On my CBC show Spark this week, we’re doing a piece on wearable computing, what with all the buzz about Google Glass, Apple’s rumoured smart watch, and the success of personal trackers like the FitBit. I talked to the most excellent Kate Hartman about what it might take for wearables to take off in a mainstream way.
As personal tracking takes off, I wonder how much of it is going to be done with purpose-built, single function devices, compared to simply using apps on our phones. It’s the ‘universal remote‘ question for this decade. On one hand, I think people have got used to the convenience of having everything they need on the device they always naturally have with them. As I asked Kate, are people really going to want to remember to load up with their numerous wearables as well as having to remember house keys and a wallet? I sometimes forget my phone as it is.
So far, I think the Nike Fuel Band is a good example of a wearable that succeeds as jewelry (not to mention succeeding as talking point, since the people I’ve seen wearing them tend to really like to talk about it!). At least some of the excitement about the Pebble smart watch is that it’s actually a really good looking watch.
Still, I can’t help but think ‘implantables’ is the next horizon. The self-tracking movement has seen a very quick move from tracking for serious athletes and people with medical conditions, to tracking as a sort of everyday hobby. Could implantable monitors and nano-devices be far behind? I had a conversation with a woman who works at Chapters recently. She told me that on more than one occasion, when she’s asked younger customers for their loyalty cards, she’s been met with a sort of Homerian “isn’t-there-anything-faster-than-a-microwave” reaction. In an era where things are virtual, producing an actual card seems like having to carry a tree branch around with you all the time. More than that, she told me, these customers have said ‘can’t you just put a chip in me?’ They were joking(?), but I think it speaks to how close we are to the domestication of our cyborg selves.
On the Google Glass tip, my colleague, Dan, pointed me to this excellent post.
UPDATE: I’m very excited that the Third Tuesday Social Media series is bringing me to four of their upcoming events in cities around the country! Third Tuesday events bring together people – mostly in media, communications, and marketing, but also those just interested in social media – to meet up and stay on top of changes in the 21st century media landscape (and of course, socialize). Big thanks to Third Tuesday co-founder, Joseph Thornley for inviting me. I’ll be in Vancouver on June 19th, Calgary on June 20th (details to follow), in Toronto on June 25th, and in Ottawa on June 27th. Tickets include a copy of the book, and students can attend for free! Come get a free copy of the book, and say hi if you do!
My first book, The Virtual Self, came out this week. I spoke at the Communitech Tech Leaders’ conference on the day it came out, and signed my first copies! Much as self-promotion makes me uncomfortable, I have to say, it’s pretty exciting!
The Virtual Self is about the growing phenomenon of ‘self-tracking’ – how we are increasingly documenting the everyday statistical details of our lives. We track where we go, how we move, what we think, feel, see, and do. It’s the era of Facebook Timeline, after all. The Virtual Self looks at why we do this: the historical roots of self-tracking and also what it is about the digital life that makes self-tracking so compelling. I also look at what that information can be used for in the aggregate, and why we need a different approach to privacy if all that data is to be used for good.
The official book launch is on Tuesday, April 24th, at the Dora Keogh, 141 Danforth, Toronto, starting at 6:30. Please come. I’m pretty sure we’ll have big fun! I’m thrilled that CBC’s Mike Wise has agreed to do an on-stage (or is that in-pub?) interview.
It’s been a long road getting the book from grain-of-an-idea to the finish line. I’ve had tons of support and I’m hugely grateful for all the conversations on Twitter and elsewhere that have helped spread the word about the book. Plus, I plan on enjoying this while it lasts! I hope you’ll come and say hi if any of these events are in your town. OK this ends the self promotion. W00t!
I’ll freely admit to having a bit of an obsession with the not-quite-human. I’m fascinated by celebrity cosmetic surgery, for instance, with the way it turns beautiful, ageing people into glossy, puffy, simulacra. And then, of course, there are the robots. It’s in equal measures fascinating and creepy to look at humanoid robots, parsing what it is about them that looks not quite right, when everything about them, looked at individually, seems, well, human.
Equally interesting is our response to robotic animals. For the most part, they’re made to be cute, like Aibo the dog (though in the above case, I’m with the cat!) When we see the workings of the machine in combination with the animalistic, though, our reactions may be quite different. I remember, for instance, the first time I saw a video of Boston Dynamics‘ Big Dog project:
I mean, it’s amazing, right? And yet also creepy. The mirroring of an animal’s gait combined with the headless mechanical creature is spooky.
