Ideas were at the at the heart of why I started this blog. One of the first posts that I wrote there being a sweet spot in the complexity of products based on the ideas of Dan Greer. I wrote about the first online election fought by Howard Dean, which now looks like a precursor to the Obama and Trump presidential bids.
I articulated a belief I still have in the benefits of USB thumb drives as the Thumb Drive Gospel. The odd rant about IT, a reflection on the power of loose social networks, thoughts on internet freedom – an idea that that I have come back to touch on numerous times over the years as the online environment has changed.
Many of the ideas that I discussed came from books like Kim and Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy.
I was able to provide an insider perspective on Brad Garlinghouse’s infamous Peanut Butter-gate debacle. It says a lot about the lack of leadership that Garlinghouse didn’t get fired for what was a power play. Garlinghouse has gone on to become CEO of Ripple.
I built on initial thoughts by Stephen Davies on the intersection between online and public relations with a particular focus on definition to try and come up with unifying ideas.
Or why thought leadership is a less useful idea than demonstrating authority of a particular subject.
I touched on various retailing ideas including the massive expansion in private label products with grades of ‘premiumness’.
I’ve also spent a good deal of time thinking about the role of technology to separate us from the hoi polloi. But this was about active choice rather than an algorithmic filter bubble.
This post may take a while to get into, so please bear with me, but I want to take two examples that showcase where I was going on immersive experiences.
User experience problems barring the way for immersive experiences
I gave my parents my first iPad in September last year so that we could stay in touch, and detailed some of the challenges that they faced in getting to grips with the device. There were two things that sprang out of this that I found of interest:
Special purpose devices like the digital TV EPG (electronic programme guide) or a satellite navigation device interface seemed to be easier to grasp
Modern interfaces weren’t as intuitive as we think
All of this is ironic given that the long term goal of HCI is to design systems that minimise the gap between the user’s cognitive model of what they want to do and the computer’s understanding of the user’s task.
From the late 1980s through to the dot com boom, technology was genuinely exciting. We got a whole new genre of fiction: cyberpunk, there was tremendous advances and glorious failures in innovation. Devices like Sony’s Glasstron display made wearable computing seem like just around the corner. Computer performance leapt forward, you could really feel the speed difference between processor chips or going from one games console generation to another. And there was a large degree of form-factor experimentation in computing:
These weren’t necessarily accessible to the average consumer, they were aspirational in nature. Culture including film, art and music promised an immersive cybernetic experience from The Lawnmower Man to Cyber Dog club wear. Virtual reality arcade games to the PowerGlove for Nintendo’s NES meant that William Gibson’s vision of the internet seemed just around the corner. Yet despite the early promise of this technology we ended up with mere interactive experiences that put up a barrier between the user and technology.
If we come forward to 2013, the killer applications of the smartphone aren’t a million miles away from the proto-instant messaging and chat services provided by CompuServe and AOL before the modern internet got started. In order to get the technology to work better it is time to break down the cognitive barriers and revisit immersive experiences.
There are two ways of providing immersive experiences:
Immersing the consumer in the device
Immersing the data in the environment
An example of immersing the consumer in the device is easy to find. From Sony’s Glasstron headsets, to augmented reality application Layar and Apple’s iOS 7.
One of the problems that virtual reality helmets back in the early 1990s was the feeling of motion sickness that it induced. This also seems to be happening with iOS 7, in fact there is now a name for the condition: cyber-sickness.
An example of immersing the data in the environment would be 3D projection mapping or a cinema screen and a digital taxi adverts with geofenced campaigns. The problem is one of scale. Incorporating the data into the environment at least doesn’t make people ill.Where this will take us all is exciting and largely uncharted territory.
This is the first in a number of posts that are designed to expand upon a post I published in May about eight trends for the future. They appear in the order in which I bite them off, chew them around and verbally masticate as posts on the blog. For this post I am looking at digital interruption.
The U.S. civil rights movement
I started thinking about the civil rights movement in the U.S.
By the late 1950s the US civil rights movement found that discourse and letters hadn’t moved the needle meaningfully and it took events like Rosa Parkes sit-down protest and the Stonewall riots to move the process forwards towards a more equal rights for all.
