A new kind of presence

David Weinberger imagines an exciting technology future:

At the FlyEye site you scan a huge video wall that shows you a feed from every person out in the streets who is sporting a meshed GoPro or Google Glass wearable video camera. Thousands of them. […] Off on the left there’s a protestor holding a sign you can’t quite make out. So, you click on one of the people in the crowd who has a blue dot over her that means she too is wearing a meshed video camera. Now you see through that camera. The protestor’s sign isn’t as interesting as you thought. So you video surf through the crowd, hopping from camera to camera.

FlyEye provides a “Twitch Plays Pokemon” sort of interface that lets the remote crowd ask participating meshed camera-wearers to turn this way or that. You click furiously asking the person with the camera you’re “riding” to look backwards. No luck. So you hop to someone further back. […] The software enables a user to choose which camera to ride, as well as the sorts of services that would make it easier to choose which cameras to surf to. Plus some chat capabilities of some sort.

 

SWAT app

Screen Shot 2014-10-14 at Tue, Oct 14, 11.21.02 AM“With a single press of a button, stream live video of your interactions with police to our secure servers. Know what to do if you’re approached by police on the sidewalk, in the car, in your home, or at a protest. Know what to pay attention to if you experience or witness police misconduct. Fill in the information you need to file an official complaint, and send it automatically to the police department. Use your phone’s location services, camera, and time and date stamps to collect evidence.”

Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

present-shock“We tend to exist in a distracted present, where forces on the periphery are magnified and those immediately before us are ignored.”

“The minute the ‘now’ is apprehended it has already passed. […] The more forcefully we attempt to stop the passage of time the less available we are to the very moment we seek to preserve.”

“Which ‘now’ is important: the now I just lived or the now I’m in right now?”

“Digiphrenia – the way our media and technologies encourage us to be in more than one place at the same time.”

“Not only have our devices outpaced us, they don’t even reflect a here and now that may constitute any legitimate sort of present tense. They are reports from the periphery, of things that happened moments ago. […] By dividing our attention between our digital extensions, we sacrifice our connection to the truer present in which we are living.”

“Humans once lived without any concept of time at all. In this early, hunter-gatherer existence, information was exchanged physically, either orally or with gestures, in person. People lived in an eternal present, without any notion of before or after, much less history or progress. Things just were. […] While they had to worry about where their next meal was coming from, they felt no pressure to succeed or to progress, to achieve or to improve. They had nowhere to go, since the very notion of a future hadn’t yet been invented. This stasis lasted several thousand years.”

“Like a digital file, a spelled word is the same everywhere it goes and does not decay.”

“Where calendars led people to think in terms of history, clocks led people to think in terms of productivity. Only after the proliferation of the clock did the word ‘speed’ (spelled spede) enter the English vocabulary.”

“Digital technology is more like a still-life picture. A sample. It is frozen in time. Sound, on the other hand, is audible only over time. We hear sound as it decays. […] The digital universe is a visual one: people staring silently at screens, where the only sounds in the room are the keys and mouse clicks.”

“While there is tremendous value in group thinking, shared platforms, and networked collaboration, there is also value in a single mind contemplating a problem.”

“We must retrain ourselves to see the reward in the amount of time we get to spend in the reverie of solo contemplation or live engagement with another human being. Whatever is vibrating on the iPhone just isn’t as valuable as the eye contact you are making right now.”

“In the space of one childhood, we can learn what it took humanity many centuries to figure out.”

“Catching up with Twitter is like staying up all night to catch up on live streaming stock quotes from yesterday. The value was in the now — which at this point is really just a then.”

“When everything is rendered instantly accessible via Google and iTunes, the entirety of culture becomes a single layer deep. The journey disappears, and all knowledge is brought into the present tense.”

“Our recorded past competes with our experienced present for dominance over the moment. […] What isn’t coming at us from the past is crashing in at us from the future.”

