For centuries scientists routinely straightened the tails of Mosasaur fossils in their reconstructions. But a recent re-examination changed overnight the way they see the sea-going lizards

Brian Switek blogs at brianswitek.com

On 6 April 1821 – a little more than two decades before their countryman Richard Owen would coin the term "Dinosauria" – the English naturalists Henry de la Beche and William Conybeare presented a report on a peculiar group of fossil animals to their fellows in the Geological Society of London. One of the subjects of their paper, the long-necked marine reptile Plesiosaurus, made its academic debut that night, but the others were already familiar to the scholars in attendance. Called Ichthyosaurus, these fossil creatures seemed to have been cobbled together out of equal parts fish and crocodile, and even during this era of pre-evolutionary palaeontology, de la Beche and Conybeare could not help but place Ichthyosaurus in what they believed to be a graded series of forms between fish, the newly discovered Plesiosaurus, and crocodiles.

At the time of their report, de la Beche and Conybeare did not have much to work with. Popular accounts of the marine reptile had made Ichthyosaurus famous, yet a significant portion of its skeleton remained unknown. The tireless efforts of one of the first expert fossil collectors – Mary Anning, of "She sells seashells on the seashore" fame – provided naturalists with more complete specimens, showing the various species of Ichthyosaurus to be crocodile-like reptiles with straight, tapering tails. Restorations remained true to the animal's "fish lizard" moniker, and when Richard Owen examined an Ichthyosaurus with a kink in the distal part of its tail, he came up with a series of scenarios by which the tail of the dead individual may have become bent. (My personal favorite: that part of the tail had become bloated with gas during decomposition and pulled the spinal column out of place.)

But Owen, as well as the various scientists and artists who had reconstructed Ichthyosaurus with a straight tail, was wrong. Exceptionally well-preserved ichthyosaur specimens discovered in the 1890s from Holzmaden, Germany, exhibited dark-coloured "halos" – created by bacteria that ate away at the carcasses as they laid on the bottom of the Jurassic seas – which represented the body shapes of these animals. Not only did Ichthyosaurus have a fleshy dorsal fin, but the downward tailbend was not a pathology – it was a normal feature which supported a large tail in the shape of a crescent moon.

Re-examined in this light, it became clear that even specimens preserved without soft-tissue impressions had vertebrae near the end of their tails that were wider at the top than at the bottom; a sure sign of a downward-kinked tail that supported a large caudal fin.

The image of Ichthyosaurus changed overnight. The piscivorous predator was not a big amphibious lizard with paddles where its hands and feet should be; it was a streamlined, fusiform creature which more closely resembled a shark than any lizard. By the close of the 19th century, the issue was settled, but spectacular specimens continue to change what we thought we knew about prehistoric life.

One such skeleton, found in the middle of Kansas in the 1960s, sat in storage for years, but a re-examination has caused scientists to reconsider what they thought they knew about another marine reptile – a mosasaur called Platecarpus.

Many books and documentaries cast mosasaurs among the many "also-rans" that lived alongside the dinosaurs between 98 and 65 million years ago.

A genus or two – usually Mosasaurus and Tylosaurus – get mentioned now and again, but the larger swath of mosasaur diversity is rarely elucidated. These marine reptiles, which were much more closely related to today's Komodo dragons than any dinosaur, were the fiercest predators of the Cretaceous seas, with many species occupying a range of habitats from near-shore to the open ocean. Most were not streamlined speed hunters like the ichthyosaurs, but instead looked like seagoing lizards; they were ambush predators that propelled themselves out of their hiding places with their long tails.

Among the most common of these marine predators was the species Platecarpus tympaniticus (named by the notorious "bone sharp" Edward Drinker Cope in 1869), and one century after it was first described an unusually complete specimen was collected from the well-known Niobrara Chalk in Kansas – a formation representing a time when a shallow sea covered much of western North America.

Shortly after it was excavated in the 1960s, the Platecarpus skeleton (known as LACM 128319) was stored in the collections at California's Natural History Museum in Los Angeles County. For one reason or another, it sat there, undescribed for decades, but in August of this year a team of palaeontologists led by Johan Lindgren of Sweden's Lund University at long last published a report on the specimen in the journal PLoS One.