If one looks at the process in terms of mechanism, rather than the politics behind it; the Greenham Common Women, the tunnels dug by road protesters like Daniel Hooper (aka Swampy); they are an extension of the tactics used by civil rights movements decades before.
The first digital protest
The first digital-powered civil rights protest was the burning of draft cards by young American men from May 1964 onwards. The cards were printed with a font that could be read by an optical card reader connected to a mainframe computer, allowing the processing of draftees more efficient. 46 Americans were subsequently prosecuted for destroying their draft cards.
Digital interruption: learning from the Max Headroom takeover
Analogue interruption of media as a form of protest hasn’t worked that well in general. Whilst pirate radio stations routinely disrupted analogue broadcast transmissions, there weren’t a form of protest media, but generally a form of expression.
Probably the most famous hack was the Max Headroom broadcast interruption in Chicago.
The takeover likely to have been done by transmitting a more powerful microwave signal at the transmitter on the Sears Tower used by local broadcast TV stations. The people behind the Max Headroom takeover have never been caught, though there seems to be a number of people on Reddit who have a good idea who they are based don the some of the discussions you can Google. There were two things with analogue interruption:
You had to have a good deal of specialist knowledge to do it
It was quite hard to not get caught, similar media interruptions that occurred earlier by the likes of Captain Midnight (aka John MacDougall) who was busted the previous year whilst protesting at HBO’s unfair charges to satellite dish owners
The roots of computer hacking come from a wide range of sources from the political movement of the Yippies providing guides to phone phreaking (getting the phone network to do things the telephone companies wouldn’t like – giving you free calls etc.) to researchers finding flaws in early mainframe programs in the mid 1960s.
By the 1980s, bulletin board services had started to become popular; mainly because local calls were bundled with the line rental of a phone and so were effectively free in the U.S; allowing a pre-internet digital culture to build up. Bulletin boards also existed in other countries but the relatively high costs in regulated telecoms markets across Europe was a major barrier to take-up.
Computer viruses that were propagated disk-to-disk could extend their reach; particularly as magazine cover disks were often compiled with shareware and freeware originally downloaded from a bulletin board as a service to their readers. Magazines were also paid to distribute trial versions of commercial software and dialers for the likes of CompuServe.
It is interesting to note that the online chat function which drove the adoption of services like CompuServe and AOL whilst mirroring much of the bulletin board function; drew their paradigm from CB radio; with CompuServe’s online chat function being originally branded a ‘CB Simulator’.
Other forms of protest such as flame wars and trolling which came out of the bulletin board culture could be seen as incubators for similar behaviour on Internet platforms from Usenet groups to Facebook pages.
Underlying internet technologies have facilitated a step-change in protest; on the one-hand functions like emailing a politician or an online petition have become increasingly ineffective. ‘Peaceful’ consumer protests against the likes of the UK’s Digital Economy Act were ignored by the politicians and petitions supporting Edward Snowden achieved nothing but provide the authorities with a list of trouble-makers.
Brands that have come under attack on their Facebook pages like Nestle have demonstrated a remarkably thick skin, showing the online people power via social media is often a fallacy.
Consumers were taught by the body-politic that vigorous discourse and petitions don’t work compared to the face-to-face interactions with corporate lobbyists from industry bodies like the BPI, the MPAA or the RIAA.
From this lack of effectiveness came the modern digital interruption. Denial of service attacks have been happening for years as a prank or financial shake down but first came into their own as a form of political protest with the use of the low orbital ion cannon (LOIC) program by members of Anonymous to attack sites related to the Church of Scientology and the RIAA. Whilst this form of protest is illegal in many countries, it is seen by those who use it as a form of civil disobedience; similar to overloading a switchboard with protest calls or a picket line.
People involved are jailed and since Anonymous, like democracy is as much an idea as an organisation; the attacks continue.
Website blackouts by authoritative brands themselves have proven to be much more effective. On January 12, 2012, Wikipedia, Reddit, Flickr and a host of other large sites were effective in overturning the RIPA and SOPA pieces of proposed legislation in the US.
On their effectiveness MPAA chief executive Chris Dodd was quoted in the Los Angeles Times:
“It is an irresponsible response and a disservice to people who rely on them for information and who use their services,” Dodd said in a statement. “It is also an abuse of power given the freedoms these companies enjoy in the marketplace today.”
