Thought Bubbles shares bits of news, ideas, links and random scribblings. Feel free to email me your own.
No safe place on earth? - go sailing!: Open sailing project is "designing for the apocalypse" - a quote presumably with tongue stuck somewhat in cheek. Seriously, though, project participants are envisioning an international sea station with labs working on cool stuff like an "energy animal" that can provide renewable solar, wind or wave energy depending on the weather and "instinctive architecture" for a ship design that adapts to extreme conditions.
Outsource your prayers: Okay, commodification of absolutely everything is now complete. But does god listen to bots?
Predicting innovation: Map of science project data mines what researchers are really spending time looking at (opposed to what they like to report they're reading) and uses data visualization to map the result. Can they predict emerging scientific innovations?
Marketing as we know it may go away in the not too distant future. Ten years ago, businesses told consumers what they wanted them to know about their product. Five years ago, most businesses caught on to the fact the internet made marketing a two-way conversation. Today, online marketing is becoming more of a one-way conversation again - not from companies to consumers, but in the other direction. Companies - get ready to develop your psychic powers.
When consumers broadcast what they want, and come to expect that to be delivered to their doorsteps, in what sense would businesses still be marketing their products? Businesses that succeed in the emerging environment will de-emphasize the (what sometimes can seem vaguely contrived) "two-way conversation" meant to build a personal relationship between themselves and their customers. The successful ones will develop their "psychic powers" by leveraging technology to monitor the environment and deliver what the consumer wants.
Yesterday, for example, prolific blogger Robert Scoble (@scobleizer) sent out a couple of tweets on Twitter saying he and his wife are expecting another child and that they're looking for a new car (congrats to the Scoble family). Within hours folks at Toyota replied, "Bunch of us Toyota PR folks on Twitter. See the list @toyotanewsroom We're happy to get you any info. you need. ~Scott."
With the mass adoption of Twitter and other life broadcasting platforms, enormous (and growing) capacity for online data mining, intelligent mapping of relationships between bits of data, people and ideas, and social media monitoring services, it's not hard to predict where this is going. Businesses that make effective use of these platforms and technologies will collapse the distance between what they have to offer and who's buying. When this trend gains enough momentum, in what sense would "marketing" still exist?
On a personal note, I believe the train has left the station on this front. Whether it's a good thing or not remains to be seen.
Update: via @dsearls - looks like Doc Searls might be hitting on similar themes in a webcast tomorrow, March 24th.
Are devices and technology that augment and modify reality - wearable tech, neural implants, biochemical modifications, robotics, among others - training wheels that will spring us (some of us, anyway) beyond a dualistic, materialist view of the world? Maybe. If you've ever lost yourself in a film or projected yourself so fully into your character in Second Life or World of Warcraft that you've temporarily forgotten where you were, think of how much more compellingly real that experience becomes as it pervades your awareness of everyday life and the objects within it. And consider how having the power to craft the world you are perceiving and virtually shape it at will would make your perception of self and object more fluid. See the Life 2.0 video at the end of the earlier lucid dreaming on demand post for one scenario on how this might play out. How does having a great deal of control over our visual, aural and kinetic inputs rewire the brain? As these technologies become increasingly available, identification with the physical body for those who use them becomes more fluid and the role of media changes dramatically.
If you believe that those developments are a long way off, you're not paying attention to how fast things are changing. To go on a trip two years ago I wrote down directions, researched where to go for dinner and entertainment ahead of time, carried a book and magazines, an iPod for music and video and a phone for calls, SMS and emails. Now I only carry an iPhone - oh, and a book for its old-school charm. The iPhone gives me instant access to local information, magazines, movies, music, directions, Twitter, emails, SMS, calls, games, language translation and whatever other functionality I choose to download from the app store. I've learned the gestural UI of finger pinches and flicks to access information so well that I now get slightly annoyed by the WIMP interface on my desktop computer. The rewiring of my brain to accept new behavior and expectations as normal took only a few months. Watch the 2009 TED talk by Juan Enriquez at the end of this post for much more compelling examples of technology coming online right now. Check out the Big Dog in the video (at ~13:00 mark). How quickly will your brain be rewired to accept that you can have some form of personal relationship with a robot when they become sophisticated enough to pass the Turing test? These developments are here. Now.
Media in a world where the distinctions between subject and object, alive and inert, human and machine begin to blur comes to play a very different role than its current one of facilitating communication. Media becomes an agent for transformative experience. That transformation can be positive, negative or somewhere in between depending on the intent of its producer and the use to which the user puts it. If we are headed into a zone where reality becomes less defined by material, physical limitations and can be shaped at will, it's probably wise to practice developing awareness of our intentions sooner rather than later.
