Where the wild things go

I have been following technology as a self proclaimed “geek” for most of my life. My dreams have been filled with anticipation of new cell phones, better video games, and faster processors. In almost a continuous cycle there is literally something exciting coming out every week. These products are mostly computers but this constant wave of innovations also includes mechanical devices such as the magic bullet, ab rocket (warning: turn your volume down), and the sham wow (warning: turn your volume down). This constant barrage of technological advancement is great for marketers and consumers like myself but I’m now starting to question its relevance to all of humanity. This does not mean I want it to stop but every now and then it helps to step back and put things in perspective.

I will begin with Jim Gemmell’s MyLifeBits project. Let me start by saying I think this project is cool. I would use this product. This is a piece of technology that has the capability of recording everything! It takes pictures, tracks where you’re going, and stores it all in a conveniently searchable database. This is good for geeks and great for those with memory problems. Though a key feature has been omitted of our integrated personal databases (brains). This is the ability to automatically delete and modify entries. Clive Thompson in an interview with NPR mentioned this,

Any psychologist would tell you that forgetting is an incredibly important part of how we make sense of ourselves and of our lives. And being able to reexperience directly everything might be sort of nightmarish.

MyLifeBits, Magic Bullet, Ab Rocket, and Sham wow are all products that appear useful. We have to ask ourselves though just because we can, should we? It might be easy to filter things out like the Sham wow and Ab Rocket, less so with the Magic Bullet, and the most difficult with MyLifeBits.
The very essence of Gemmell’s database breaks this innate rule in our own databases. Thompson continues,

And the very few times that psychologists have encountered people with absolutely perfect recall – and it has been found, it’s very rare; it’s sort of a mental condition where people literally can, if you ask them, two years ago on this date, what did you do, they’ll be able to tell you – these people do not have remarkable lives in any way. You would think that they’re smarter or that they did better at college, and they’re not. And they don’t necessarily have a better emotional experience of their lives.

It is an assumption that it would be beneficial to remember everything although experts might disagree.

So it seems as evidenced by MyLifeBits that achieving 100% memory recall and storage are amazing feats though not completely compatible with our own psychological well being. It also seems that achieving anything that is assumed impossible with technology is becoming more of a reality. Moore’s law states that the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit can double approximately every two years. This is an amazing thing but what’s troubling is that this speed is also two times faster than we as humans are willing to except. Howard Reingold author of the Shibunya Epiphany found that there are more cell phones in Stockholm than anywhere in the world. How can this be explained if cell phones are so culturally important? Further, why do we as a country have the second largest stockpile of nuclear arms in the world yet we are also adamant about disarming other countries who seek the same capabilities. We are all very aware of the destructive capacity of nuclear weapons and I would not oppose the disarming but I also wouldn’t have opposed banning their creation. Of course on the other hand it helped end World War 2.

So technology which is the very fabric of our species dominance of the world is obviously not going away nor should it. Its advancement is also increasing at an incredible speed. It seems that the impossible if it isn’t already won’t be impossible for much longer. So just as the usefulness of a technology capable of eradicating most of the inhabitants of Earth merits much conversation I believe other technologies should be given at least a percentage of the scrutiny. Technology advances faster than we are able to justify its use. We currently dismiss technologies where use is not immediately apparent or adopt technologies with little thought. Technology is not going away. Technology is not slowing down. We as humans hold the key to its adoption and use. This thought process needs to flow through everyone’s life. Not just geeks like me but all citizens up to our leaders too. Technology will be there for us to make life easier and help us adapt to our environments but we still have to think. We still have to use our brains.

Image Credits

Stock illustration: The Band Concert
Stock illustration: Listening to Music
Stock illustration: 3DMoney
Stock illustration: Hand idea
Stock Photo: Female Singer
Stock illustration: Music Band 1
Stock photo: Screamin
Stock photo: File Overload
Stock photo: bizzare love
Copyleft logo
Concrete grunge background
Viper Nora Grunge Font

Websites Referenced

Urban Dictionary definition for: Collabo
Collaboration
Music
RIAA
RIAA vs The People

Music

On the Water
Trudge

Videos

Cobus – Blink-182 – Feeling This 2009 (Drum Cover)
Blink 182 Feeling This Bass Cover
Blink 182 “Feeling This” Cover
Blink-182 – Feeling This

Original Works and Supporting Links

User Created Content
Open Source Sawngs
Virtual Dust

Inspired by the CNBC special, “Big Brother” I played around with Google to try to see if I could uncover any juicy information. I must have been a little bored at the time because I turned the experience into a short YouTube video. In the end I didn’t find anything too exciting. Well at least not to me. The more I think about it though I realize it was terribly easy to uncover the data I found. How much more time and experience does one need before something substantial turns up? I know if I had stumbled over anything with my name on it I’d be a little nervous. To top it all off I was able to do it with no monetary outlay. Assuming I’m able to, do I try to contact the information owner? If it was my information out there I wouldn’t mind if someone contacted me at least to make sure I was aware of it.

