Hippo Dignity

I’m not sure who’s responsible for this…

Originally uploaded by Kelly Sue.

The way LOLcats spread last year showed me that the increased growth of the Internet has both homogenized it and just allowed a whole range of subcultures to flourish and interact.

Or, to put it less wonkishly, it means the weird can spread.

This Obama poster is completely illegible to someone outside of certain Internet subcultures — in fact, I wonder if someone coming to it from “outside” would assume it was racist. But to someone inside any (or many) of those cultures, it’s — well, after a day spent talking to HIV treatment counselors who have to see 20 patients every single day, it’s a delightful change of pace.

And of course a reminder of how detached those subcultures are from the grim meathook future from where I’m currently sending dispatches.

1.  The strip is designed to keep you inside casinos.  Inside my hotel (the Flamingo, because we information architects like to kick it old-school), every path you can take is designed to take you through or into a casino.  The rooms don’t even have those terrible hotel-room coffee makers, which I presume is to get you downstairs, near where you could spend money, without caffeine.   It’s bizarrely fascinating.

2.  The keynote speaker at the conference has an office literally down the block from where I work.  I walk past his building at least a couple of times a week.  And yet I don’t think I would ever have just walked in to say hello.  Now we’ve exchanged cards, and I’m hoping he or someone from his firm will come address our brown-bag series in the works.
3. Steven, in comments to my last post, directed me to the geeky story behind the Bellagio water display, which has made me unreasonably happy.  Thank you, Steven!

4. I’ve seen the room where I’m presenting.  I’m definitely going to need to run for a presentation-clicker.  (I bought one in New York, which is… um, I think still on my bed at home.)

So the first big news out of SXSW Interactive this year seems to be that Twitter has hit some sort of adoption tipping point: In Ross Mayfield’s phrase, it’s “tipped the tuna.”

Twitter is a presence publisher: it asks you “what are you doing now?” and you tell it. It, in turn, tells your friends, or the whole world, if you make your posts public. Your friends can receive your Twitter posts via IM, SMS, web, or my preferred method, the Mac-only Twitterific app.

When I’ve been asked to describe Twitter, I call it “Dodgeball for people who don’t go out.” (And the fact that I can use that description tells you something about the tech-nerd quotient of the people asking the question.) Dodgeball is all about the ephemeral moment: we’re here now, come join us. Twitter is a bit more stateful: it could be Dodgeball-esque, but the people on my friends list use mostly for less pressing things — for updates on their moods, to describe a sky, and even for advice and a sort of asynchronous group chat.

However, Twitter is also apparently very useful as a Dodgeball-type app at a conference like SXSW, even though there is a Dodgeball Austin, and I wonder in fact if the long lagtime as Dodgeball has gotten integrated into Google will end up working against it: I’m not sure why it left the space for Twitter to move into.

I tried getting Twitter on my phone, on the Dodgeball model, and had to turn it off: it was making me crazy. I need to know that Clive is at his local New York bar right now: I do not need to be interrupted on the street to know that Emily in LA is packing for a trip. (Sorry, honey.) Having Twitter on my desktop makes a lot more sense — it provides a light-weight, low-cost way to check in with the world outside my workspace.

Liz Lawley, a bigger Twitter fan than I am, says:

What Twitter does, in a simple and brilliant way, is to merge a number of interesting trends in social software usage–personal blogging, lightweight presence indicators, and IM status messages–into a fascinating blend of ephemerality and permanence, public and private.

I’m not sure about either brilliant or fascinating there, myself, but I know this much: despite all the other presence indicators available to me, I haven’t turned it off yet. For the rest, I’ll have to see.

Note: I’m michelet on Twitter if you’re interested, or want to add me as a friend. I’m not a hugely active poster, as you might have guessed from the above, but reading my previous “twitters” did remind me I still haven’t posted here about The Coast of Utopia. Maybe when I start procrastinating tomorrow, which I’ve taken off to finish my IA Summit talk…

I am one of maybe five people in the entire world, if that, who looked at the new New Yorker site  and had a flashback to the navigational structure of this site.  But that’s only to be expected.

(Thesis: there are interface design paradigms that speak deeply to lit geeks.  Discuss.)