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Mark Trapp. Blog.

Mark is an expert in information clarity and simplicity: he has a broad range of experience in usability, technology management, information architecture, and interactive strategy. This is his blog.

Who needs Friendship? NobodySeptember 29

Bottom Line: Both sides of the Friendship aisle miss the point: Friendship is a disposition one finds oneself in, not something to strive for.

That's right: nobody. Of all the things that are necessary in life, Friendship is not one of them. Not even close. 

To get to why this is the case, we need to get a little abstract and talk about two different types of affinities people have towards each other: one doesn't produce Friendship, the other does.

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Two types of affinity

The first one I'll call neediness. Cheap Trick's famous single sums neediness up: it's a need to have someone, or anyone, pay attention to you. This isn't necessarily a bad thing: everyone needs to feel loved or recognized regularly. It gives us motivation and a will to succeed. 

One negative for neediness is that it's awfully one sided: I need something, you are providing that something, and I take that something. Not much in it for you, is there? We can sort of fake reciprocity by me giving you someth

Argumentation: it's not just for trollsSeptember 27

Bottom Line: Separating the argument from the arguing and the people doing the arguing lets us talk about topics in a broader depth and get things done.

Earlier this week, I mentioned I'd be organizing what I write into different serializations, or "tracks:" today I'm going to introduce a track on argumentation. I'll be discussing how to use argumentation to not only your advantage: not necessarily to win arguments, but to find out what the best possible answer is to a problem.

What is an argument?

Most people consider an argument to be two people shouting at each other, getting angrier and angrier as time progresses. I'm going to talk about a different kind of argument: one that I hope would be more palatable to more people.

An argument is a position and a justification for that position. I think scones are the best baked good. I believe this to be true because they're dry but not too dry, you can stick various delicious things in them, and they go well with a hot beverage. That's is an argument. You may have a comp

The College of MarkSeptember 24

Bottom Line: Mark. Blog. is going back to school.

In starting this blog, I had a couple things I wanted to talk about for a long time and get people's reactions. After a couple posts, I'm starting to think about what my long term goals are, what interests me, and what may be of some value to others.

My goal in social media has always been two-fold: to become more knowledgeable about different topics I'd otherwise never learn about, and to share what I know with other people. In figuring out how best to accomplish these two goals, I started to think about a model with which I'm both familiar and comfortable: the college course. 

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A lecturer or instructor may teach several courses in addition to research activities: each course can be taken by itself and provides an ongoing in-depth discussion about a specific topic. In addition, the instructor may take on other subjects that he may not know all that much about in hopes of learning more and coming up with new insights about the topic. 

Introducing Blog "Tracks"

So in the same respect, I'll be structuring what I write here into different "courses" or "tracks:" I started one track already, about the role of Friendship in digital media. In addition to Friendship, I'll talk about other interesting aspects of the "social" in so

Friendship in the digital world (Part 2)September 23

Bottom Line: Friendship differs from other relationships in one key respect: friends aren't in it for personal gain, but to achieve something that makes each other better.

 

Note: this series of posts is adapted from a larger paper on the nature of Friendship I wrote in 2005. Part 1 discusses the problems with Friendship in digital media. Check back later in the week for the subsequent parts.

Yesterday I mentioned three basic intuitions most people have about what Friendship is:

• Friends share interests
• Friends share interest in each other
• Friendship is stable

Today, I want to start off by talking about some basic intuitions about what Friendship isn't: that is, while keeping our basic understand of Friendship in mind, what circumstances would we consider definitely not a case of Friendship?

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What Friendship Isn't – Example 1: Co-workers

In the real world, take a look at two co-workers in the office. They both share interests: each one is ostensively interested in the company and its workings (motivations for doing so aside). They both share an interest in each other: co-workers help each other out on projects all the time. And, for most people, t

Friendship in the digital world (Part 1)September 22

Bottom Line: Friendship is a complex concept that few web applications define, leaving the users to make sense of what their relationships are in the digital world.

Note: this series of posts is adapted from a larger paper on the nature of Friendship I wrote in 2005. Check back later in the week for the subsequent parts.

One of the fundamental concepts in social media is the idea of Friendship: in order to participate in any social network or to utilize any of the social media tools, one needs to have friends. From a purely technical perspective, a friend is simply a connection on an individual's social graph: a similar entity that has been defined as "connected" to the individual.

But that simple connection isn't defined, in any normative sense, by the technical implementation. Users are free to define that connection however they wish. For example, if I wish to define all my friends in a social network to be everyone named "Jeff," there'd be nothing to stop me from doing so. I could go to my friends page and marvel at all the people named "Jeff."

But that's not really what we consider friendship, and one would be hard pressed to find anyone who'd find some substantive use from a social graph like that. So what could we consider real Friendship?

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Friendship: rel