Not only did it retain traces of soft tissues – including skin impressions and a reddish residue on its ribs that may be the remnants of its heart or liver – but its tail contained a distinctive set of vertebrae that were wider at the top than at the bottom. Platecarpus, just like Ichthyosaurus, had a downward-kinked tail that probably supported at least a modest tail fin.

Specimen LACM 128319 was not the first mosasaur skeleton to show signs of a tail fluke. In 2007, Lindgren led a different set of colleagues in describing the skeleton of a specialised form of mosasaur found in California called Plotosaurus (a specimen of which has also been found sporting soft-tissue impressions). The end of its tail sported a modified portion of vertebrae that looked extremely similar to the tail arrangement of sharks (just flipped down inside of up).

Along with a streamlined body that was deep from top-to-bottom, Plotosaurus was a mosasaur adapted to cruising in the open ocean – it was a mosasaur built like an ichthyosaur.

The skeleton of Platecarpus was not as specialised for pelagic life as that of Plotosaurus, but the examination of the new specimen shows that it was an intermediate form between the early, lizard-like mosasaurs and the last, highly streamlined types.

What is curious, however, is that the new specimen of Platecarpus represents yet another case of a marine reptile that independently evolved a downward tailbend. Ichthyosaurs did, some seagoing crocodiles (such as Geosaurus) did, and now we know that some mosasaurs did. Putting this in an even wider context, sharks have the same kind of tail, but their spinal column kinks upward and the fleshy part of their tail is below. In marine reptiles it is the other way around – with the spinal column bent downward – and perhaps there is some kind of shared evolutionary constraint, inherited from their last common ancestor, that caused the tails of marine reptiles to consistently bend downward when evolving this kind of propulsion.

As yet, such an evolutionary constraint has not been identified, but if it could be discerned, such a quirk of natural history might help us better appreciate how contingency and constraint shape evolution's grand pattern.

Brian Switek blogs at brianswitek.com

We’re pleased to host this fascinating guest post by Eric Michael Johnson during the Primate Diaries in Exile blog tour. Follow other stops on Eric’s tour through his RSS feed or at the #PDEx hashtag on Twitter. You can also follow Eric himself on Twitter.

There was an uneasy silence as we waited for the secret to be revealed. The pointed Gothic arches of the cathedral’s bell tower loomed just outside the window making the cramped room feel all the more like we were sitting in a confessional. It was the first year of my PhD program at Duke University and I was joined by about a dozen fellow graduate students from the life sciences and a few from the medical school. None of us knew what to expect, only that we’d received an e-mail from a professor suggesting that all students who wanted to understand the culture of sexism at the university should make a point to attend. No one had heard what we were about to be told and I have changed some of the following details to protect the professor’s identity.

It started many years earlier when the professor, let’s call her Dr. Leda, had first been hired at the university. She was to take over management of the lab previously run by a tenured male professor and carry out research using a specialized procedure as part of the conditions of her hiring. However, the lab was not yet equipped to allow for this procedure, a fact which Leda brought to her colleague’s attention. The tenured male professor explained that this upgrade would be expensive and time consuming. However, if Leda would be willing to have sex with him he could make the necessary improvements. Naturally she refused and brought up the lab upgrades to the department Chair (leaving out the sexual coercion since she had no direct evidence of it). Leda was told that any improvements to the lab would have to come out of the tenured professor’s grant and that she would need to take the issue up with him.

With little recourse Leda developed a modified research project that she could carry out without the necessary lab upgrades. However, when she came up for her mid-tenure review she was criticized in the departmental report for not carrying out the research that was specified in her hiring package. If she didn’t make good on her contract it was unlikely she would be granted tenure and would be forced to begin looking for another job. We all sat in stunned silence as Leda described her colleague’s reaction once she confronted him, “I explained the seriousness of this but all he did was smile and say, ‘I know. My offer still stands if you’d like to keep your job.’”

