As I did for last year, I’ll try to liveblog the whole conference, and publish when I can at the breaks.
Apparently we selected a great set of people to kick off the morning. A lot of thinking about big issues of social, networking, and understanding. They put everything else we do into context very well.
Shilpa Shah kicked us off with by setting how mobile can change to behave in human ways, not try to change people to work in technological ways. Much of this was, to me, interestingly related to the gesture work we’ve been showing off (and some AR and other stuff we’ve been secretly thinking about) so it was nice to get a higher level, philosophical view of it all.
She talked about a bunch of the social contexts of use I’ve been ranting on more and more lately. I embrace it, but she thinks there is going to be a backlash to technology and people will want to move away from it. I am not sure I buy the backlash per se, but the concepts are still broadly right.
Because of an audio problem in the room, we didn’t all watch this, but she wanted us to see it, so watch this TED video on “antisocial” phone use: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/renny_gleeson_on_antisocial_phone_tricks.html
Some principles to keep in mind for designing like this:
1) Engagement creates a new shared experience
2) Helps people physically connect
3) Physical reality should remain unchanged
4) Does not compete for attention
5) Celebrate the emotional, not the efficient
Judy Breck reminded us that Encarta in 1993 was amazing. Inconceivable that you could get an encyclopedia on a CD. Set to die this year. Encarta had no long tail, no connections, a perfect walled garden.
20th century education has squashed the long tail. Encarta was only in the head, and everything else is around standards, and rote knowledge. Each grade gives you a bit more information about a topic, but that is all. If you are curious about cells in the 3rd grade, too bad for you. The tail should be available as needed for exploring by the precocious.
A good first step is to encourage kids (and even teach them how) to find info on the internet. But more so, we need to make the information /findable/. Make educational systems as SEO-centric as sales types.
There are a lot of neat videos, a cool hyperbolic tree of the human “diseasome” the LANL map of science and so on. Do take the time to play with her presentation. Click the little images in the strip at the top to get from page to page.
Knowledge is a network, as is our brain. These two facts are not coincidental; her “knowledge explorer” example lets you see this aggregated information, and link to museum websites around the world. In the pre-internet era, you could go view this information for real, but never all of them at once. And multiple people, in multiple locations, can do this all together. She can even see schools functionally disappearing, and some entirely other type of social network to support this knowledge/learning/education need will emerge.
Literally boggling my mind. So radical it’s hard to ask the right questions about this, but it all makes sense so I’m gonna keep track of it.
Scott Campbell asked us, what is the message? From the point of view of mobile, and social media today, what does this all mean? Marshall McLuhan’s “medium is the message” is in fact key. Is a marriage proposal the same over email?
The emergence of radio (then television for the next generation) were key defining attributes of their age. Broadcast, in the sense of an institution in a big building sending a narrow range of messages to pretty much everyone. There are drawbacks and benefits, but this is a “mass age” model.
The PC, then the Internet, fostered a shift from the mass age to a networked society. He sees us moving into the personal communication society, as a subset, or evolution from, the networked one.
There are worries about “social privatism,” where people spend all their time on their immediate lives and that of their immediate friends, at the expense of broader communities. This can lead you to disregarding all outside views, and kills healthy debate.
Information exchange on the internet (vs. sociability or recreation) does enable social connectedness and involvement in the community. TV in general correlates to less social engagement, but those who watch more news engage /more/ with their local community. So the content is more important? Studies he did showed a positive correlation between civic and political engagement and recreational use as well though. Why is that?
They are tightly coupled to the size of the network, and the degree to which it is like minded. Larger networks are better for a political life. Network diversity is bad for involvement (avoid conflict, etc.) but good to set your attitude to accept other viewpoints. If you just interact with the same small group all the time, it’s encouraging social privatism and detachment from everything else.
Designers can work on this by tailoring device design, content and the manner in which social networks are designed, to make this all work in a more engaging and socially responsive manner.