1. sneJ on May 3, 2004 4:36 PM writes...

Which literature in particular are you talking about? Multiple-personality disorder was generally very trendy in the '80s, and widely overdiagnosed. And by the way, it's not a psychosis at all and has nothing to do with schizophrenia.

I think geek culture has always been a bit farther out along the continuum towards autism -- there are beneficial traits that go along with it, that are useful to engineers and scientists. It stands to reason that social software created by us geeks will be accommodating of the kind of social limitations that one finds along that continuum. I don't think that's necessarily a negative thing, or that it will "encourage" that sort of dysfunction.

Every culture seems to get its own characteristic set of mental problems. Victorian Europe got hysterical neurosis, conformist mid-20th century America got schizophrenia, nowadays we get a lot of addiction and autism...

2. sneJ on May 3, 2004 4:39 PM writes...

FYI: The server's comment filter rejected the plural of "neurosis" (change the "i" to an "e") as "objectionable". In fact the word it complained about was the substring "R-o-s-e". Seems like a bogus filter term that should be taken out...

Also annoying is that after you get this slap on the wrist, the comment field's contents are cleared. I had to use the Back button to recover what I'd typed.

3. zephoria on May 3, 2004 4:48 PM writes...

sneJ - i'm mostly thinking about the body of work that stemmed from Turkle, Haraway, Stone. The primary writers were mostly cautious, but there was a larger body of one-off PoMo bits that came out in relation to them. I wish i had that literature on me right now, but alas. If i remember correctly, there was the first link to MPD because of fragmented identities and the opportunities there. This then led to a discussion around schizophrenia and the engrained tendencies of the human mind... bridging MPD and schizophrenia into a continous discussion about online performance. The cyberculture lit was more of a metaphor, not particularly grounded in the discussion (and not at all connected with any notion of psychosis as much as with perceived structures of the mind). I think you're right - it became a possible metaphor because there was hysteria then... and over-diagnoses.

I wonder how over-diagnosed autism and/or Asberger's is.

This also makes me think of the ADD links that get built into software... hmmm...

4. Bill Seitz on May 3, 2004 8:23 PM writes...

It tracks articles published in Wired. There was an autism article a few months ago.

And a decade back everyone had their marked-up copy of the ADD self-diag test from Wired that came from Driven To Distraction...

5. Cory Doctorow on May 4, 2004 4:43 AM writes...

There is defintely a strong echo of autism life-skills training in the YASNSes. An autistic learns that a smile means happiness, a frown anger, and so on -- and wishes that people would just explicitly spell out their feelings, rather than using these mushy, unspecific cues. To me, this is strongly reminiscent of the YASNS's demand that we make explicit all our friendships (to the point of writing testimonials about our friends!) -- "Your nuanced continuum of friendship is hard to understand and needs to be quantified. Please rate all your friends' sexiness from one to three."

6. Gail Berry on May 6, 2004 9:02 AM writes...

MPD is, in fact, a mental disorder, but Asperger's is a developmental disorder, which is a horse of a different color. MPD is acquired and Asperger's is inherited, through a combination of genetics.

Unwittingly, through having children diagnosed with Asperger's, parents (particularly fathers) are being diagnosed as having it through examination of the family medical history. I believe this is part of the reason for the "popularity" of Asperger's for lack of a better term.

Like any other disorder, either acquired or inherited, there is a range of impact with Asperger's going from mild to severe. Social community is a great place for Asperger's folk because they love to socialize but don't have all the tools to do so. There's probably a lot to learn in how they go about it, don't you think?

7. Dave Asprey on May 11, 2004 3:51 AM writes...

So what if social networking is more Asperger-like? It works as well for non-Asperger people as well as Asperger people. I can't imagine social networking causing Aspergers - it's just faster to use LinkedIn than it is to work over a room of 100 people to network.

In any case, Asperger's is not caused by genetics; it's caused by a complex interaction of mercury poisoning and bacterial or fungal infection.

8. dani on June 29, 2004 2:19 AM writes...

I'm familiar with one of the memes referenced in the original post - the way that people use "be whatever you want to be" and misinformation about other people's experiences to just run wild.

"oh everyone's a little multiple/autistic/schizophrenic/transgendered/etc., and we all need to embrace this blurring of definitions and co-opting of identities because it's the future, baby! i mean, look at me! i'm practically queer, because i really 'get' will and grace and i think gay men are totally funny! race, sexuality, sex, age, none of it matters, cause we're all PEOPLE, right? so it doesn't matter if i make huge illogical jumps and talk about how you're acting like some autistic freak or decide that, like, the way identity works on the internet is giving everyone multiple personalities!"

*ahem* anyway.

on a less ranty note... i think that what ADD and autism and asperger's and "MPD" have in common
(those quotes are in protest because I'm multiple and i don't consider it/experience it as a disorder)
is that they have all, more or less recently, gone through the usual pop psych cycle of
1. being introduced into the media;
2. being diagnosed and self-diagnosed more because more people know about them;
3. suffering a backlash as people see the sudden wave of increased diagnoses and assume that most or all of it is misdiagnosis.

Which is complicated by the fact that there are misdiagnoses, all the more so because (as is evidenced by the fact that we have this wave-crash cycle in the first place) there is not much good basic information about psych stuff in mainstream media... and, imho, also because the study of psychology is ridiculously young and yet behaves in many ways as if everything is already understood. Which also, I think, leads to people identifying with articles on ADD or Asperger's or whatever even if they don't have ADD or Asperger's because they see *something* there that no one else has recognized in them yet... because we don't know everything!

