Friendster or Foester?

Some people have asked me to explain why I call this blog Thus Spake Shibboleth.

Actually, that’s false, no one has asked me to explain it, but bear with me for a few paragraphs.

The “Thus Spake” comes from “Thus Spake Zarathustra,” an orchestral piece by Richard Strauss that is much better known as the theme from the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Good film, but I’ve never understood the ending.

Shibboleth is a word I had neither heard nor seen before I came to USC but now encounter daily. It appears in that ominous Shibboleth Authentication Request Processed message I get -- and I assume everyone else gets – from the USC server when logging into a password-protected area like Blackboard or email. The term actually predates email by about 3,000 years and has a number of different meanings, only one of them related to computer security. Wikipedia can explain further.

So, what I have here is a geeky title worthy of small talk during a break at a Star Trek convention. But after my first two reflections postings and what I’m about to describe this week, people may think I should change the name to Curmudgeonly Complaining.

Am I a curmudgeon, or worse? Thursday night Professor Dmitri Williams called me a Luddite because I hadn’t watched TV in three weeks and for other reasons, one of which I’ll get to in a sec. But, c’mon, would a Luddite have a blog? And just look at all these nice hyperlinks I’m embedding this week, including that one for people who don’t know what a Luddite is.

Did I have it coming from Professor Williams? You be the judge.

I’m sitting in his Social Dynamics of Online Communities class and our learned professor asks if we know who Dank and Martha are and why we should care about them. D & M were in our readings from last week. They’re two people on Second Life who got into a huge fight because Dank’s make-believe dog ate Martha’s beautiful-but-poisonous make-believe flowers, which resulted in Dank’s pooch “dying” in make-believe pain.

So I say, “They’re two people who obviously have way too much time on their hands.”

And Professor Williams replies, “Welcome to the next 12 months of this program.”

I hope not. I can’t be the only person who believes that online communities can be so much more than the fun and games, self-promotion and virtual panty gifting afforded by the likes of Facebook, LinkedIn and Second Life.

Actually I know I’m not alone because I just read about Bryant Choung. He’s a software engineer who in an interview with Wired magazine a couple of years back said he thought social networking sites seemed like a good idea at first, but their usage often devolved into “an attempt to get as many fake friends as possible.”

Annoyed by a deluge of friend requests from virtual strangers, Choung launched a social-networking parody site called Snubster. There people can list people and things that bug them. Several similar sites exist, including Enemybook. One of our assignments this past week was to register at some smaller social networking sites and have a look around, so I chose those two.

Both of the sites have their droll elements. Enemybook’s add-an-enemy form asks whether you are adding this person or thing because this entity killed your (choose one): family, friend, buzz or dog. But Enemybook is in many ways just another kind of social networking site. Its home page, for instance, invites users to “see who lists you as an enemy and . . . become friends with the friends of your enemy.”

As we’ve learned in one of our classes, new communication media inevitably spawn a backlash. These parody sites are more of a countermelody than a backlash, but they serve as a call to imaginative and technically savvy people to push online-community building beyond the adolescent level at which it seems to have plateaued.

That will be one of our goals when we tackle our final projects this fall, I suppose. At least it will be one of mine.