“Big data companies collect seemingly innocuous data on everyone, such as the frequency of our text messages, the books we’ve bought, the number of rings it takes us co pick up the phone, the number of doors on our cars, the terms we use in our Web searches, in order to create a giant profile. They then compare this profile against those of everyone else. For reasons no one understands, the data may show that people who have two-door cars, answer the phone in three or more rings, and own cats are extremely likely to respond favorably to ads for soup. So these people will Ье shown lots of soup advertisements. The market researchers don’t care about the data points themselves or the logic connecting one behavior to another. They only care care about predicting what a person is statistically likely to do.”

“For the first time, people engaged with products completely divorced from the people who actually made them. Technologies masked not just the labor, but also the time that went into an item’s production. […] This new way of interacting with things defined a new human identity for the very first time — that of the consumer.”

“Consumption makes up about half of all economic activity in America.”

“In a digitally enhanced consumer reality, we not only work to keep up with the latest products and service options, we purchase products and services that serve no purpose other than to help us better keep up. Our iPads and Adroids are nothing like the productivity-computing tools on which they may once have been based but are instead purchasing platforms designed to increase the ease and speed with which we consume.”

“We are so good at making stuff and providing services that we no longer require all of us to do it.”

“It is now usually cheaper to just try something than to sit around and try to figure out whether to try something.” — Joichi Ito

“The individual is flow, and the community is storage. Only the individual can take actions. Only the community can absorb their impact over time.”

“Fractalnoia – Relating one thing to another, even when the relationship is forced or imagined.”

“Ideas don’t generally emerge from individuals, but from groups (liquid networks).” – Social critic Steven Johnson

“In a networked ideascape, the ownership of an idea becomes as quaint and indefensible a notion as copyright or patents. Since ideas are built on the logic of others, there is no way to trace their independent origins. It’s all just access to shared consciousness. Everything is everything.”

“Consumers don’t want to speak with companies through social media; we want to speak with one another. We don’t even think of ourselves as consumers anymore, but as people.”

“As long as people didn’t engage with one another and were instead kept happily competing with one another, their actions, votes, and emotions remained fairly predictable.”

“The human body is a space suit for something that could be stored quite differently.”

“I find myself unable to let go of the sense that human beings are somehow special, and that moment-to-moment human experience contains a certain unquantifiable essence. I still suspect there is something to quirky, too paradoxical, or too interpersonal to be imitated or re-created by machine life.”

Amazon

“Your future employer is watching you online”

Please don’t stop with these two paragraphs from Michael Fertik’s excellent post on one of the Harvard Business Review blogs. It’s not overly long and filled with interesting nuggets. To wet your whistle:

“Using today’s technology, an employer can search 1,000 submitted resumes for keywords such as university name, previous employer name, and specialty. The computer can serve up the three people who fit the employer’s criteria. The employer reaches out, interviews them, and hires one. More than 99% of candidates didn’t even get at bat. No human evaluation — for subtlety, interesting career paths, etc. — was needed or utilized to get to the top of the pile.”

“Let’s imagine what this looks like with tomorrow’s technology. The computer knows the digital profiles of top employees at the employer’s company. It knows their backgrounds; their reputation on the internet for professionalism, hard work, and achievement; their previous patterns of work history and tenure; their collaboration styles; what the internet thinks their personal interests and habits are; what their friends are like; what their family lives are like, etc. The employer tells the machine that she’d like to get a terrific new employee for the Customer Service department. The machine then researches the million people who live closest to her office, surfaces three names based on their digital reputations and how similar they are to top employees at the company, and she reaches out to them. She and the candidates are mutually delighted with the result.”

I think I’ve always (since I got online) known we were headed here and (subconsciously?) conducted myself accordingly. But then, I was sort of an adult by the time the net came along, with youthful indiscretions confined to some fading photos (which I put online).

I know some will be disturbed by the this post and perhaps I should be, but I’m not.

Is the party moving?

