digitally numb

Social networking ourselves to death

So you’ve probably heard about Chatroulette by now. EVERYONE is writing about it and postulating about its significance — how it’s reminiscent of the early days of the Internet, how its growth reflects our desire for anonymity, how it’s the anti-Facebook and how Twitter is ‘so 2009’ as celebs like Ashton Kutcher and Chris Brown jump onto the Chatroulette bandwagon. The New York Times even managed to track down the creator of the site (who happens to be a 17 year old student in Moscow) and the site already appears to be creating a market of clones. Here’s the bottom line –- the site is popular and it’s controversial, so the mainstream media has to talk about it. I don’t fault them for trying to dig deeper and extract some larger meaning out of its popularity and for speculating whether it’s the “next big thing”. However, here’s the unfortunate truth –- Chatroulette means nothing. It’s just a pointless toy (no wonder kids love it) that reflects the unfortunate state of modern society. 

I can spend my whole lifetime trying to articulate why Chatroulette means nothing, but will not be able to put it as well as Neil Postman did in his highly recommended book, Amusing Ourselves to Death. Here’s the best part — he was talking about television and wrote it way before the Internet of today. Postman was right; the contemporary world is better reflected by Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, than by George Orwell’s 1984. Although to a certain extent, it may be true that Big Brother is watching us, but we are more oppressed by our addiction to entertainment than by state control. You may want to give Chatroulette a try and you may even be entertained or amused for a few minutes (maybe even a few days or weeks), but that’s all you can hope to get out of it.

“For in the end, he [Aldous Huxley] was trying to tell us that what afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking”

- Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985)

You are what you tweet — be discreet!

The digital revolution has ushered in the apocalypse for some and a rebirth for others (depending on which side of the old/new media fence you happen to sit on). The old media ways have been left behind to choke on the dust kicked by empowered consumers, as they sprint ahead and embrace the ever-expanding array of new media consumption mediums and channels. Yes, this is great — this is progress. Not only do we have access to so much more information, but it’s also mostly free and accessible everywhere. Most importantly, now we can all contribute to this new media universe – blog, tweet, upload, tag, share and become your own little media empire!

Not unlike what the origin of language and then writing did to human beings thousands of years ago –- the power to transcribe thoughts and communicate instantaneously, across geographic and cultural boundaries in this manner is leading to huge personal and social transformations. The difference is, in the offline world, we could expect a lot of what we said and shared during our lifetime (for better or worse) to be often counterbalanced by the problem of inadequate data storage & retrieval capabilities (the limitations of human memory). In the pre-Internet days of the offline world, we were mostly reliant on every social interaction, new friendship or acquaintance, good or bad deed, and every moment spent communicating through various mediums during our lifetimes to eventually add up to shaping how others perceived us. Unless you were a published author or generally someone famous, or influential with access to mass media communication channels, you were limited to gradually and painstakingly building your personal legacies within your social circles over your lifetime. As we all know, that’s no longer the case anymore, because we’re all media producers now and we’re all are beginning to shift our offline lives online. You can share what you’re thinking, doing, eating, buying, your opinions on anything and everything online –- not just with words, but along with images, moving pictures and sound. All this in an environment with infinite storage and retrieval capabilities

With every tweet, status update, blog post, photo or video uploaded, you’re essentially leaving bits and bytes of yourself (some of which you may never be able to take back). Just because you forgot about what you tweeted yesterday and just because tomorrow you may abandon Twitter or Facebook for the next shiny new Internet toy, doesn’t mean what you’ve shared is forgotten. As search technologies keep evolving, there’s going to be very few places for the information you’ve shared, and consequently for you to hide. This is not meant to scare you or convince you that social media and over sharing should be curtailed (who am I to say that?). Create and share by all means –- just remember that with this new found power, you’re not only interacting, making friends, entertaining yourself and others –- you’re building your digital legacy, which will live on long after you’re gone.

5 real problems in an augmented world

Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.

It’s finally here — our view of the real world need not be limited by what our naked eye can see. Gadgets and terminals are not the be-all and the end-all in our quest for more information, real time access to data and most importantly, a reliable secondary storage mechanism for our memories. Why miss out on the physical world if you want to be immersed in and enjoy the benefits of digital media? Why not just augment the physical world with it? Yes, it’s the new buzz word, but Augmented Reality is here (and here to stay). The potential for this technology is undoubtedly endless, but what we’ve seen so far has mostly ranged from gimmicky and cute to somewhat useful. Nothing groundbreaking so far — no mass adoption of wearable technology or any of the entertainment possibilities. However, it’s just a matter of time when some of these implementations become part of our daily lives. If you hate how people are constantly distracted by their iPhones and Blackberry’s, brace yourself, because it’s about to get much worse.