I also found this Google search string, inurl:”ViewerFrame?Mode=” which is able to locate a certain model of security camera which uses a web interface. If it is not programmed correctly it is able to viewed over the Internet with no authentication. Some of them are left open intentionally but for the ones that are not once again is it appropriate to try to notify the owners? I was thinking maybe this one maybe shouldn’t be out in the open. In fact a few years ago I uncovered a security camera from a retail shop that was right down the road from me. I was able to see the employees come and go which could be valuable to someone who had criminal intentions. That time I informed the owners in person and was asked why I was snooping around. I figured they would be gracious but it turned out they were more aggravated.

What is alarming to me is there is very little to guard unsuspecting users from their information seeping out into the public domain. Of course users are aware that their information can be stolen but even if their information is not stolen it still may be made available. Also, like Julia Hernandez experienced in “Big Brother” your information could be mixed up with another user with a similar name. In Julia’s case it cost her a potential job. That employer claimed she could have disputed the report but what if the employer didn’t make it known what they found in the report? They could have gone with another candidate without her knowledge and she would still have that blemish on her record.

To add to the problems regarding the use of this assumed private information is the ethics of it’s use. It’s not that ethical decisions can’t be made but the subject has such a large grey area. Immanuel Kant cited in the book, “A Gift of Fire: Social, Legal, and Ethical Issues for Computers and the Internet” had a very black and white view of ethics. Kant believed in absolutism a belief system which provides no flexibility when it comes to rules such as lying. In a society where the ability to track the behavior of a large population is very realistic a belief system like this would just not work .

As a citizen with online and offline behavior being tracked, recorded, and scrutinized one begins to wonder what will be considered appropriate in the future.  Will there be any room for mistakes? The movie Demolition Man could be more of a reality.

Also what affect would this have on innovation? It’s getting to the point if it hasn’t gotten there already where exposure to the Internet is necessary in this country. If this is true it appears you won’t stand much of a chance in keeping your data private. As evidenced in Big Brother simply searching Google can leave breadcrumbs of your existence that have an infinite life span. So unless you actually plan on living under a rock it looks like you’ll have to give up a little of your privacy. Of course if both law enforcement and employers choose to use this information against you living under a rock becomes a realistic decision but of course you would probably have to use Google to learn how to survive.  It might sound silly unless you were one of the thousands of music fans that have been sued by the RIAA. In the TED lecture How creativity is being strangled by the law Larry Lessig makes an argument for the loosening of restrictions on the way content is used. This is a viewpoint which would promote a citizens to come out from under their rocks. I haven’t seen much movement in legitimizing this thinking although it doesn’t seem like user created content is slowing down at all.

So where is all this going? I’m not sure. I know for myself the current environment would shape the landscape of my project should it ever come to fruition. I would be asking users of my site to lower their guard and expose themselves to the public domain. For not only users who contribute music but also those who listen to the music. I don’t see that as much of a problem for my generation as this has become socially exceptable behavior. We want to share and we want to innovate simply for the love of what we’re doing. I want to see those barriers that Lessig describes brought down and I believe my site provides a good medium to accomplish this. Unfortunately it would probably mean less profits and I see this being a serious issue for the record companies. It seems that we need to reach some kind of agreement but I’m unsure how or when these conversations would take place. As long as the current passive aggressive behavior is taking place it seems we’ll keep walking in opposite directions.

Prior to this week I had thought a great deal about how users would interact with my site. I pictured guitar players meeting up with drummers, singers, and songwriters and creating master pieces. I then pictured the finished music flowing through the many social networks, ipods, and eventually into arenas. What I hadn’t thought about was the users themselves. What about musicians that don’t want to share their music? What about listeners that still want to listen to classic rock? These users are well served without my website.