Despite the advances our society has made for women’s rights and sexual equality during the last century this example is just one more sign of how far we still have to go. It’s not an isolated incident. According to statistics compiled by the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission there were 12,696 workplace sexual harassment cases filed in 2009 (which would be a fraction of the number that actually occurred) and 84% of these cases were brought by women. Businesses have gotten increasingly serious about cracking down on such abuses but last year they were still held liable to the tune of $51.5 million, the largest figure since 2001. What is going on here? Could this kind of gender inequality be an intrinsic feature of human nature that we’re stuck with or is it simply a failure to create an environment that prevents such behaviors from reoccurring?

Primatologists and evolutionary biologists have taken this question seriously and have developed some surprising conclusions that could inform our approach to this issue. Unlike Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer’s book A Natural History of Rape, a thesis that was criticized by scholars both in biology and gender studies, other evolutionary researchers have developed a much more balanced analysis. One example is from the recent edited volume Sexual Coercion in Primates and Humans by Martin Muller and Richard Wrangham. As they wrote in their introduction:

[M]ales in a number of primate species appear to use force, or the threat of force, to coerce unwilling females to mate with them. . . Although the utility of this distinction has been disputed, there is no doubt that sexual coercion is a potentially important mechanism of mating bias within the broad framework of sexual conflict theory.

There are three forms of sexual coercion that researchers have documented in both human and nonhuman primates: harassment, intimidation, and forced copulation. Harassment is the most common and results when males make repeated attempts to mate that imposes costs on females, intimidation is the use of physical violence inflicted on females who refuse to mate with a given male, and forced copulation (or “rape” in the human literature) is the least common form that involves violent restraint for immediate mating. The researchers found convincing evidence that the first two forms of sexual coercion (but not the third) increased the long-term reproductive success among males in Japanese macaques, baboons, and our closest evolutionary relative the chimpanzees. This suggests that, at least for these three species, sexual coercion has been selected as an adaptive strategy in male sexual behavior.

But what about humans? This is a difficult question to answer since, for reasons of privacy, researchers can’t very well study human sexuality by stationing a field researcher in our bedrooms. However, reported statistics on extreme forms of intimidation can perhaps give an indication of how common sexual coercion is in modern societies. Therefore, in the same edited volume, researchers Margo Wilson and Martin Daly republished their findings from a 1996 paper in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science (pdf here). To address this question they analyzed statistics for uxoricide (killings of wives) in the United States, England, and Canada between the years 1965 and 1990. Just like those researchers who studied nonhuman primates, Wilson and Daly operated under the assumption that the use of sexual coercion would be highest against those women with the highest “reproductive value.” In other words, men would be most likely to use threats or even violence against younger women who had the majority of their childbearing years ahead of them.

As the above graphs indicate, their results strongly supported this hypothesis. The highest number of uxoricides occurred in women from puberty to 24-years-old followed by those who were between 25 and 34. The lowest rate of uxoricide occurred in those women who were either approaching menopause or were already post-menopausal (50-years-old and older). The researchers also found identical trends for cases of sexual assault committed against both married and unmarried women, indicating that the murders likely had the same motivations as other cases of sexual violence.

Nonlethal sexual intimidation statistics in married and unmarried women.

Of course, one objection to these trends could be that younger men are simply more violence prone and would therefore be more likely to assault their partners. However, what Wilson and Daly discovered was that older men who were with younger women actually had a higher rate of intimidation than did younger men. These conclusions fit right in with those of our nonhuman male counterparts showing sexual coercion as a reoccurring feature of human behavior. The uncomfortable implication is just what feminist scholars have been arguing all along: the patriarchy is real and it will require committed focus to reduce or eradicate sexual coercion in modern societies.

