Anthony C. Maki

Posted with email on Anthony Christo­pher Maki’s pos­ter­ous.

Posted with email on Anthony Christo­pher Maki’s pos­ter­ous.

Posted with email on Anthony Christo­pher Maki’s pos­ter­ous.

Posted with email on Anthony Christo­pher Maki’s pos­ter­ous.

Posted with email on Anthony’s pos­ter­ous.

Test­ing, test­ing, test­ing…

Posted with email on Anthony’s pos­ter­ous.

Social net­work inter­ac­tion flow­chart

2009 has brought many waves of con­nect­ed­ness between social net­work­ing web­sites and even con­tent web­sites, such as the New York Times and the Huff­in­g­ton Post, which want to tap into the influ­ence social net­works have. An exam­ple of the for­mer is YouTube with their Autoshare fea­ture, allow­ing one to auto­mat­i­cally pub­lish to Face­book, Twit­ter, et al. the videos which one com­ments on, rates, favorites, or uploads. Sim­i­larly, Digg uses Face­book Con­nect for new account cre­ation and also fea­tures pub­lish­ing to Face­book. Friend­Feed, recently acquired by Face­book, aggre­gates vir­tu­ally all user-generated con­tent on social net­work­ing web­sites and option­ally pub­lishes this mate­r­ial to Face­book or Twit­ter.

As the fea­tures have been rolled out by each party, I, being a fer­vent lover of all things alpha and beta, have usu­ally adopted the new things avail­able to me. The result has been a strange, built-up web of inter­ac­tions between the web­sites I am active on and, in some (unfor­tu­nate) cases, feed­back loops which ooze dupli­cate post­ings.

I decided to attempt to visu­al­ize the afore­men­tioned inter­ac­tions; the flow­chart at the top of the post is the fin­ished prod­uct. It’s not effi­cient, it’s ugly, and it needs some help. I think the best way to go about it is to rearrange the flow like so (in other words, to cre­ate a hier­ar­chy):

Revised social net­work inter­ac­tion flow­chart

The title is from Jesus Christ Super­star— this post, how­ever, is pretty much filed under “mis­cel­la­neous”.

I’m still in Min­neapo­lis and now see it as a per­ma­nent enclave. I’m work­ing at the Chat­ter­box Pub in the Lin­den Hills neigh­bor­hood. I’m in con­tention for a job doing won­der­ful non­profit work at Clare Hous­ing, whose great mis­sion is to care for those who are liv­ing with HIV/AIDS. I have ended my work with Sen­ate Dis­trict 48 DFL, as I am no longer a res­i­dent in that dis­trict, but I am still hand­ing all the prover­bial keys to tech­nol­ogy (Face­book, Twit­ter, web­site, intranet) I started over to the charis­matic, com­mit­ted crew there. Um, here’s my cur­rent to-do list (for which, I use the Tasks func­tion­al­ity in Gmail and Google Cal­en­dar):

Anthony’s list

• Clean and orga­nize room, desk
• Enter clock-in/outs for sched­uled shifts
• Floss, brush teeth
• Deposit pay­check and tips, can­cel free check­ing
• Deliver thank-you card to Yvonne
• Pre­pare tech info later this week
• Pur­chase a wine key
• eBay/Craiglist/Ama­zon items

So, you may notice that I’m a bit method­i­cal… or some­thing. I am also half-heartedly look­ing at apart­ments around the city, but that’s going to be quite far off in my future. Pretty soon here I need to get my paper­work in order for MCTC. Also, Min­neso­taCare.

There, my info dump is com­plete. Kthxbai.

As a nineteen-year-old, I have a simul­ta­ne­ous pas­sive ide­al­ist yet pes­simist per­cep­tion of the world. The idea of pas­sively enter­tain­ing this image of micro– and macro-social behav­iors was, up until today, a very com­pat­i­ble one. Now it has thrown me into a bout of cog­ni­tive dis­so­nance.

I pay bills. Not many. Not large rel­a­tive to some­one who is a credit card slave or to a cou­ple who owns a house and has chil­dren. So, I am not com­plain­ing about the fact that I have bills, or that I pay them. In fact, I real­ize that I have bills because I entered into an agree­ment with some party such as the uni­ver­sity for my tuition or a bank for my stu­dent loan or because I requested a ser­vice or pur­chased a good from some­body. Those bills are my bills.

We have an under­stand­ing that I don’t mind bills, I don’t com­plain about them, because they are mine — so what on Earth am I quib­bling about?

The col­lec­tive con­science of Amer­i­cans, or Amer­i­can soci­ety, has a dis­tinc­tive sense of anti-corporate, pro-Main Street ideals. We prob­a­bly do not want to use anti-corporate, because that would sound harsh, and we love to fos­ter what we call a “free mar­ket”. It’s just that gen­eral call-to-arms to pro­tect that com­mon man, or woman as the case may be. So it’s with pride that most of us “stick it to the man”.

Any­way, I have always been in tune with this sort of pop­ulist mind­set, but when I’m pay­ing bills, even if I dis­agree about how much the good or ser­vice is val­ued (because cer­tainly some things are over­val­ued), it never crosses my mind to stick it to the man.

Well. The man, as we know him, has stuck it to me. Mobile phone car­ri­ers are well-known for the obfus­ca­tion of terms, con­di­tions, what that one $3.53 charge was for, the increas­ingly difficult-to-understand cus­tomer ser­vice rep­re­sen­ta­tives, the bureau­cracy intended to make solv­ing an issue or com­plaint as mis­er­ably impos­si­ble as pos­si­ble, from mis­lead­ing words to out­right lies, etc.

I started a fam­ily plan with two friends August 31, 2009. At the T-Mobile store, it was fast and sim­ple to make that hap­pen. After return­ing home and view­ing my account online, it became evi­dent that there were many incon­sis­ten­cies: 144 min­utes were already used on the plan, and the two cycles of ser­vice that I paid for (sup­pos­edly, for ser­vice until Novem­ber 1) would actu­ally end Octo­ber 1. This would mean that I paid for two cycles, but received one cycle plus one day (August 31).

After an hour with a “Cus­tomer Care” rep­re­sen­ta­tive, we were able to con­clude that:

• Yes, we have no idea where those 144 min­utes came from, and we can’t access our own records to check, but we’re still going to leave them used on your account.
• I asked, “Is it really true that I paid a full-cycle price for just one day (August 31) and then for the month of Sep­tem­ber?” The answer: “That’s cor­rect. I’m very sorry.”
• Q: “Are you tak­ing advan­tage of your sub­scribers?” A: “Damn straight!”

Okay, that last bul­let point was made up, but the inten­tional hyper­bole was not.

I have an ax to grind with T-Mobile, and I feel extremely sym­pa­thetic and con­cerned for the in-store sales rep­re­sen­ta­tive who has to deal with me.

I’m mov­ing to Min­neapo­lis, again, and I am def­i­nitely feel­ing like I can’t stay in one place for too long. I think the City of Lakes, how­ever, will be dif­fer­ent. I’m excited for this new oppor­tu­nity, and I hope it helps me real­ize my vision.