their business to do just that.

If you would like an alternative, try Facebook Texting:
Screenshot 2014-08-10 10.03.45

It is accessible via Facebook Settings (easiest way to access it is to click on the lock in the header next to the updates icon and go to “See more settings”).

A life lost, a legacy remembered…

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I do not have many words to add to the multiple that are already out there. What I do have to say is that about a year ago I was protesting SOPA with the rest of you. It was one of those things those of us who care so deeply about freedom and the Internet did in hopes that it would actually bring about change.

Internet and Information freedom are near and dear to my heart. My entire Masters research was on FOSS / Fedora. I’ve posted on this blog about many of the things that are threats to this freedom including cyber bullying, censorship, and net neutrality.

Though I have a few papers floating around on the Internet, you will not find any of them in a journal much to the dismay of many of you who have contacted me for copies and citations. Why? Because I refuse to have my research (especially that which I do of my own free will and with no outside funding) published in a journal that cannot be accessed by the public, even if this hurts me academically.

I am not the only one that has a problem with the journal system and there are a few journals out there that have risen up against the status quo. There are also a few people who have taken a stand against the privatization of publicly funded information. Aaron Swartz was one such person. While he should be remembered for the many awesome things he did for Internet and Information Freedom, it is the ending of his life over the weekend that is being talked about today.

All I can say is the world, especially those of us who feel the same way he did, lost a great mind and advocate. He has been an inspiration to many of us, and he will only continue to do so. It will be interesting now to see how he has changed the world through the ending of his own. I am just an academic and a wanna-be hacker, but I will always do what I can to fight many of the same fights he did.

In the words of famed anthropologist Margaret Mead:

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.

How are you changing the world today?

P.S. If you are reading this through an RSS feed – thank Aaron…

Dear Rick Scott

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I recently read remarks you made about my discipline, anthropology. There you proclaimed that your state, Florida, didn’t need any more anthropologists.

“Is it a vital interest of the state to have more anthropologists? I don’t think so.”

It saddens me that you are ignorant of the fact that your state is the home of one of the best anthropology programs out there. That said, I think you should really do that thing we anthropologists call “research” before you make statements that you’re not prepared to defend.

Here, some University of South Florida students have given you a head start:
This is Anthropology: USF.

Lastly, I would like to state for the record that I am an anthropologist. I not only have a job, but a very good paying job. Additionally, I do research in everything from Open Source Software development to User Experience Design. I have conducted research for companies such as Microsoft, Motorola, General Motors, Red Hat, and am currently working on research for yet another tech company. Last I checked these all represent aspects of technology, one of those subjects that seems to be tremendously valued by you. Please learn more about my discipline before saying it’s useless.

Sorry to keep it short, but I have to get back to work.

The effects of working from home on my psyche

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Ah to be a remote worker!

I have worked from multiple parts of the world with people from all over the world, but this is the first time I’ve been sequestered to a single place with a single in person contact for multiple days on end. Here’s a bit of what it has been like to go from being some what of a highly motivated social butterfly both online and in person to someone who fell into social isolation and un-motivation before I even realized it and what I did about it.

When my husband was assigned to Fort Bliss in El Paso Texas, I was excited because that meant we could actually live together and I could still keep up with things like work and school. The company I work for gave me the opportunity to work remote and I was able to fill my semester with all online classes. We then traded in my sports car for an SUV and headed off to West Texas.

After a month of spotty internet connections from the hotel we were staying in, the Starbucks down the street, and the public wifi on base, I was ever so thankful to finally get setup in our home off base. What I didn’t realize is that I would for 6 out of 7 days have only 1 person I would physically see and converse with now that I was at home. While I’m ever so happy this person is my husband, and after a year of him being in a foreign country I am definitely not complaining, I had no idea the effects this would have on my psyche.

What I have learned is that it’s not just about the fact that I am home alone all day. No, it’s also the fact that even if I wanted to leave I do not have the option to do so. You see, we opted to have a single vehicle because well it was cheaper and I didn’t have to drive to work. So, though it made sense at the time, I now see the error of my ways. This situation has set me up with the overwhelming feeling of being trapped in my own house!