Been a while since I went five days without sharing something here. Most of Friday and Saturday in Tulsa with family. Busy at work. But the real culprit is almost certainly Google +, the new social “project” from Google. I’m spending a lot of my online time there, and less all other places (here, Twitter, etc).

I won’t try to explain it. I learned that lesson with Twitter. If I have to explain it, you probably won’t use G+.  And I’ll be very surprised if it “kills” any of the other social sites. But for those who like and use Google products/services, Google + is fun.

Like most users, the Circles approach to following and sharing is the big thing for me. I have a circle of friends & family; work; and interesting people who I don’t know but like to read. This is pretty close to how my life works.

So what about smays.com. That’s a good question. Some of the Cool Kids have already shuttered their blogs and moved lock, stock and barrel to Google +. Unlikely I will do that. I have almost 10 years invested in this blog and I like having my on place to park things. But I do expect to post less.

I’m thinking I’ll share something here here when I have something “original” to contribute. All of the the “did you see this?” stuff will get posted to my Google + stream. That’s got to be a 10-to-1 ratio. Maybe higher.

As for Twitter, who knows. I really like the Twitter format. And the people I follow on Twitter. If many/most of them migrate to G+, Twitter becomes that much less interesting. We’ll see.

Revisiting Picassa

I’m a long-time flickr fan. Have a couple of thousand photos in my photostream. Shoot, I’m paid up until 2013. It’s a great service. And yesterday I downloaded (copied) all of those photos and posted them to my Picassa account.

The geek-o-sphere is buzzing (wait, no good)… is all atwitter (uh, that won’t work)… talking about Google+, the new social initiative from Google. If you haven’t followed this, it’s not important, except to explain why I’m exploring another place to put my photos online.

I’m a big fan of most Google services (Gmail, Reader, YouTube, Calendar, Maps, etc etc) and all of these will –eventually– be tightly integrated with Google+. It dawned on me that photos was about the only thing I was not using Google for.

No one knows if Google+ will be a success but I’m hoping that it is and decided it made sense to bring my pix under the Google tent.

And if you have an invite…

Online influence

Interesting article in the Sunday Review section of the New York Times (I think I used the last of my 20 free accesses for the month). It’s about the growing importance (?) of online influence.

“If you have a Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn account, you are already being judged — or will be soon. Companies with names like Klout, PeerIndex and Twitter Grader are in the process of scoring millions, eventually billions, of people on their level of influence — or in the lingo, rating “influencers.” Yet the companies are not simply looking at the number of followers or friends you’ve amassed. Rather, they are beginning to measure influence in more nuanced ways, and posting their judgments — in the form of a score — online.”

Yes, I check my Klout score from time to time but it’s never gotten above 40. 39 as of a few minutes ago. But 40 suggests “a strong, but niche, following.” Niche being the operative word. And the average Klout score is in the high teens, so…

“After analyzing 22 million tweets last year, researchers at Hewlett-Packard found that it’s not enough to attract Twitter followers — you must inspire those followers to take action. In other words, influence is about engagement and motivation, not just racking up legions of followers.”

Is there any sort of analogue to this in the world of traditional advertising? Do we even care about the influence of someone hearing our radio ad?

“Industry professionals say it’s also important to focus your digital presence on one or two areas of interest. Don’t be a generalist. Most importantly: be passionate, knowledgeable and trustworthy.”

Half the fun of checking your Klout score is comparing your score to your friends and acquaintances.

My pal David Brazeal is off on his own now and needs as much Klout as he can get. He’s something of an expert on “weather, lightening & tornados.” Jonathan Brownfield should be higher given his access to beautiful, large-breasted young women.

My plan is to stand outside Hooters and wait for a bad storm.

Instagram

Every time I peek at Instagram, I find remarkable new images. This one by someone calling themselves purposofenvy. You can see more of his/her photos here.
Not sure why I find instagram so appealing. I think it’s that the photo is the extent of the communication. You can intuit (?) a lot about someone without a bunch of words. The photo is the story.