However, an important thing to remember whenever reading about the implications of human evolution is that biology is not destiny. Fortunately, just as researching nonhuman primates has allowed us to better identify the problem for our own species, it can also provide us with some of the solutions. An important aspect of primate sexual coercion that shouldn’t be ignored is where it doesn’t exist and why. Bonobos are as closely related to us as chimpanzees since we shared a common ancestor with both between 4 and 6 million years ago and the two species later diverged from each other only about 1 million years ago. There has never been an observed case of male sexual coercion in this species despite the fact that males are still somewhat larger than females. A unique aspect of bonobo society is that they are a female-dominated species thanks to the network of support that exists between bonobo females. Chimpanzee females are largely isolated from one another, but bonobo females come to one another’s aid. While there may be some genetic differences that account for the lack of sexual coercion in bonobos, one important factor is the different environment that promotes these cooperative networks and limits the usefulness of male coercion. Male bonobos mate more frequently by gaining support from these female networks rather than using sexual coercion as can be found in chimpanzees. Males grow up with this “culture” and observe the older males in their troop emphasize grooming over aggression and then adapt their own behavior in order to maximize their reproductive success.

But bonobos aren’t the only ones. To illustrate how powerful the influence of culture can be for primate societies consider the most extreme example of a sexually coercive species: savanna baboons. Males have been known to viciously maul a female that has rejected their advances and the level of male aggression is strongly correlated with their mating success. However, in a unique natural experiment Stanford primatologist Robert Sapolsky observed what developed when the largest and most aggressive males died out in a group known as Forest Troop (because they were feeding at the contaminated dump site of a Western safari lodge). In the intervening years Forest Group developed a culture in which kindness was rewarded more than aggression and adolescent males who migrated into the troop adopted this culture themselves. As Sapolsky related in his essay A Natural History of Peace for the journal Foreign Affairs:

The results were that Forest Troop was left with males who were less aggressive and more social than average and the troop now had double its previous female-to-male ratio. The social consequences of these changes were dramatic. There remained a hierarchy among the Forest Troop males, but it was far looser than before: compared with other, more typical savanna baboon groups, high-ranking males rarely harassed subordinates and occasionally even relinquished contested resources to them. Aggression was less frequent, particularly against third parties. And rates of affiliative behaviors, such as males and females grooming each other or sitting together, soared. There were even instances, now and then, of adult males grooming each other – a behavior nearly as unprecedented as baboons sprouting wings. . . By the early 1990s, none of the original low aggression/high affiliation males of Forest Troop’s tuberculosis period was still alive; all of the group’s adult males had joined after the epidemic. Despite this, the troop’s unique social milieu persisted – as it does to this day, some 20 years after the selective bottleneck.

In other words, adolescent males that enter Forest Troop after having grown up elsewhere wind up adopting the unique behavioral style of the resident males. As defined by both anthropologists and animal behaviorists, “culture” consists of local behavioral variations, occurring for nongenetic and nonecological reasons, that last beyond the time of their originators. Forest Troop’s low aggression/high affiliation society constitutes nothing less than a multigenerational benign culture.

These nonhuman primate examples suggest that an increased focus on women’s rights might not only reduce the current levels of sexual coercion but could benefit society as a whole. If women have increased social power (both politically and economically) they would be better able to resist male sexual coercion due to stronger networks of social support. At the same time this increased social power would be expected to help create a change in male culture that would influence how young men interact with women when trying to gain sexual access. While specific policies that protect women from coercion and exploitation remain important, what we’re ultimately after is social change. While we work on promoting gender parity both politically and economically we should also follow the example of our baboon cousins and model the way that men should interact with women. This means that more men should take issues of women’s rights seriously so that younger men who look up to them will follow in turn.

This is the moral of the story with Dr. Leda and her own case of sexual coercion. Students, both male and female, were outraged by her story and pelted her department with e-mails and phone calls insisting that she be granted tenure. I’m pleased to say that the department was sufficiently embarrassed by the incident to conduct a review of her mid-tenure application only to find that she was not at fault for the criticisms contained in their report. However, as for the would-be swan who thought that his power in the department offered him impunity to engage in sexual blackmail, he remains a senior member of the Duke faculty. At this point in our history such abuses remain possible, but how much longer depends on each generation’s decision whether or not sexual coercion should be a thing of the past.