Fast forward a few years, and New Scientist has the story of Boston Dynamics releasing a new video of a cheetah-like robot able to run 30 km/hour:
It’s equally amazing, and yet not creepy, not for me, at least. Is it something about the design or the setting that makes it seem more normal, or is it the waning of the Uncanny Valley? Perhaps we’re getting so used to the not-quite-animate in everything from video games, to hyper-realistic animated movies, to the way we anthropomorphize our Roombas, to cosmetic surgery, that we’re bridging that Uncanny Valley. We’re not waiting until the tech gets realistic enough that we can’t distinguish it from the natural; we’re just more comfortable with the natural-unnatural hybrid.
On a recent visit to Ottawa, I went to see Christian Marclay’sThe Clock at The National Gallery. Very basically, The Clock is a 24-hour film, comprised of short clips of movies and TV shows, each of which shows or refers to the time: a character looks at a watch, we see a clock on the wall, etc. The clips are culled from all eras of film, and from multiple genres. The achievement is, of course, amazing enough in its obsessive sourcing of material, but the astonishing thing is that the time displayed in each of the clips is the same time as it is in the actual world. I have to admit up front, I only watched about 40 minutes of The Clock. We would have stayed longer, but we were expected at dinner, and returned to Toronto the next day. I would happily have sat there for hours longer, though, it was so captivating. Occasionally (at least if you happened to be watching when I was, between 5:00 and 6:00 p.m.) it’s quite funny.
Part of the fascination is obvious: you can hardly believe what you’re seeing, you wonder how long it must have taken to create, or indeed how it was created. Also, although there’s no ‘story’, there is a kind of internal rhythm to it, and a playfulness in the way the clips ‘talk’ to each other. For instance, we see a character look up, presumably towards a wall clock, and then we see a wall clock, but it’s a clock in a different scene. The way it plays with our own sense of time is fascinating. We’re all familiar with being at a movie and losing track of time, or being at a bad movie, where time seems to slow down. Here, in virtue of watching The Clock, we are ‘watching the clock’ – we’re aware of what time it is in the non-movie world. And yet, amazingly, it’s so compelling that even still, we lose track of time.
What I’ve been puzzling over, though, is what it is about The Clock that feels so digital, because there is something very much of our time about it.
I started thinking about this because some time ago, I interviewed the poetry critic and academic, Marjorie Perloff for my show, Spark. She argues that in poetry at least, we can talk about something she calls “unoriginal genius”, meaning that we can claim as art the skillful re-using of other source material in poetry. In the full, unedited interview (not online) she raised The Clock in the context of this kind of repurposing and remixing, and specifically in the context of a digital, internet-enabled era. Her observation about The Clock is that this is how we experience time now, in this same sort of collage way. For example, she noted, we move through time zones, we click on news stories that take place on the other side of the world, many hours ahead of us. We access information pulled from multiple points in time. Fascinating observations.
There’s clearly a more pedestrian, or practical sense in which it’s a digital work. It’s hard to imagine how you would make it in an analog era. I assume that at least Marclay had access to online databases of scripts to search for mentions of clocks/time. Certainly editing it digitally would have been less crazy-making a task than in an earlier era. But I can’t help feeling there’s something uncanny about The Clock that feels very much a piece with who we are now. It feels like something outside of nature, as though the very order of the natural world (the unfolding of linear time) is being played with. It’s like he’s created an alternate, virtual reality, running alongside our everyday reality. It’s a feeling that you don’t get from simply watching a film which takes you out of your everyday experience of the world to another place. This parallel reality feels, as I say, uncanny. Charming, but also a bit creepy. I wonder if there isn’t something in this that at least feels like what it means to be digital.
My podcasting pal, Cathi Bond and I have a new episode out. This time, Cathi continues her fascination with the re-invention of agriculture by looking at an intriguing project she found on Kickstarter. I continue to have an unhealthy interest in how we are learning to manage the enormous amount of information that we now have access to. We’re trying out new models that deliberately taper and tailor that information – and do it in a way that’s friendly. I look at two new spins on this: Little Printer and Feedair. Click to listen below, or visit the blog for the full show notes, with links to our stories.
Technology Review has an article on how game mechanics are being used in conjunction with marketing. The idea is to create social or game-like spaces online that are also affiliated with a product. For instance, as TR puts it:
for the USA Network’s television show Psych, the startup Bunchball helped build Club Psych on the show’s official website. It rewards fans who sign in, browse though photo galleries, or play mini-games online. In those games they can earn points that can be spent on virtual items that make their “room” on the site resemble the main characters’ office, or on physical Psych-related merchandise. USA Network used Bunchball’s technology in a smart-phone app that is meant to be used while the show is broadcast, rewarding viewers with more points.