I need to look at  what characteristics of my site will be able to connect both listeners and musicians beyond music alone. There has to be a “coolness” element. I was looking at Twitter today and realized that there isn’t much to it. It’s basically a simple text message to the world. The catch obviously is everyone can read them and every Tweet you make offers the possibility of becoming more popular than you were the day before.

For my project to be successful I have to stroke the ego of my users. I have to give them the opportunity and hope of being a star. These talents are out there right now. I have found a few of them on YouTube. They are recreating existing popular music and film and posting them for the world to see.

Take these for example:

Brandon Hardesty – “Covers” movies with his own acting. I also added a clip showing how well his acting actually fits in with the movie. The Brandon Hardesty videos are NOT WORK SAFE!

NOT WORK SAFE

Cobus – The drum cover – He goes by the name deedlebag. He plays his drums over the original tracks with skill. He also adds exceptional production quality with multiple camera angles and excellent sound quality.

The theory here is that these two YouTube stars are both talented individuals. They have chosen to spread their talent to the world through YouTube and have received quite the reception. I want to drill down on the music niche. I want to give the musicians like Cobus the opportunity to be stars and meet up with other talented musicians and be able to create some original music. He already has a following and so I want to create an avenue for his fans and fans of any genre and opportunity to follow and share their experiences.

I can relate to Ryan’s frustration with acronyms. Unfortunately they are used everywhere. Here’s one of the cooler ones. TASER

This week’s module focused heavily on the user as applied to interactive design. Referenced in The Inmates are Running the Asylum, Alan Cooper complains about the short comings of his fancy alarm clock which also plays CDs. He has a tough time programming the most important feature, the alarm!

It’s very hard to tell when the alarm is armed, so it occasionally fails to wake me up on a Monday and rousts me out of bed early on a Saturday.

You would assume that a self proclaimed gizmologist like Alan would avoid a product like this based on the findings and criticisms found in his book. Never the less this advanced machine won him over the generic non-computerized model with simple features and a simple yet effective alarm feature.  To him having quality sound, a subtle but difficult to set alarm clock, and CD functionality were more important than waking up on time.

In contrast to this situation take an ATM for example. It’s users expect to insert their card, enter a pin, and extract money. This is the basic functionality. If an ATM gives less than the amount of money requested a huge problem is created. No added features including Twitter integration, being able to upload photos, an MP3 player, or stereo sound could fix the shortcomings of an ATM that gave out less money than requested.

In the first instance a major feature of the alarm clock is difficult to program giving up all guarantees of waking up at the intended hour. This is forgiven by Cooper since the clock makes up for the lack of consistent alarming with its other charming features. The ATM on the other hand becomes useless even though it also boasts many charming features.

My question is then why is it acceptable to omit key functionality in some products while it’s unacceptable in others?

Don Norman argues in his talk on Emotional Design that these decisions are primarily innate. Norman describes three sections of the brain as they are related to design. The visceral level relates to attractiveness, the behavioral layer relates to functionality and usability, and the reflective layer relates to self image. Obviously ATM users are more concerned with the functionality of the ATM than with its attractiveness.

If you take the same features of our souped up ATM and implement them into a cell phone once again you have a product who’s key feature, the phone, is not the most important thing to be functional. Even my own phone will drop several calls whether I lose signal or perhaps hit a wrong button. Both, Cooper and myself have forgiven our gadgets as they have captured us in different ways perhaps at the reflective or visceral level.

Where does this line get drawn though? At what point does useful become useless? When does useless become OK simply because something is beautiful or makes us feel important?

If I’m a user the answer seems simple to me. If I’m a designer or developer the answer also seems simple to me. When the product is actually created it seems the answer actually wasn’t that simple. How did it become OK for phones to drop calls yet we would not forgive an ATM that refused to give us money?

My thinking on this subject shifted several times this week while going through the readings and lecture. On the one hand I started to feel annoyed as Alan Cooper ripped apart the gadgets that rule our life criticizing the interactive designs of such things as remote key-less entry systems and the microwave. On the other hand he’s simply right. Why does my car key have a panic button? How many people really pay attention to car alarms anyway?

Despite the added complexity and learning curve to simple tasks I’m willing to sacrifice ease of use for the gained free time and energy in my day. I can steam broccoli in a bag in the microwave in under two minutes. I can also steam broccoli in a pot on the stove top in under two minutes. The catch is it takes another five or so minutes to boil the water, get my steamer prepared, chop the broccoli, and add it to the steamer. Both methods give you the same result. Method A (microwave) gets me there in half the time. Call me lazy? Go ahead. It really doesn’t bother me. I don’t simply take the gained time in my day and throw it in the trash. Those precious minutes start to build up and can be used for more productive means.