Which brings me to another comment, which is that (again imho) MPD wasn't/isn't overdiagnosed, but was perceived as being overdiagnosed because (1) it seems so weird to people, and (2) it is still very misunderstood. And (3), the psych community says that it's caused by abuse and many people even in that community don't want to accept the prevalence of abuse in our society. Therefore it must be rare, because abuse HAS TO be rare, because they can't deal with any other premise.

It frustrates me that there's so little attention paid to what it's actually like to be multiple that people (who don't even think they're multiple) confuse it with having a multi-faceted identity. I mean, people in the multiple community know that you can have lots of people in one multiple system who each have a very multi-faceted identity of their very own. It's not the same thing as being multiple. And at the same time, I think there's a blurry space wherein people who don't know yet that they're multiple (because, for example, they have zero information about what that means and they don't lose time) just think they must be very multi-faceted.

oh yeah... and I'm interested by the statement that Asperger's is caused by mercury poisining and bacterial or fungal infection. (Infection of what, and why is it "bacterial or fungal"?) I didn't know that they (whoever they are) had decided what caused it, but I have noticed that everyone I know who has Asperger's was pretty extensively abused in some way. And I know that there have been studies that showed that people who had been abused tend to read most expressions as angry. And I know, or think anyway, that one major part of Asperger's is the inability to understand what people's expressions mean, and I wonder whether there's a connection there - even if mercury poisoning and infection are also factors.

9. JamesJayTrouble on June 29, 2004 8:27 PM writes...

Another set-a interesting reads, with a lot in 'em which can only be "trolled on" by me in small pieces.. And this may be intended to "trouble" danah and dani, in particular, I dunno:

"I mean, people in the multiple community know that you can have lots of people in one multiple system who each have a very multi-faceted identity of their very own. It’s not the same thing as being multiple. And at the same time, I think there’s a blurry space wherein people who don’t know yet that they’re multiple (because, for example, they have zero information about what that means and they don’t lose time) just think they must be very multi-faceted."

I would not say I have experience specifically with "the multiple community". But I've been diagnosed a time or two.. (And continue self- and other-"diagnosing", to guage and engage others, btw).. And I guess my experience is somewhat different.

I would say, rather, that "people in the [Human] community know that you can [not help, in almost-absolutely-all cases, but to] have lots of people in one multiple system who each have a very multi-faceted identity of their very own."

As far as "losing time" being the differentiator, well I'm losing time typing this in, just as you all are losing time reading it, right...?...;-D

I haven't seen the study.. but have seen some of the experiences which also showed that "people who had been abused tend to read most expressions as angry." However, as all lives tend to have different forms of abuse, throughout the span, then it looks to be an on-going problem of how to deal with one's and other people's anger-expression-management issues...

...And "the inability to understand what people’s expressions mean," is something I find my self doing quite frequently, (especially in writing,) but dunno that means I have one particular genetic-enviro-psycho-condition or 'nuther, afaik.

I would say there's no doubt of "a connection there..."..in fact I'd say there are multiple connections:

One is that it can often be difficult to ascertain between an affliction and an asset, genetically/behaviorly/otherwise... (As a person's General Psyche/Condition can (usually?) effect both career and personal-life inversely.)

Another is that, imo/observation there would tend to be an increase in quasi-social time, (or semi-social time,) just according to how much time a person is increasing semi-alone on/wearing computer-like-devices (ie Net'd 'n vetted, when done in the public-sphere like this...;-)

I still contend what I have in the past, which is that text-to-speech and speech-to-text will (not "radically" a-TALL, but..) considerably change how websites are utilized, and computers-in-general. And as the size eventually spans from wallet-camera-phones to, perhaps, a-Grid-or-two-size-"websites"..

Well, these will certainly change some things, but probably not the fact that "social software" is particulary anti-social, because it's being built by those who've been using computers for 3 or 4 computer-generations now..

I would guess it's both "intentional [and] a by-product of the tech culture." People (socially-gifted or socially/oxie-moron-like, both) normally DO want others to be like just "like them", those who they interact with, right?

Clinical dysfunctions/disorders notwithstanding, hopefully...

10. the RaptorMage on July 2, 2004 11:33 AM writes...

I noted this entry in my own (backwater, nonTrackBacking) blog at the time - http://users.ca.astound.net/gaughan/blog/2004/05/12.html#a441 - and now use the excuse of boyd's latest post to plug that here. We need to recognize that there are shallow and deep analogies, and that it's not very useful to analyze the reality of shallow ones. When ADD, autism, or MPD are used as conventional-wisdom shorthand without concern for the accuracy of the comparison, there's no point in pointing out that the comparison breaks down. But in the rare event (such as boyd's) where the comparison is serious, then data about these disorders is useful... and I provided links from my blog to several studies and sites that say that autism and Asperger's are not just increasing in diagnosis but in real occurrence.

About the cause-effect claims in these comments: I've also posted links (here and here, as just a couple of examples) to studies refuting the claim that such developmental delays are caused by mercury poisoning. And although I'm sure dani is truthful when writing, "everyone I know who has Asperger’s was pretty extensively abused in some way", that's a very weird experience. Public reporting has never even claimed that abuse is more common among Asperger's patients than among the general public, let alone a majority experience or likely cause. I have had no reason to even suspect abuse of the Asperger's kids that I've known or worked with.

11. zephoria on July 5, 2004 2:49 PM writes...

When i posted this, i did not assume that the comparisons work to the deepest level, but that they are useful for shaking up our perspective on these technologies. There is also a huge difference between the cultural assumptions about disorders and the lived experiences of them. I am by no means referencing the lived experiences. Such experiences are so complex and personal.