It was a tacit admission that whilst consumers could do without films and music, internet search, email and Wikipedia were now must-haves. The web blackout scared politicians because of the services ubiquity to modern life. They couldn’t be ignored like the petitions or emails and be dismissed as a fringe influence.
The world will break down into two types of organisations:
Social
Anti-social
From a communications point of view anti-social means not engaging for a specific reason, be it regulatory or not wanting to change controversial business practices. Conversely a social organisation not only communicates with it’s audience but also acts on what it hears from co-creation to changing business practices. Reputation management opportunities for agencies will occur when a client organisation tries to fall between the two categories and need to be guided between one or the other. Key skills will include:
Closing down social presence to deny digital interrupters an attack platform
Being conversant with techniques to help harden non-social online presence
Management consultancy to bring about business process change as part of making an organisation a social one
Irish cookery teacher terrified into handing over website name to Lady Gaga | Irish Business | IrishCentral – the smart thing would have come to an agreement with the Irish cookery teacher and agree to licence the name to her for cookery blogging purposes only. Instead they’ve risked a social media shit-storm for a box-ticking exercise. In this day and age, that’s an act of gross negligence and incompetence by whoever signed off on this and I feel for the Irish cooker teacher involved. More Irish related content here.
Quitting Facebook: What’s Behind The New Trend To Leave Social Networks? Eurasia Review – Reasons for quitting Facebook were mainly privacy concerns (48.3 percent), followed by a general dissatisfaction with Facebook (13.5 percent), negative aspects of online friends (12.6 percent), and the feeling of getting addicted to Facebook (6.0 percent; other/unspecific, 19.6 percent).
Hilton Worldwide Files for an IPO – Euromonitor International – interesting analysis of their business. Hilton Worldwide can trace its history back to a Texas hotelier in the early 20th century. It expanded to New York in 1943. Hilton Worldwide was one of the first users of computing with its centralised hotel booking system. It also pioneered the airport hotel with the first Hilton Worldwide airport property at San Francisco airport. Hilton Worldwide is being taken public by private equity company Blackstone.
Twitter makes IPO plans official: files confidential S-1, but expected value is about $14B — Tech News and Analysis – that this is a confidential filing means the company’s annual revenue is less than $1 billion. Usually when companies announce plans to go public, they have to file an S-1, the securities filing that companies use to provide details about their planned initial public offerings. Under the JOBS act of 2012, however, companies with less than $1 billion in revenue can file confidentially.
Wintel destined to eventually fail, says Acer founder – many downstream players moving to Google eco-system… For an ecosystem to have a chance of growing and staying strong, it must have leadership adopting strategies that allow all partners to earn profits. – Surprised Stan Shih was that blunt about their relationship with Microsoft
I missed this earlier on in the summer with the weight of Get Lucky -related content that appears. Get Lucky is undoubtedly a classic that will be played for years to come, so long as Daft Punk allow it. I thought that the 1990 on was particularly well done with the Steve Silk Hurley-esque horns in the background. Kudos to my former colleagues at RFI Studios for flagging this one up.
Coffee infographic
The coffee shop (Alchemy Coffee, Hon Hai Street) just up the block from my office has this great hand-drawn infographic that guides consumers through the veritable jungle of coffee choices that they may want to order. Confused by a flat white or a latte; not any more you aren’t. Really simple information architecture that other coffee shops and coffee drinkers could learn from. More Hong Kong related content here.
Disenchanted
I found out about this comic through Mark Millar’s Crossed web comic series. Disenchanted looks at what happens when no one believes in you any more and when you don’t matter through the lives of fairie folk. Call it a deconstruction of religion or a reflection on the post-colonial futures of former societies if you will; one thing I can tell you is that it will definitely be an interesting read. It starts October, but put it in your RSS feeds now. Millar’s work promises to be a dystopian fantastic realism in a comic.
Sublime Wizardry
Sublime Wizardry have backed Public Enemy on tours, which is as good a measure of quality as any. Sublime Wizardry is a crew from Germany and the UK. They include Tony Burrell who has been a DJ producer since the mid-1980s and other former members of 32 Troop alongside rapper Native Sun:
Really interesting talk on the future of books by Hannu Rajaniemi, in terms of its form rather the media that it’s published in (paper/pixels).