After looking at the different approaches to filtering for Relevance, I have been seeking a way to map them visually. There are many different startups competing in this space along with the giants, and a way to map them in a matrix would help us see the big picture of how the battle for relevance is evolving on the social web.

What are the fundamental ways in which these approaches and startups differ? These could form the axis around which we can then proceed to map them.

Filtering either works by showing us the most popular stuff being shared online, or by understanding our individual preferences and surfacing personalized content. Thus, we have the following axis:

You either search for content or you see it serendipitously without seeking anything specific. Search is actively initiated by the user and is goal-driven, while serendipitous discovery is gifted with the user being passive at the receiving end. This gives us our second axis:

We combine these two axes to form the backbone of our visualization. We then place different services within our matrix as per their core filtering approach. The result is the Filtering FOR Relevance Matrix (FORMAT) as seen below:

Let us now look at each quadrant closely.

This is the simplest and oldest of all. Search powered by algorithms to surface most popular content online. This also includes other Twitter search services like Topsy. These services are powered by algorithms such as PageRank, PersonRank, Resonance, etc. to surface the most popular result relevant to a query.

This approach dominated the Web 1.0 era before the advent of the social web.

Services in this category help you find the most popular content being shared online across different social networks. These were the next to evolve in the Web 2.0 era, beginning with social bookmarking services like Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc.

There is an element of personalization provided by many of these, in that you “follow” some users, but the motive behind such following is less to seek personalized content, more to seek trending, viral content.

Note how Digg is attempting to move from this quadrant to the personalized quadrant, and facing hurdles along the way.

A breed of services has evolved around delivering personalized recommendations and content tailored for your needs. Hunch learns about you and acts as a “taste engine”, while Blekko allows you to personalize your searches with slashtags. Google is making forays in this space with its Social Search service, which tries to personalize search results based on your social graph.

This is the hottest space where most of the competition is today.

Twitter Lists are personalized (created by you) and deliver fresh, serendipitous content relevant to your interests. Facebook Likes give you serendipitous discovery from your personal friends. Flipboard provides a social magazine based on your personal social circle on Facebook and Twitter. My6sense delivers new content using ‘Digital Intuition’. Vertical networks like Last.fm deliver music recommendations based on your individual taste. Personalized Twitter newspapers give you fresh content filtered by your social graph on Twitter.

Note how Datasift lies at the center of the matrix. This is because Datasift is a platform providing different filtering services and approaches. Developers may use the platform to develop different services and apps that can lie in any of these quadrants.

So what is the point of this exercise? Using FORMAT:

• We see the big picture of how services providing relevance and filtering are evolving.
• We see how personalized serendipity is the holy grail of the social web right now.
• We see how different services relate to each other and who is competing with whom and how.
• We see how identifying the target quadrant is important for any new startup in this space.
• We see how users provide friction when a service tries to change quadrants (Digg).

If you are involved in a startup aiming to provide filtered, relevant content to users, which quadrant would you target? See how FORMAT helps?

Grötkräkla, "porridge sceptre"

The Four Stone Hearth blog carnival first opened its gaudy tent flap almost four years ago, in October 2006. Since then, 50 blogs have hosted it, 32 of which are still active. The record for most 4SH hostings is shared by Afarensis and Remote Central, both of which have hosted seven carnivals. Well done, everybody!

Here are the submissions for the 100th instalment:

• Krys at Anthropology in Practice discusses the Piltdown hoax.
  
• Dan at Neuroanthropology writes about linguistic relativism, the idea that our language forms our world rather than the other way around.
  
• Raymond at The Prancing Papio presents a study suggesting that a girl having brothers delays her menstruation and sexual activity.
  
• Eric (formerly of The Primate Diaries), meanwhile, discusses a paper on the evolution of menopause in women.
  
• Franco at Culture Potion talks about eskimo art with loads of wonderful pics.
  
• Ciarán at Ad Hominin discusses the recent study suggesting that tool use may be a million years older than we thought.
  
• Judith at Zenobia presents Queen Boran who was made Great King of Persia in AD 629.
  
• Colleen at Middle Savagery talks about archaeological field schools and management styles.
  