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So here I have a new problem. I don’t have a textbook or a notebook for this class. Everything I do in 501dc is facilitated by some digital means. The readings, lectures, grades, and assignments are delivered via the Internet and are consumed for the most part through my laptop and cell phone. A major straggler in my remote learning process is paper. That damn paper gets me every time! In just a little over a month I have compiled a stack of heavily highlighted, annotated, and tabbed booklets consisting of the printed readings for each module. These serve a useful purpose initially as I am able to look back at a small number of readings and reference them when typing my responses. Unfortunately these things start to teleport to locations unknown, fall apart, and get clustered in an ever growing pile of crap. If I ever wanted to refer back to any of this stuff I’d have to spend a few hours rummaging through the past weeks readings to find the one thing I’m looking for.

So what a perfect week to explore a tool to make my my first life integrate a little better with my Second Life. Of course as I said before this is a trade off. I now have to learn how to use a new piece of software and put up with it’s shortcomings. It’s going to take some time to learn how to integrate it into my online learning process. Most annoying to me is I’ll have yet another toolbar taking up screen real estate on my Firefox browser (F11). It also still has some bugs. It has caused my browser to crash several times. I have deleted some notes by accident with no apparent way to get them back. The bottom line is I’m going to have to pay with a little more time upfront but it will pay off in time. On the upside all my annotations are currently searchable, shareable, and linked to their original documents (basically what I am looking for). Maybe it won’t be WebNotes.net but it will be “something” that allows me to do what I want in the realm of digitally annotating documents. The idea is already there it will just take some time to refine it. After all, Microsoft didn’t disappear after Windows ME or Vista. They came back bigger and badder than ever with XP and 7. Each iteration builds upon the feedback from the last. How many times have you burned popcorn because five minutes on your old microwave equaled the power of two on the new one. Now most microwaves have a button that simply says “popcorn” taking the guess work out of it.

Cooper is right that the interactive design of these products is bad but I rather have bad with the promise of improvement than not existing at all. Also, with a growing list of interactive communication specialists on the way these growing pains we are experiencing with new technology will hopefully start to diminish.

I’m drawing most of the inspiration for this project from the project above. The basic premise  is bringing together spatially dispersed members of the music community to create music. This could be listeners, guitar players, drummers, producers, vocalists, rappers, DJs, or any party involved in the music creation process. The input for music can come  from anywhere or it come from within. The final product then becomes available for distribution.

Competitive Landscape

Currently “open source” anything is not a new thing. I’m not sure if the open aspect is what’s appreciated or simply the free. This project will begin without a business model so I’m temporarily avoiding the aspects of cost. What will make this site survive are the users. If users fail to find value in the site then they will simply move elsewhere. Without a community of users this site simply doesn’t exist. So the site is essentially dealing with time. What will make users give up time from other websites and come here. The sites listed below contain the components of mass community that I want to draw from. I am basically competing will all of them for peoples time.

www.youtube.com – for community driven content

www.facebook.com – for sharing personal interests and content

www.pandora.com – for enjoyment of music

www.nin.com/ – involves many community elements and also distributes music under the creative commons licensing. These are the users I want. I also want Nine Inch Nails the band. I want Nine Inch Nails to be able to work with artists they may or may not have interacted with before. I want them to show that this site can be legitimate. It can bridge the gap between old music and new music.

www.livenation.com/ – Brings artists together to perform live.  My site would facilitate most of the promotional work and tickets to live shows could be linked through the artists personal pages.

Layout

Without going into much detail the sites listed below project a certain level of professionalism and trust. They also project many Web 2.0 elements and without stating such make me feel like I’ve come to the right place.

http://freelanceswitch.com/ – I’ve always been drawn to this layout.

http://www.mint.com/ – A very clean layout. Good use of contrast and color.

I want users to feel safe. I want them to feel like they can share and enjoy musical content without backlash.

I also want to redefine where music comes from just as your news doesn’t necessarily come from the TV anymore. As a listener we see mostly the finished product whether from legitimate or non legitimate means. If that’s all users want that’s fine but I want to legitimize this site as a channel for music distribution. I believe using musicians with an established fan base such as Nine Inch Nails can help facilitate this.

I also want artists to feel the same comfort. This would mean leaving traditional record companies behind and producing music in a new more open environment.