After two and a half months of this (July, August, September), I found myself feeling more and more down, uninspired, and completely unmotivated. What was more alarming was I found that after the 3 to 5 days a month I spent in Dallas in the office and on campus I’d come home feeling renewed and refreshed only to have it all drain out of me within a day or two. For those who know me, this is the very opposite of who I am. I generally have so many projects going I don’t know what to do with myself! To go from that to having absolutely no interest in anything was a giant red flag for me.

I tried many tips and tricks including:

  • Getting up and dressed for work even if you’re not leaving the house
  • Having a specific room in the house where work is conducted
  • Taking the occasional afternoon out where I worked on base until my husband got off

Unfortunately, none of these seemed to make a difference. I had to find a way to fix this or it was going to drive me crazy, and not in the figurative sense. To that end, I started running. Yes, running. I don’t know what it is, whether it is just getting out of the house farther than the few streets I normally go to walk my dogs or the resulting endorphins in my head – but it seems to be working. It helps now that it’s cooler outside so I’m not killing myself in the Texas heat. It’s also nice because it’s something physical and I completely leave all of my work and school work and RA work behind to just have a bit of time to myself, for myself.

Being the self-competitive person I am, it’s also turned into a bit of a game of going further, faster, longer. Though I love my computers and I love being online, sometimes you just have to step away from it all to get some perspective. This taught me something else as well, I need time away from work. Working from home means for most people, myself included, more hours and more varied work times.

I found myself finishing something Sunday night that I could have had completed the Friday before had I just had it in me to do it. Now I turn off my work email and chat at 5pm. My work day is done and it doesn’t start again until 8am. This means I HAVE to get my work done during the hours allotted. I get even more motivated when I spend my lunch hour running as that means I can’t do work during lunch time either! (Which I was guilty of doing while I was in the office all the time.)

This change in my schedule also meant I had to tell my boss, no I cannot work on that tonight – giving me time to set aside specific hours to work on school work as well. Funny enough, this in turn gave me more time to do things I enjoy doing outside of work and school like gaming! Putting exercise and more structure in my day was a brilliant way for me to get out of my funk.

Last week, not only did I run every day (2.5 miles), but I also took 3 quizzes, 1 test, participated in class discussions, conducted a bit of heuristic evaluation for my research assistanceship as well as completing all of my office work before the weekend. In addition to all of that, I also got a lot of work done for my wedding (yes, I’m already married – but we didn’t have a wedding as we go married at the US Embassy in Seoul, South Korea). This included designing and ordering save the dates and proper invitations as well as getting a photographer, a cake baker, a DJ and working with all of my bride’s maids to get their dresses ordered. This also meant that I actually got to play video games last weekend as I actually had free time for once.

So, there you have it. Now I actually get to take advantage of some of the freedoms granted to me by working from home even if I don’t have a vehicle and only see a single person in person 6 out of 7 days a week. All it took was a little organization and thinking outside of my computer screen.

My next couple of posts will go into some of the interesting things I’ve experienced in online gaming as of last as well as how I am using a Facebook group to organize my wedding. This is just my way of getting back into writing something at least a little relevant here. My hope is that someone gets some use out of this. If nothing else – this place will not look as dormant as it has of late.

Ok, I’ll admit it – I have a Cyber Husband

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This shouldn’t be too much of a surprise, I am a cyber anthropologist after all and I do pretty much LIVE online, but perhaps I should explain.

My husband is in the US Army currently stationed in Uijeongbu, South Korea. We have been married all of a month and a half as of today, Valentines day – however, our wedding isn’t until December 30th of this year.

Married in Seoul, Korea
Just Married!