Augmented Reality, just like any other technology will have some incredibly beneficial uses and some absolutely useless ones. However, all forms of Augmented Reality will likely be accompanied by some risks. Here are just five potential problems we can expect in the years ahead:

1. Profiling: The use of facial recognition technology, combined with geo-location and augmented data will lead to a seamless integration of our online and offline lives. As a result of these developments, a person walking around in the physical world will no longer just be a person, but will be their physical self along with a digital profile and other information that either the person itself or others make available online. Imagine walking into a social gathering and getting ignored by a bunch of people because you have self-identified yourself with a political or religious affiliation that they don’t particularly care for. Or worse — imagine being singled out for additional security screening at the airport because of it.

2. Unauthorized Augmented Advertising: Advertisers and tech companies are drooling over the possibilities of monetizing objects & spaces in the physical world by augmenting digital ads onto them in real-time. Think of the physical and intellectual property rights implications if the technologies that drive augmented advertising do not come with inbuilt controls — controls that would prevent advertisers from augmenting their marketing messages on building surfaces and other physical objects (including private or public property or other trademarked or copyrighted material) without adequate permission.

3. Augmented Behavioral Targeting: Ad targeting based on real world behavior using a combination of geo-location data & publicly self-disclosed information via social media services is just around the corner. For example, let’s assume you live in Los Angeles, travel a lot and have been checking into the local airport via services like Gowalla, Brightkite or Foursquare every time you leave town. Let’s also assume you have been checking out websites selling home security systems lately. Thanks to your online activities and your eagerness to share, you get served an ad that states “Given your busy travel schedule & the rising crime rate in LA, don’t you think it’s high time you installed a home security system?” (Actually this example may not be that bad considering sites like Please Rob Me have emerged). It does raise questions though. Who would have to provide privacy notice and choice in this scenario and how would you control what information is collected and how it is used for advertising that blurs the boundaries between your physical and virtual worlds?

4. Physical danger: Augmented Reality, like any mobile media technology presents some real physical safety issues. If you think mobile phones are currently a distraction while driving a car, think of an augmented windshield feeding you driving directions, along with more data about your surroundings than you may need. Or imagine crossing a busy street in an unfamiliar neighborhood, while simultaneously using an Augmented Reality interface to look for that hot new restaurant, checking out what people are tweeting about it and being bombarded with ads through it all.

5. Spam: Yes — where there is a marketing opportunity, there will be spam, deceptive advertising techniques and social engineering tricks to dupe gullible consumers into paying for things they don’t really need. If you think too many legitimate Internet companies (that are sensitive to your privacy concerns)  are harvesting all the data you publicly share on the Internet, there are even more scammers out there doing the very same thing. Be ready to be tricked and duped by too good to be true augmented offers in the real world — offers that will lure you in ways that unsolicited email from online pharmacies or belly-fat banner ads only wish they could.

The above list is by no means an exhaustive one. The dangers (much like the benefits) are far too many to be cataloged in one blog post. However, the sooner we start preparing for some of these problems, the more we increase our chances of arriving at timely solutions. There are a lot of smart people out there working incredibly hard on building the exciting future of augmented reality. Let’s hope there are also a few that are working at least half as hard on solving some of its incidental problems.

digitally numb?

Admit it. You love technology.

You love the way every new medium for creating, consuming & communicating media that has emerged  in the recent past (from email and instant messaging to social media and smart phones) has all seamlessly managed to transform the way you live to the point where you’ve seriously started to doubt if you could survive without any of it. I ask myself that all the time. Here’s the dilemma — Are we sure if all this technology that we love so dearly is in fact making us more free, productive, connected, informed or just cloaking your perception of reality with an endless stream of information & digital distractions?

I’m not sure either. It’s probably a bit if both, but how often do any of us sit and reflect upon what traits and values the brand new iPhone or Facebook and Twitter are actually adding or taking away from our lives? I’m not suggesting you do that because the answer will rarely, if at all, be in absolutes. Nevertheless, these are important questions that don’t get asked often enough. Most of us blindly accept and embrace technology as it is thrust upon us assuming more information has to be better than less, faster connectivity ought to be better than slow and all that is new is obviously better than what’s old.

At one end, the technophobes mourn about the speed of progress & risk being left behind, while at the other end, the technophiles eagerly march towards techno utopia. However, the very notion that we’re all either technophiles or a technophobes is firstly as ridiculous as the idea that we can only have either right or left wing political ideologies. Who can disagree that what we really need in politics (theoretically at least) is a midpoint between extremes? But I digress…in terms of technology, this balance cannot be achieved by passing judgments on media and communications technologies. However, we need to start asking the right questions — by observing technology’s current and potential impact on human needs and values with a view to nurturing traits that are beneficial to individuals and society in general.

So where do we begin? I’ve spent the past few precious minutes of my life typing this post on my iPhone, rather than killing zombies in my favorite iPhone game. I’d say I’m off to a good start.…back to the game now.