connecting*the*dots

Chris Fahey and I go back 12 years in the new media game:

• While I was designing CD-Rom games at LTI in 1995, Chris was working on a project at The Music Pen, just a few blocks uptown.
• One of the producers at his gig was a guy named Alan Robbins, who just so happened to teach with my father at Kean University.
• Alan and I became tight for a short period of time following my gig at LTI, as my father introduced us and we rapped about teaching — an interest of mine.
• My friend and colleague from LTI, Rebecca Rothstein, left the gig and took up shop at Rare Medium — one of the big bubble agencies from the mid-nineties.
• Chris happened to do the same, leaving The Music Pen for Rare Medium around the same time.
• A few months later, Rebecca referred me to Organic Online, where I took my first job as an information architect, proper.
• Chris and I both ended up up at the same information architect conventions, honing our craft, meeting new people and drinking flailing dotcom money at the free after-parties.
• Soon thereafter, we both became active participants of the SIG-IA list, participating with the IA community to solve data and interface issues.
• Last August, we had a lively discussion of my never-to-be-seen illustration for the Media Matters redesign.

After coming across one of Chris’ most recent posts regarding the government wiretapping and phone call pattern analysis programs (which was laced with some serious, righteous conviction), I left a comment along the lines that it’s our duty as trained information architects to perform a bit of Internal Affairs work — to help illustrate the potential damage these programs could do to our civil liberties.

You know, illustrate, say, the potential that crossed-path analysis has in generating false-positive relationship assumptions… such as the degree to which Chris and I kept close company over the past 12 years.

You see, we never formally met until last July.

If you get a moment, head over to his blog to review some of his recent thoughts on the matter.

This stuff is serious, folks.