• And finally, I've got a paper out that stimulated some interesting blog discussion regarding the goals of archaeology.

The carnival rarely gets many submissions: as you can see, even this even-number instalment got only nine counting my own. This means that bloggers don't care much about the Four Stone Hearth. Does the carnival have regular readers that follow it around to the various venues where it appears? Dear Reader, if you are a committed 4SH regular, please say so in a comment.

Blog carnivals seem to be going out of fashion. The Skeptics' Circle, The Tangled Bank and The Carnival of the Godless have all folded. Months pass between instalments of the History Carnival. And I've decided to let go of the Four Stone Hearth. Anybody want to take over as its coordinator? I've paid the domain registration for the next twelve months. Will #100 be the last time the Four Stone Hearth is lit?

Artist Catherine Anyango tells how her richly-detailed drawings reflect the dense style of Joseph Conrad's savage colonial story

In the 108 years since it was published, Joseph Conrad's colonial fable Heart of Darkness has infected TS Eliot, been excoriated for racism by Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe and transplanted to Vietnam by Francis Ford Coppola.

Now the book has been reinterpreted as a graphic novel in whose monochrome pages Conrad's exploration of power, greed and madness plays out as disturbingly as ever.

Catherine Anyango, whose drawings are peppered with David Zane Mairowitz's adaptation of the text, had her doubts about tackling the Polish-born novelist's most famous work.

Those reservations had more to do with the original medium than the enduring controversy over Conrad's views or the familiarity of Heart of Darkness.

"I wasn't sure initially if it was a good subject for a graphic novel as the writing is so dense and the style of it is partly what attracts me to the book," she said.

"As I knew we couldn't keep most of the text in, I tried to make the drawings very rich in detail and texture so that immersive feeling you get, especially when he describes the river and the jungle, was carried across."

Anyango was determined not to allow the horror of the book's subject matter to overwhelm her drawings. "I wanted to draw the reader in with seductive imagery, and then show them that even in the most beautiful of settings, terrible things can happen."

There was also Coppola's 1979 epic to contend with.

"I was too terrified to watch Apocalypse Now," the Kenyan-Swedish artist said. "Partly because I didn't want to end up with any similar visuals and also I had been warned that something nasty happens to a cow … [but] Apocalypse Now is huge and well, apocalyptic, but Heart of Darkness is a much quieter story."

Anyango, who grew up in Kenya where she went to a British school, wanted to steer a course that was as true as possible to the original so that her version did not sink under the weight of too much intellectual baggage.

"When I was dealing with the book, I was focused solely on the particular events of the Congo, rather than colonialism in general," she said. "I wasn't trying to tell the history of colonialism either, but to situate this particular narrative in a way that people might ask: what on earth was the attitude of that time that these things could happen?"

To reinforce the geographical and historical immediacy of Conrad's tale, the graphic novel is interspersed with excerpts from The Congo Diary – the journal Conrad kept of his 1890 voyage up the river.

Anyango's research also led her to the story of a man from a village in the Upper Congo called Nsala. She came across a photograph of him sat on a step contemplating the hand and foot of his daughter, which had been cut off by guards sent to his village by the Anglo Belgian India Rubber Company. The men, ordered to attack Nsala's village for failing to provide the company with enough rubber, devoured his wife and daughter, leaving only the child's hand and foot.

"I put him on one page, and similar portraits on others, so the Congolese characters have resonance at least for me, even if they remain stereotyped because of the existing narrative," she said.

In her efforts to ensure the authenticity of the uniforms she drew — the protagonist, Marlow, is given a cap with a prominent Belgian lion badge — Anyango was shocked to discover how markedly Belgian perceptions of the occupation of Congo still vary.

For some, it is a shameful episode in the country's history, while others still view it as a benign experience despite the evidence uncovered by recent histories such as Adam Hochschild's 1998 book, King Leopold's Ghost, which laid bare the barbarism inflicted on Congo.

The artist found that Belgium's colonial deeds "seem to have vanished into history, with the [country's] education system not dwelling on anything but positive aspects of the colonial rule".