You see, he proposed to me on Christmas Day last year (the proposal story is posted on my Facebook) and we decided the day before we did it to go ahead and get married while I was there celebrating the holidays with him. Yes, we got married just 6 days after we got engaged and yes, we really surprised our family and friends with that one. As his little brother said, “it just kind of Facebook happened” commenting on the fact we let everyone know we were engaged and then married via Facebook status updates as we made each one “Facebook Official”. Now, I haven’t written up the marriage story yet, but let me tell you – getting married in a foreign country is a story in and of itself.

The day before I left
The last picture I took of us, taken the day before I left.

Just 11 days after we were married I was on my way back to the states leaving my new husband on base back in Korea. And, though we were married 6 weeks ago, we haven’t had an actual wedding. Our one year anniversary will be spent having our wedding with friends and family back here in the states. This means I’m currently working two jobs (one as a UXD for a web hosting company and the other as a community manager for the virtual barcamp community I mentioned in my last post), going to school full time for my PhD, and planning a wedding. No I don’t sleep…

Not only do I have all that to contend with, but I also have to help make a 7 thousand mile long distance marriage work. Add to that the fact that our schedules are 15 hours apart (when it is DST it’s only 14 hours) and you can see this makes for an interesting set of circumstances when trying to coordinate and spend as much time together as possible.

You may be wondering how we make this work? This is where we enter the world of cyber marriage. What do I mean by “cyber marriage”? Well, at the moment, we spend our time as a married couple completely online. How do we do this? Our number one tool is Skype and we each have laptops with a built in web cams and mics, which means we can see and talk to each other on a fairly regular basis.

In addition to that, I bought him an iPod touch with camera for his birthday and I have an iPhone 4. Having these allows us to video conference both over Face Time and now Skype. We also use Facebook quite extensively both through our laptops and mobile devices. For us it is used mostly as an instant messaging service since we can’t text each other, a way to send notes to each other rather than emails, and as a way to keep up with one another via 4sq check-ins and wall posts. This way all we have to do is get real time status updates during the short time we have together rather than having to hash out our entire day when the other can keep up with it in our “off times” via our Facebook wall posts or notes. Lastly, we have a shared Mobile Me account where we can upload files to each other, share our calendars with one another, and even post pictures to one another. Having all of these options for connecting is very handy given our schedules.

Watching Blizzcon together over Skype (day here - night there)
Watching Blizzcon together over Skype (day here - night there)

Speaking of schedules, this is where we have to get really creative. Currently, with the 15 hour time difference, I hang out with him before he leaves for work, which is my afternoon from 4:30 to 6 pm and his morning from 7:30 to 9am. Then we hangout during his lunch, which is his 11:30 to Noon and my 8:30 to 10 pm. The only other chance we get is when I get up in the morning before I go to work my 7 to 9 am, which is just before he goes to sleep as it is his 10 pm to midnight. Sometimes things get in the way, like the fact I have class on Wednesday nights and I don’t get home until he has to be back at work. That and once a month I have class Friday day, Friday night, and Saturday day, which ends up being his ENTIRE weekend. Lame huh?

Though those are the only times we actually get to hangout and talk with each other, he’ll have me up on his Skype from the time he gets home at just after 5 pm (my 2 am), until I get up at 7 am (his 10 pm), and I’ll call him back when I get to work at 9:30am (his 12:30 am) and let him sleep until he has to get up at 5:45 am (my 2:45 pm). Though that may sound odd, it really is a comfort just knowing the other person is there, even if they are unconscious.

On the weekends it’s a bit different and we both make adjustments as best we can to spend as much waking time with each other as possible. Usually we spend our time playing World of Warcraft or Borderlands together. This does become hard when I have things like homework to keep up with, but even then, it’s nice having him up on my screen while I write papers. As I said before, knowing he’s there and being able to see him and interact with him whenever I want is a great comfort. It’s almost like him being in the room next to me, just hanging out at his computer playing video games, while I’m at my computer working on a paper. Almost…

The funny thing is, if you count up all the hours where we are both conscious and unconscious with each other, it turns out we spend more time together now than we would were we physically together and both holding down jobs and me with my school schedule.

