Meme me up, Scotty
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About Me
Caroline's FTVMS 712 blog.
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3-D Avatars Could Put You in Two Places at Once
If Jim Blascovich and Jeremy Bailenson are right, here is what’s in store for you and your avatar very soon, probably within the next five years:
1) Without leaving your living room or office, you’ll sit at three-dimensional virtual meetings and classes, looking around the table or the lecture hall at your colleagues’ avatars.
2) Your avatar will be programmed to make a better impression than you could ever manage.
3) While your avatar sits there at the conference table gazing alertly and taking notes, you can do something more important: sleep.
Does this sound like future hype? Your first instinct may be to classify it with the old predictions — see World’s Fair, 1964 — that there would soon be a picturephone in every kitchen. It took half a century for video phone calls to become affordable and usable. But in their new book,Infinite Reality Dr. Blascovich and Dr. Bailenson insist that 3-D conferences with avatars are nigh because consumer technology has suddenly caught up with the work going on in their virtual-reality laboratories in academia. Thesepsychologists point to three developments in the past year: the Microsoft Kinect tracking system for the Xbox, the Nintendo 3DS gaming device, and the triumph on “Jeopardy!” of I.B.M.’s Watson computer.
Source: NY Times
(NOTE: See the IBM Virtual Center for our own cutting edge 3D, avatar-based, voice-enabled and easy to use virtual meeting and conference space.)
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Tweeting the truth
Postman has said that “a major new medium changes the structure of discourse; it does so by encouraging certain uses of of the intellect, by favoring a certain kind of content- in a phrase, by creating new forms of truth-telling”. As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, for Postman the new medium of television was detrimental to public discourse. But unlike television, new media doesn’t always favor images over text- the popularity of Twitter is testament to this.
So what “uses of the intellect” does Twitter foster? What “certain kinds of content” does it support? This is problematic because part of Twitter’s appeal is its diversity. Anyone can have an account, and can choose to use it in any number of ways from the ‘sandwich tweet’ to shameless advertising to citizen (or indeed, professional) journalism. In terms of content, probably the most striking feature of Twitter is its brevity. Postman had a lot to say about variety and brevity in television: “the average length of a shot on network television is only 3.5 seconds, so that the eye never rests, always has something new to see. Moreover, television offers viewers a variety of subject matter, requires minimal skills to comprehend it…” Sound familiar? By the time I’ve finished reading one tweet, there’s usually a helpful little banner at the top of my screen alerting me to the fact that there are 21 new and equally short tweets waiting. Another feature of Twitter is that there’s no categorization to the content of Tweets- in their bid for my attention journalists compete with comedians, friends compete with celebrities- it’s the “Now… this” phenomenon on hyperdrive.
Whether or not this is a bad thing depends, I think, on how twitterers think about their audience. Marwick and Boyd investigated this in a piece called “I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience”. They found that some users have multiple audiences in mind; fans, friends, even just themselves, so that Twitter “is a medium, like telephone or email, that can be used for many different purposes”. Others conceptualized an “ideal reader”. Some well followed Twitterers imagined they were communicating with a fan base described as a “manageable community”. Each imagined audience is going to be addressed differently- as a fan, a citizen, a consumer, a friend- although the boundaries between these groups are not necessarily distinct.
Because the Twitter audience is so hard to define, Twitter users have a difficult job when it comes to impression management. According to Marwick and Boyd, Twitterers tend to develop strategies such as “concealing information, targeting tweets to different audiences and attempting to portray both an authentic self and an interesting personality” in order to negotiate the obscure social terrain. This seems like a bit of a shady, “lowest common denominator” approach and I don’t entirely agree with it. I think the difficulty of the identifying the Twitter audience is one which ultimately enriches its discourse. Users choose to “follow” each other because they have certain expectations about the content they will receive. If I’m after updates on current events or political analysis, why would I follow a user who delivers substandard material? I don’t need to be entertained by TVNZ’s twitter feed because Sarah Silverman takes care of that. When I make a choice to “follow” a news channel on Twitter I expect to receive links to thorough and accurate information. And if TVNZ doesn’t deliver what I’m after, I’ve got a much better range of alternatives to choose from than I do on television. I’m sure on Twitter “infotainment” is still plentiful, but unlike Postman’s television, it’s not on every channel.
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"Truth, like time itself, is a product of a conversation man has with himself about and through the techniques of communication he has invented"
-Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
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Amusing ourselves to death?
Western society loves entertainment. It kind of follows that as soon as they realized we’d sit in front of a screen for hours if it was fun, the media has sought to entertain us. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman said that “the problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining”. Postman was talking about TV, and many of his arguments are specific to it, but even given all the freedom that the internet provides, I think some of his statements ring true for the net. In particular, it’s still a medium which is highly focused on entertainment.