My friend Risa forwarded me the "Social Media Marketing Madness" Hubspot cartoon on the left. "I'm a marketer," the first cell says. "I blog about marketing," says the next. "I have a podcast about marketing bloggers," "I tweet about podcasters that talk about marketing bloggers," and finally "I have a Facebook group for Twitter users that tweet about podcasters that talk about marketing bloggers."
Might be funnier if it weren't so true that the currency of social media is heavily invested in derivatives. And we all know how well the investment in derivatives is working out on the economic stage right now. I'm just sayin'.
One more recap from SXSW 2009 before I head back to San Francisco. Thor Muller (Get Satisfaction, Inc.) demonstrated a fictitious product called "ThinkTwice" during his presentation to get the audience thinking about the longer-term impact of what may be relatively near-term developments in human augmentation. His fictitious use case is a thought-provoking adjunct to my post on What happens when marketing gets truly interactive? where I noted the marketplace is beginning to blur the lines between personal and commercial. Muller's hypothetical product blurs the lines between internal and external as well. Welcome to lucid dreaming on demand, people. Question is, who will provide the stuff your dreams are made of?
Muller describes ThinkTwice as made up of a neural implant (a subcutaneous patch maybe) that uses the central nervous system as its network, with a display component surgically implanted in the retina (okay, he said "seared on the eyeball itself"), along with input devices (via physical gestures that translate, say, typed words to the processing unit through muscle memory). He noted that this "rig" would not be such a leap from what we already have. The rig he describes simply eliminates friction between communication media that currently exist.
He makes his point by asking, "How much more likely are you to respond to a letter than an email? To an email than a text message?" The only difference in likelihood is the effort it takes to reply. If the rig were physically incorporated into your body in a way that could be controlled by thought and gesture instead of having to interact with an external device, communication and the manipulation of sensory information could be virtually instantaneous. "We already have telepathy, except with a little bit of friction," he says.
So what might be the impact of the rig? Muller suggests new social norms will arise. Disconnection becomes a luxury. Perhaps there's an "arms race" for information mastery with the ignorance of those out of the loop and unable to keep up creating a big disparity in opportunities for participation. New values will replace old values. Already we're seeing that accuracy of information is less valuable than its availability. Would there be an age of consent? A divide of adoption, say between the "augments" and the "naturals"?
Many of these questions have already come up in other contexts, e.g., computer haves and have-nots, use of steroids and elective plastic surgery - and for the same reasons. We dream of what we might like to know, how athletic we want to be and of how we want to look - and with technology we can make the dream happen (to some extent). Businesses and marketers help shape what's possible - and what's desirable. One difference between the world we're in now, and one of frictionless communication, is that in the latter deliberation vanishes. The world would in some ways become like a lucid dream - except for the added physical component and its limitations. If we're not deliberate about what we want the stuff of our dreams to be made of now, we may drift into a world that fails to deliver what we desire for ourselves and others.
Update: link to Life 2.0 video used in Muller's presentation that visualizes what lucid dreaming on demand (my phrase) might be like
Social media is nothing new. Social commentator and sci-fi author Bruce "global microbrand"* Sterling noted in his talk this afternoon at SXSW that in the early 20th century H.P. Lovecraft, the writer of odd sci-fi and horror, set up an amateur author network of what might now be analogous to a blogger network. In addition to his sci-fi writing, Lovecraft cultivated a network of devoted followers who often relied on him for life advice. Lovecraft was perhaps an influencer of his time.
The difference now, of course, is the massive connectivity enabled by technology. This is a fact that Sterling partially laments for ushering in an era where he's speaking to "the people formerly known as the audience" as 100s of attendees twitter away while he talks. He partially sees it as beneficial as well - by opening channels of communication that can perhaps be credited for the relative political stablility in these environmentally and economically unstable times. From the laughter among audience members at unfunny moments, I wonder
whether they thought he was being serious or just hyperbolic about what
are likely to be near-future challenges such as increased violence,
repeated unstable weather patterns, and shortages of necessities like
shelter. Maybe it was just nervous laughter, I don't know. In any case, I share Sterling's ambivalence about the broken attention span massive connectivity enables, as well as its capacity to draw together the raw materials of human innovation to solve some of the critical challenges the current environment is beginning to generate.
Ambiguities, of course, are resolved in actions, and we have a lot of raw materials to work with. Among Sterling's suggestions are to engage the elderly who are "going to be the backbone of the social web," given their free time and the limited effort it takes to "hit the return button." He also suggested frequent mini-SXSW-style BarCamps potentially generating ideas, local micro payment systems, health festivals to take care of the sick who can no longer afford to care for themselves, young people squatting in abandoned buildings to create a space of their own, energy "barn raisings," and better refugee zones than the local stadium for when environmental disasters hit.
