Danah Boyd without subtitles

I am listening to Danah Boyd in the webcast, and she speaks about very interesting subjects. One of her references is Burning Man, a phenomenon I have been peripherally aware of for years. This is, however, also an example of how the cultural distance makes it hard to understand her.

Now she is talking about dating - a phenomenon that is mysterious and alien to Norwegians, as we have no dating culture that can be compared to the American dating routine. But I used Friendster as one of the examples yesterday, so the digital area she talks about should be familiar. Jill is also projecting Friendster on a screen here, and she just showed my profile and Lisbeth's profile through that. Danah's story of how Friendster was used for diverging profiles like drug-dealing, data-trading and fraud is fascinating.

Norwegians are used to subtitles in television screens, and now with the chat, as Jill types in questions, there are a kind of subtitles. Still, it is hard to respond to a face on a screen, even if I argued yesterday that people are supposed to be able to take the role of the writer or sender when facing the modern media.

Now Jill was very strict and wanted everybody to log into the chat. First, I logged into the wrogn chat that did not work. Then I logged into the right chat, and it still didn't work. Not much I can do about that. I'll try to catch Jill on AIM and catch her there!