Expect to see more of this kind of thing as the trend towards gamification and social games continues. The article reminded me of a conversation about transmedia storytelling that I had with Steve Rubel for an upcoming episode of Spark. He talked about the way transmedia narrative can further the connection to shows, products or projects by creating more of an ongoing relationship with consumers. Of course, as he pointed out, all media are in competition for time and attention when there are so many entertainment and information options out there. I can’t help wondering if there’s going to be pushback from consumers, as time-consuming games and social networks gobble up more of our time. Personally, I want something that either offers me deep engagement, and so truly rewards my attention (such as listening to a niche podcast I really value) or is so lightweight that I can easily fold it into my day (such as Twitter). As content creators, we really have to think clearly about what offers genuine value to our communities.
What does a physical object mean in a digital age? Even as many of us embrace ebooks, convert our music libraries to mp3s, or stream movies online, we still seem to hunger for the tactile. It’s something we’ve talked about before, both on Spark (for instance, in this interview with Mark Paterson) and on my podcast with Cathi Bond. This time on The Sniffer podcast, Cathi has a look at a new art/fashion-y publication called The Slant. What I find intriguing about it is the idea of paper publication as artifact. If you’re going to make something physical, tactile, you have to bring real value to the physical product – make it something that can’t really be replicated as digitally. Let’s see how The Slant does!
You can listen to the episode below, or head over to The Sniffer blog to listen and check out the links to our stories. Thanks! Sni-2011-11-04 by nora3000
Last night, I was in Stratford, ON for a town hall meeting on the future of the Stratford library. I was part of a panel – the first step in coming up with a 4-7 year strategic plan for the library. I love that Stratford is making this an issue for public consultation and discussion. It was an inspiring group of people, who left me with a lot to think about. One of the points I touched on is something I’ve been thinking about for a while: organizations and individuals who can be informal “credibility hubs”. As the old top-down model of rigidly curated and approved information breaks down (largely for the better, I think) we’re all struggling a bit with Clay Shirky’s “filter failure“. How can people such as journalists, academics, expert-amateurs, and librarians act as informal, less hierarchical nodes of expertise within the new information ecosystem? Algorithms have taken us some way down this curatorial road, as have the social relationships on networking sites, of course, but I wonder what role people who, by dint of their training, expertise, or jobs, might effectively help the communities we serve without retreating into old hierarchies. It’s something the always thought-provoking Anand Giridharadas has written about here.
Further to Thursday’s post, this week’s episode of Spark is a repeat from last season. It’s a special theme issue on games, and it was one of our favourites from last year. You can listen online here, or subscribe to the podcast. Thanks!
“Gamification” is a huge buzz term these days. It refers to the use of games and game mechanics to all sorts of tasks, including those we don’t normally think of as fun, such as chores or public policy outcomes. The popularity of video games shows us that people will engage in focused activity – even if it isn’t in itself ‘fun’ – if it’s structured around principles such as challenge and reward, tension and release, levelling up, and effective feedback. It not only helps people achieve goals, but can also lead to deeper understanding, thanks to the immersive power of games.
Technology Review points to an intriguing example of this immersive power in action with Spent, a game designed to show players what it’s like to live in poverty. Personally, I’ve experienced the emotional power of this sort of immersion in a game called Loneliness. It’s a simple, minimalist game that takes you through what it feels like to be socially isolated – shunned. It actually brought tears to my eyes. Its emotional power is especially intriguing because it’s so simple…abstract, even. It suggests that we don’t need sophisticated graphics or ‘realistic’ games to tap into their immersive potential. These games have tremendous power to teach empathy.
Games are powerful tools. Gamification does leave me with some questions, though. Where is the line between making the most out of the human response to games on one hand, and manipulating people on the other? If we are in some sense hard wired to respond to games, does this mean that using games to ‘get’ people to eat their veggies, say, amounts to a sort of denial of individual choice? Traditionally, art is the way that we develop and refine our sense of empathy. Literature and theatre can put us in someone else’s shoes. Is there something about the subtlety of other arts that we miss in the abstracted world of games? Finally, I know that whenever we talk about gamification to achieve goals like education on Spark, I hear from people who are disturbed by the idea, primarily in a moral sense. The objection is generally that life isn’t always fun, and kids ought to learn to accomplish goals for reasons other than the rewards of successful game play. So, what if we are able to make virtually any task game-like? After all, game designer, Jane McGonigal has even made recovering from a head injury into a game. Is there something else that we are sacrificing in gamification, and what is that something?