Social media in a world of massive connectivity used to coordinate meaningful action, in the end, might be what knits together broken attention spans. As familiar structures begin to dissemble, I hope many will be motivated to step up instead of dribble away their attention until it's too late (publishing industry, case in point). I'm rooting for us.
*Sterling noted that he used to call himself a journalist and author. That has now been supplanted by his niche celebrity as a "global microbrand" as the publishing industry loses its hold on the distribution channels and patriarchical structure.
More thoughts from SXSW on emerging media and its implications. The next wave of innovation will almost certainly happen as "the internet leaves the internet" said Patrick Moorhead (Razorfish) during the panel on emerging media innovation during a recession. Mobile devices will play a key role in facilitating this innovation according to Ron Gonda & Juan-Carlos Morales (Sapient) and Ryan Stuart (Adobe) in their panel on trends in mobile technology. My takeaway is these trends are likely to dramatically alter where, how, what and to whom we market products and services in the near future - and, most importantly, why we do it.
Moorhead and co-presenter Daniel Polinchock (Brand Experience Lab) highlighted developments in play today that they predict we won't be able to live without tomorrow. Examples include QR codes placed on clothing that allow you to take a picture and, say, get the Facebook profile of the person wearing the code on his t-shirt. (Sounds like "Personal Social Media Presence Curator" might be a good career opportunity in the near future). Life broadcasting in real time. Ordering and paying for items via RFID tags and cell phones. Visual search and the move toward finding items through image recognition (e.g., on Like.com). You can now take a picture of a logo with your iPhone and the company website appears on your screen.
Morales underscored this in the mobile panel noting that we're "merging the digital world with the physical world, with the phone as the portal." Location-aware cellular technology is able to provide an overlay of historical information as we walk through London, for instance, or about our current location as we use the iPhone as a navigation device while driving. Gonda sees promise in sub-audible frequency information streamed along with the audible sound of, say, dialog in a film that can be picked up by mobile phones and provide backstory to what is appearing on the screen. And these are only a few of the innovations to augment our reality in play right now.
If we're moving toward an augmented reality that enables always-on and everywhere deep access to information, companies, people, products, places and services - and facilitates interacting with them - we're heading into territory that creates an unprecedentedly rich interactive marketplace. So much so, it will up-end how we think about marketing products and services, it blurs the line between personal and commercial and challenges the fundamental structure of the established marketplace.
As Polinchock said of traditional retail, "Physical retail experience has to deliver more than price and product." If retailers don't evolve to compete with applications such as Amazon's iPhone app that allows you to enter a brick and mortar, take a picture, price compare and purchase online, they will become "stupidly expensive websites." To survive, physical stores will have to provide some valuable service or experience that can't easily be found online. In Polinchock's view, it's a matter not of creating just brand awareness, but "brand utility."
As marketplace gets truly interactive, creating brand utility will mean more than providing easy access to context-relevant, valuable information and facilitating transactions. When marketing gets truly interactive I believe it hits escape velocity from the realm of linear transactions and practical utility into the realm of co-creating a story. Polinchock hinted at this by saying people are now searching more for meaning - than possessions, presumably. I'd take that a step further and say that what people are really starting to look for is to be part of a story that resonates with them and provides a satisfying experience. To the extent brands can connect with the marketplace on that level, they will successfully evolve.
Update: Added TED video of reality augmentation working prototype from MIT Media Lab:
At South by Southwest Interactive on a wet & chilly Austin day - good time to be inside. Great panel this afternoon on what's coming that might replace the familiar "window, icon, menu, pointing device" user interface (WIMP), as well as how film & sci fi informs tech development - and vice versa.
The panelists Ben Rigby (Mobile Voter), Barrett Fox (COCO Studios) and Jeroen Lapre (distant-galaxy.com) put together a pre-presentation series of blog posts on alternate UIs that are worth checking out. During the presentation they covered several trends in coming design that include the holoprojector (think Princess Leah), holotouch (using 3D space for information visualization), immersive environments like the holodeck, and developing gesture languages that control the UI through direct manipulation.
The change from a "paper & desk" UI metaphor to ones that take fuller advantage of 3D space is more than just a design change. It transforms our relationship to information in a way that begins to erase the experience of being separate from technology - and for that matter begins to animate previously-perceived-as-static objects as well.
One of the panelists suggested that using visual interfaces to directly manipulate information may create more left-brain/right-brain parity, thereby allowing us to develop more of our brainpower. Tim O'Reilly made a complementary suggestion in his Radar post yesterday about Twitter and the social nervous system. During MIT's Media Lab demonstration at TED on wearable tech and developing the sixth sense Pattie Maes makes a similar point. All interesting developments to watch.