There’s some stand out ways in which the internet is different; scores of productive political/social/creative activities have only been able to happen because of it, but the evidence suggests that this productivity is just a speck in what is otherwise mostly porn and lolcats.
I can’t help associating this with Transmetropolitan, a comic book by Warren Ellis. There’s a wonderful issue, ‘What Spider Watches on TV’, where the protagonist, a chain smoking journalist called Spider Jerusalem (think somewhere between Veronica Guerin and Wolverine), forces himself to watch TV non-stop for a whole day. He becomes “so incredibly bored” that he buys a pair of “ridiculous shoes” from an advertisement and spends a great deal of time trolling call-in shows. This activity leads him to actually become a news item, which he is horrified about (“oh my god. I have become television”), and the news leaves him lying despondent on the floor, flicking from channel to channel through a list of questionably titled shows (e.g. “Torture me for money”). It’s an exaggerated universe, certainly, but is it wholly unrecognizable from our own? The most popular youtube video is currently “Baby Dancing to Beyonce” and today’s hottest google search is Marie Osmond.
Maybe the positive productivity I mentioned earlier is comparatively niche, and so what we’re seeing is kind of like Chris Anderson’s theory of the long tail: Millions of people will watch a video of a baby monkey riding a pig,because it’s instant, easy entertainment. It’s a lot harder to organize a beach clean-up/ donate to animal rights/ find a mathematics convention (surely these exist)/ read a political blog, but most of the people who watched the baby monkey riding on a pig probably did do something of this nature. The non-trashy activity outnumbers the trashy, it’s just that the trashy is universal whereas the productive is dispersed. I guess I’m saying that we have more in common when it comes to low brow entertainment than we do in other aspects of life, but it could be that I’m completely wrong, because honestly I’m just trying to rationalize the whole lolcat situation we find ourselves in.
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The calm amongst the storm
In the wake of our recent youtube creations, I’ve been thinking a lot about information overload. The overwhelming amount of content flying at us from all angles can be very frustrating. There are times when it all becomes a bit too much; when there are so many interfaces demanding attention that it becomes much easier to disconnect than to engage.
I’ve also experienced more “serene” digital encounters. Digital spaces designed to be sleek, streamlined and understated. Google’s interface is a good example. It’s also why I prefer to work on a Mac, regardless of scorn this earns me from techie friends: some technologies just organize information better. Weiser calls these types of designs “calm technologies”. Yvonne Rogers offers the following explanation of Weiser’s work:
“Given the likelihood that computers will be everywhere, in our environments and even embedded in our bodies, he argued that they better “stay out of the way” and not overburden us in our everyday lives. In contrast, his picture of calm technology portrayed a world of serenity, comfort and awareness, where we are kept perpetually informed of what is happening around us, what is going to happen and what has just happened. Information would appear in the center of our attention when needed and effortlessly disappear into the periphery of our attention when not” (Rogers, 2006).
Weiser’s vision is a little skewed because he wrote all this before the turn of the 21st century, but I’ve definitely noticed moments of “digital calm” amid the otherwise stormy information society. I think as the amount of information online increases, it will be vital to manage it in savvy ways to encourage engagement. As Shirky said, ‘It’s not information overload, it’s filter failure”.
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"computers for personal use have focused on the excitement of interaction… the most potentially interesting, challenging and profound change implied by the ubiquitous computing era is a focus on calm"
-Mark Weiser, The Coming Age of Calm Technology
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This is pretty cool in and of itself, but I think it’s also a good representation of online interaction in general, and the “mash-up” culture we see a lot of today.
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Banal is the new black
Well, almost… In an interview for Mediamatic.net Dutch artist Martin Butler ambitiously claims that “Banal is the new sacred”. He reaches this Warhol-esque conclusion by comparing the iconography of religion to the iconography associated with social networking. Both seek to act as proof of existence- the first as proof of God (i.e. “God was there, look, here’s a picture of it”), the second as proof of self (i.e. “I was there, look, here’s a picture of it… in fact, here’s a post about it, here’s a link to someone who was also there”).
That’s definitely a new way of seeing social networking for me, but I’ve got to admit, his approach has a beautiful logic. Further, the comparison seems to conform with ideas floating around about narcissism in social networking. People spend such a great deal of time online, and particularly on sites built around self construction, that it’s hard to avoid self-importance. The digital world is tailored to “you”, with an implied promise that everyone else cares; it’s an environment which fosters egotistical behavior. Granted, the results are sometimes hilarious.
I’d be a cynic indeed if I thought that was the whole story. It’s also important to note that as well as proving our existence, banality proves our humanity- there’s something refreshingly “real”, for example, about Stephen Fry’s enthusiastic tweets during a football match. Banality can be entertaining, revealing and even touching despite its triviality.
smarterplanet
