I feel as if I did worse than usual on my goals for 2011, but that could be due to getting a bunch of them done early, with not many coming in the second half of the year.
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My goals for 2011.
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I once again had eight goals for 2010, and it’s not too likely that any more of them will be accomplished before the end of the year.
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Yes, clearly my progress (or lack thereof) needs quarterly reports. And here’s the first one for this year.
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Happy New Year!

Once again, my goals for the coming year.
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To all my friends, even those who don’t read this blog: love and best wishes for the season[*] and the coming year.

I hope we see more of each other in 2010, and that we make our time together as meaningful, focused, and fun as possible.

I haven’t had time to formulate an opinion yet, but I respect past work by danah boyd and am quite certain that she’s onto something important in the research that led to her talk “The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online”, some of the implications of which she discusses in an interview, “MySpace to Facebook = White Flight?”. A key line: “We’re seeing a reproduction of all kinds of all types of social segregation that we like to pretend has gone away.”

That, in itself, is extremely important, and as more people use online arenas as “public spaces”, the fact that these arenas are actually deeply stratified and subject to a variety of hidden pressures becomes more and more significant. Also significant is how the other arenas, while technically easier to encounter because of all the wonderful information-sharing aspects of the internet, become almost hidden because stratification and habituation make each of us less likely, rather than more, to venture into spaces where we don’t have connections.

I’ve been reading Powers again, because trade paperback #11 finally came out (I picked it up at Isotope, which seems like quite a cool store) and the damn thing is just as addictive as ever. 11 books in, and it still leaves me demanding more as soon as it’s done.
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Or maybe not… This evening I found myself perusing the WP:LAME page on Wikipedia, home to what the editors have chosen as the “lamest edit wars”. And wow, people do get very, very involved in long-running disputes over amazing things.
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After years of ignoring social networking sites, starting in 2002 with Friendster, I finally joined Facebook yesterday.
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This is all anecdotal, and hence statistically useless, but I’ve noticed far more bad driving correlated with cellphone use recently. Some of it was in Dublin, where I think cellphone use is still higher per capita, but I’ve seen a lot of it around San Francisco also. I think every case of notably bad driving that I’ve encountered in the last month turned out to involve a driver using a cellphone.
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I’ve been reading danah boyd‘s work about online public spaces for a few years, and recommend her writing generally. Today I read one of her essays on how class divisions are being reflected online, specifically in the makeup of social networking sites.
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It struck me this weekend that there are significant advantages in having large extended families, not merely in standrd labor-sharing terms but also in terms of the likelihood of a greater range of experience.
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