This is the schedule we kept up while we were dating and still keep up now that we are married. When he comes stateside in May/June, we’ll be able to keep a more regular schedule with each other and actually be able to use things like phones to communicate, but until then, this is good as it gets in our cyber marriage.

Our first kiss as a married couple.
Self portrait of us and our first kiss as husband and wife.

So, for those of you this Valentine’s day who have the opportunity to reach out and physically touch the person you’re attached to, be thankful. There are those of us who wish for that every day, but we do what we can to make it work with a computer, a web cam, and an internet connection.

  

   

I miss you Rob, my Cyber Husband.
Happy Valentine’s Day.

P.S. In case you’re wondering, his Valentine’s present consisted of Steam games I bought for him off his wish list. He bought me an in game pet and in game mount for World of Warcraft!

Earning the title of Gamer

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Do you play Farmville or any of the other what seem like thousands of passive games on Facebook? Do you enjoy it? Get something out of it? If so, you probably don’t want to read any further. Head back to your Facebook page and continue to spew your digital litter all over the place and I’ll continue to toss your pixels wasted on your mind numbing updates into the digital recycle bin.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hold the fact you play the games against you – but please don’t be offended if I do not share in the excitement or even interest of your overzealous updates on your latest point-click-refresh time sink.

Now, I’m just as guilty as the next 4sq’r on your list. Yes, I’ll admit to that. But, you also have to admit you rarely see a 4sq update from me, and when you do it’s someplace really cool and usually with friends. Most of the check ins I never publish to my feeds and if it takes any longer than 30 seconds to check in, I get over it and move on.

That being said, does anyone else feel like the concept of gaming (for the record I don’t necessarily agree with calling these passive apps games), has been dumbed down? What ever happened to the days of gaming wizards, hackers fighting hackers, hacking war games, pissing off that hacker girl you like by beating her at her favorite game, or being picked to do real battle for your leet arcade skills?

That’s just it, the crux of this post, gaming used to be synonymous with having skills. Working for 3DFX, we even used games to compete with one another for special privileges like hosting the booth at Quakecon. I remember the days of Atari (yes I was young, but I played it!); when pizza joints had arcade tables where you could eat and at the same time play Pacman with a friend; the awesomeness of playing against someone in Street Fighter and Mortal Combat at the arcade; beating Super Mario and Paper Boy for the first time on the NES; and even playing games on the now defunct Dreamcast and Sega Saturn.

My first exposure to PC games was Doom, then on to Quake and Unreal Tournament, and I definitely remember enjoying Myst, 7th Guest, and Myth. From there I moved on to Diablo / Diablo II, & Warcraft I/II/III. (Gotta give Blizzard props for having games that came out on PC and Mac at the same time – this is what won me over to them early on.) Can’t forget the original Sims (though it’s been hard for me to get into the latest version and I’ll admit only played Spore a few hours). Hell, I remember playing the first Halo game when it came out and finding it funny that it took Microsoft buying Bungie, who was originally a Macintosh game developer (anyone remember Oni?), to put out a great game.

These days I’m all about Borderlands (via Steam and my ever expanding library of games there), WoW (/played since Nov 23, 2004), as well as games like Little Big Planet, any of the Lego games (Batman, Star Wars, and Harry Potter are my favs so far), and many many others on multiple computers, consoles, and hand held devices.

I don’t mean to spark a debate here over what should and should not be called a game, or even the quality of the games themselves – this is more about the gaming experience and what it means to self identify or earn the title of Gamer. This is by no means the type of academic post most are used to seeing here, it’s more of an opinion piece. My opinion is simple – games should take mental skills, actual effort, quick thinking, consequences of making critical choices, and even some practice.

If you’re playing a game that doesn’t require these things, especially the making you think part, well perhaps you should try them sometime. Then, maybe we can talk gamer to gamer. Until that time, I’ll continue to block your point-click-refresh posts off my Facebook feed and decline every single invitation you send my way. Look me up when you want to waste time with me playing a real game. I promise not to beat you too bad, – the first time.

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