Steve Gillmor’s GestureLab

A few weeks ago I wrote a post called iPhonomics. A few days later I was chatting with Andrew Keen when he casually mentioned that would make a good title for a book. Although I have no intention of writing a book (that’s real work) I thought I’d check out the domain on Go Daddy. To my not so much surprise, someone had grabbed it. I called the guy up and asked him why. He said he thought it was a good title for a book. I asked him if he would release it back to me. He said he’d think about it and call me on Monday. He never did.

Several years ago at BloggerCon (the one where Adam Curry talked and Scoble did a session on information overload) I coined the term podosphere in answer to a question. As I spoke, a guy two rows down and 10 seats over grabbed the domain. A year or so later he sold the domain to someone else, who contacted me and asked whether I was interested in working with him to do something with it. I declined.

Several months ago Doc Searls and I came up with a name for a new show I have been developing. I grabbed it that night as soon as I got home. Tomorrow that show will launch: it’s called Bad Sinatra.

In the Gesturesphere, we all make contributions to the state of mind we call this social network of ours. You can call it attention, or intention, or VRM, or Twitter, or whatever. But it still represents our hope to make some difference, to leave a footprint in the cement out in front of the theatre of our lives. We take it a lot more seriously than we let on, but like high school we pretend that it doesn’t hurt when we’re insulted, passed by, snickered at, or worst of all, not noticed.

Gestures have become big business. The politics of personality swamp us with messages that need to be triaged much like we used to parse advertising. Is this the program wrapped in signals or signals disguised as programming? Yes. It’s an ugly space we’re in, and nobody holds the high ground. We’re all selling something, and of course it’s ourselves.

Gabe Rivera invited me into Facebook to show me the news feature and the general ecology of the system. I appreciate the gesture. As part of the setup, I gave FB access to my Gmail contact list and it converted the entire list into friend requests (with my permission of course.) At first I went name by name and deselected the ones I felt awkward about, but at the end I said the hell with it and just sent them all out. I’m glad I did. I have Twitter to thank for this, and before that LinkedIn, where the difficulty of delineating “friendship” gave way to simply saying yes to all. Come to think of it, if the contact is made, it represents a gesture of friendship at its heart, no matter what the cascading motive beyond it.

Once you’re over the initial phase, Facebook begins to tease out more metadata, the context of the relationship and then the fleshing out of the category with detail. I’m still resistant to the early attempts at coaxing content — write something on my wall and this zombies thing, for example — but the system’s mechanism to clarify such choices as “You met randomly” produces results like this:

Gillmor is my favorite “asshole” and I mean that as the highest praise. I heard a rumor that he’s starting a new podcast with Doc. I pray this is true. A real man with a real voice in a sea of ridiculous poseurs. I would listen to him everyday if I could. He’s funny And mean. I like him.

Fantastic. And then I get a request to confirm this comment as accurate. You bet I did. The joy of collaborating with a robot to produce fine comedy is exhilarating. And to Tree Shapiro, the author of above, thank you sir for your discerning genius and fuck you as well. See you in the Gesturesphere.

Sunday, July 8th, 2007 at 11:36 am.
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