That may not be not wholly surprising: at her school in Nairobi, Anyango did not learn about Britain's colonies.

It is this creeping colonial amnesia — not to mention a catalogue of recent and current events — which, she argues, give Heart of Darkness both its relevance and its universality.

"It's about the idea of entitlement; [how] through the ages we enforce our feelings of entitlement in whatever way that age will allow — from Leopold II owning the Congo as a private possession to the corporations involved with blood diamonds. The effects of entitlement have not so much gone out of fashion as out of sight."

Dr Keith Carabine, who teaches literature at the University of Kent and chairs the Joseph Conrad Society, agrees that Kurtz, the ivory trader whose misplaced idealism has putrefied into savagery and madness, has become an archetypal figure.

"Heart of Darkness is the most important book in the last 100-plus years not because it's the best, but because it anticipated how 20th century leaders with visions of bringing light and creating new models for humans beings – Hitler, Lenin, Pol Pot, Mao – all ended up," he said. "When disappointed by the response of the very groups they wanted to save or help or transform, they, like Kurtz, wish to (and actually do, of course) 'exterminate all the brutes!'"

Of the Edwardian novella's continuing relevance, Carabine is unequivocal. "If Bush and Cheney and the neocons had read Heart of Darkness and understood it, they would not have invaded Iraq under the absurd utopian illusion that the Iraqis were gagging for democracy."

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Happy 9.02.10!

I think this is simply the best scene of “Beverly Hills 90210.” The show, which inexplicably ran for 10 years, was absurd — a simplistic, unaware, and whitewashed depiction of rich kids in high school, and then in college. It is a key cultural icon of the 1990s, and yet it was utterly without irony, which, given the times, is in itself rather ironic. Especially in the first half of the show’s run, the stories were always morality tales, and the morals were almost hilariously conservative. The only irony about “90210” was in watching it. For a year in college, I went to a “Bev and Mel” party every Wednesday at which we watched “90210” and it’s sillier, slightly more aware spin-off “Melrose Place,” and we cruelly mocked both while drinking beer and eating pizza. (Good times.)

Over the years, as the original leads became “stars” and left the show to find fame (and without fail, they failed), Tori Spelling, who was cast only because her father was the show’s executive producer, became one of the show’s leads, and in a way, a star. Famously, Tori’s character Donna Martin was naive and a forever virgin, and she wasn’t allowed to have any fun because Tori’s overprotective dad called the shots. When she did anything wrong, she got in trouble. At the end of the 1992-93 season, Donna — gasp — got drunk at the prom and got caught by the principal. Here’s that classic scene and a re-cap of the whole episode (which has been voted as the “best" of the entire series). Her punishment? She wasn’t going to be allowed to graduate. For some reason, she was so popular among the other students that they rallied behind her. Literally. They stormed a school board meeting while chanting “Donna Martin graduates!”

danah boyd's work has influenced my thinking toward social science, toward graduate school, and toward Microsoft, of all things. I respect the woman. So I read her tweets and her papers knowing I'll learn something new. (That's a word that will come back to us again and again.) But there's been something sticking in my brain—something forcing me to circle back, to rethink, to reconsider—with regards to her thoughts on racial divides in social media. Taking into account many, if not all of the potential self-deluding fallacies (e.g., fundamental attribution error, etc.) that might be plaguing me, I am still resolute in thinking that there's an alternate explanation for the alleged race and class-based flight* occurring within social media.

What if we examine danah boyd's observations from a different vantage point? What if we're not seeing users running from some sort of person but instead moving toward something? What if it's not so much white flight as it is different rates of adoption and abandonment? What if it represents a simple response to opportunity? Or perhaps opportunity isn't quite accurate, perhaps it's response to novelty—to newness. I choose this ungainly word to express the importance of the aspect of the new, something the word novelty does, but does not clearly underscore the current obsession with the new. (A few years ago there was a paper mill promotion that suggested that we needed a new word for "new." It was satire then, now it seems almost prescient.)

