Social Media in Chile, IA vs. UX: thoughts of the week
Last week my former boss, the Information Retrieval guru Ricardo Baeza published an article about the growth of Facebook in Chile, which currently includes over 4 million users, roughly one fourth of the country’s population. There he raises the question of why some rather small and non-develiped countries have been so strong to adopt social websites like Facebook. I don’t have an answer, but my suspicions lead to tight social clusters whithin society, fewer migrations within people’s lifetimes, and longer-lasting friendships. Supporting this data, we saw this week on Fred’s class a NYT map of Facebook’s growth, where Chile is clearly invaded by Facebook within this last year.
Last night, in Gary Marchionini’s class, we were recapping on the previous class about Information Architecture, and he shared with us some of his ideas about the whole IA/UX debate. He had some interesting thoughts that seemed quite sensible to me, and I had not seen from other people. I’m sure his farther position, and history in professorship give him an advantaged view. Some of these thoughts, bluntly paraphrasing, and adding from my own ideas:
- No profession is a fixed box, the edges are always fuzzy. He mentioned fields which we can see as stable and traditional as chemistry, you have clear differences between physical and organical chemists, but in practice they do more things in common than one would like to think. He also pointed how even in business school, the people who syudy accounting do much more thinks than book keeping.
- The discussion itself is an important ingredient of what makes the profession interesting. The people who work in this field are attracted by the fact that it’s a cutting edge area that is always on the move.
- Once you get the job, you define what the role is in that particular situation, based on your knowledge, skills and context.