Is this just semantics? A nice word game to distract us from a larger cultural movement? Or some positive psychology spin on a meaningful and socially problematic undercurrent? Perhaps my opinion flies in the face of current psychological and sociological research. I am okay with that—for now. The conversation is open: further inquiry may reveal a new interpretation. Below I consider an alternate interpretation of user flight from social networks.

Let's park our preconceived notion of previously gathered real life socially derived data; let's not map it onto the Internet, yet. Instead, let's turn our attention to focus on the influence of software.

First, a personal anecdote: I don't know if I respond to race in some different manner when I'm online than when I'm off. When I am online, the people I seek out are those who have similar interests to my own, or those who might expand my world a bit more. If others are experiencing their online world in a way that's similar to my own, is race the only correlating factor? What about people from Pennsylvania or folks from Indonesia? Can our theories encompass such large parameters?

I'm much more comfortable saying that social actions are attributable to culture—our U.S.-based culture focused on the value of the individual, replete with personal interests but derived from macro-influences. Human belief systems are complicated. Therefore, it's difficult to say X consistently influences us in Y way. This is where the "correlation is necessary but not sufficient for causation" argument steps up and declares its value. Traits and experience don't necessarily conclude in standard patterns of behavior.

And yet, I don't want to let the role of a vital variable slip by unnoticed. Leave out the role of software design in this argument and you miss the elephant in the room. Let's bring it front and center because it controls the parameters that help to define our actions.

Most software is a box: a box into which we (generally) willingly place ourselves. And software has had some really good marketing: its how we got to the moon, and how we scan the brain, it drives the engines in our cars, and its what permits me to write this on a computer. Software has permitted us to accomplish some pretty grand stuff. Subsequently, our perception of it doesn't often coincide with its limitations. Its boxiness escapes attention until we stop to realize that our choices are limited by the intentions of the software, by the financial decisions that drove its creation, by the desires and influences of the people who created the box.

Let's acknowledge that software is a tool with its own agenda. In other words, as users, we don't create its parameters. The appreciation we have for a piece of software depends on how we perceive this box—can we run for miles without finding the edge, or hold out our arms and touch the walls, or do we barely have room to breathe? Is it reflecting us or providing a window for us? When you sit at your desk or walk around using a smartphone, do you find yourself wishing your software did things differently? I'll bet you have; I know I have. What you've found is the hard edge of that particular software: you've brushed against its inherent boxiness.

Social media software is a series of boxes, some large, some small, some that feel comfortable and some that don't. But the dimensions of it are culturally mediated by its designers. In effective software design, the users are the proverbial fish asked about the temperature of the water. What's water?

Ineffective software design reminds us that while it may look like we can see the entire world around us—that our tank appears to be limitless—we can't get to where we want to go. Sometimes, software flight can be explained by the software itself. Freud was right, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. When we leave some social network, we're not leaving the culture, we're leaving the cultural parameters that the software predefined. Getting tired of or bored with software is something entirely different from getting tired of or bored with the people the software allows you to interact with. When you get bored with the experience of a piece of software, you're getting bored with the reality that the software has boxed you into.

I didn't take to Facebook all that well for reasons that will make sense to some private, introspective folks. I don't anticipate everyone will understand that decision and that's perfectly okay with me. But I feel it's necessary to declare that I didn't leave Facebook because I began to see more varied people on it. On the contrary. I left Facebook because its algorithms didn't suit my own. I didn't like their box.

So I chafe a bit at reading that flight is occurring from websites in a fashion reminiscent of suburban white flight. I don't want my actions bunched in to some larger, more generalized racially-derived movement. If that happens then the delicate, nuanced, multidimensional experience of the individual get lost in the shuffle, and in this instance, that individual is me. If we do that, then we've placed too much emphasis on the software's declaration of what constitutes culture and missed the individual human interpretation of it.

*If we're insistent on using race as the fulcrum for this discussion, then let's unpack what we mean when we talk about race or class, because I'm not sure we're all speaking the same language. Do we mean that race is physiological or physical? Or that it's culturally derived? Does ethnicity play a role? Is class clearly defined? Or are these generally accepted terms?

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