X
… any attempts to present ideas to the public all take on commercial overtones. If they are not directly sponsored, their presentation mirrors forms familiar as advertising. Branding leaves no interstitial space in the culture for alternative conceptions of public communication, for non-commercial expressions of social meanings. All such attempts are quickly assimilated to the mode of branding. Habits become lifestyles, which become reified into branded products. We conceive of ourselves as brands, we brand our work, we present ourselves in quasi-logo form on internet social networks, while twittering slogans for ourselves throughout the day. With more and more of our social existence taking place in a fully quantifiable space online, all forms of social recognition are collapsed into the metrics appropriate to monitoring business. This undermines the possibility of integrity, which may perhaps be defined precisely as that which can’t be measured but only practiced.
— Advertising as creative destruction by Rob Horning
*sigh* It’s all a bit shit, really.
What Media Is (For)
Chroma reminds us of a classic Umair quote:
In an interconnected world, media is everywhere: it’s the stuff that plugs consumption and production together. The opportunities for value creation are greater than ever before - but we must expand our vision of what media is to begin realizing them.
To my mind, media is: Bandwidth, Processing, and Storage. Or if you like higher-level labels: Communication, Context, and Content. I’ll try to explain how that model works soon. But safe to say, it’s all boring unless you know what you want to use it for.
Chroma also has a neat summary of the Content vs Context debate btw.
Links 2008-08-18
-
"Human beings both want to — and, in a deeper way, need to — feel a sense of being autonomous. When someone else begins to seduce you into behaving with an offer of a reward, it takes away your sense of being autonomous. Now you are doing it for someone else. External rewards and punishments are counterproductive when it comes to activities that are meaningful — tasks that telegraph something about a person's intellectual abilities, generosity, courage or values. People will voluntarily perform intellectually arduous work, for example, because it gives them pleasure to solve a puzzle or win a game of wits. It is easy to offer a reward, but it is not easy to help people find their own motivation." — Numbers numb.
-
Adam Curtis: "Machines like Google know something about us as human beings that we really don't want to know - that we are not individuals: 'If you like this then you will like that…'. So Google is a paradox. It gives us the feeling we are wild and free individuals, powerfully reinforcing an idea of us as heroic figures in the consumer age. Yet at the same time it is powerfully proving the opposite - that we are completely predictable."
-
"The are relatively few games that have exploited Bluetooth in this way but one such is You Who from Age0+ which provides a simple game premise to help initiate a meeting. After scanning for other users running the application and ‘inviting ‘ a person to play the game, the first player acts as a ‘mystery person’, who then provides clues about their appearance to the second player, who builds up a picture on their mobile phone screen. After a set number of clues have been given, the players’ phones alert, revealing both players’ locations and identities. Obviously, the game play is quite limited and effectively non-competitive, which is unlikely to result in repeated game play, therefore, it is closer to the Nokia Sensor than a game." — Not all games have to be objectively competitive.
-
Iain's, err, YouTube demo… umm… just click the link above.
-
Geo-tagged photos near you on your iPhone via Flickr.
-
Nice.
-
“Weight Watchers is an RPG. Think about it. As with an RPG, you roll a virtual character, manage your inventory and resources, and try to achieve a goal. Weight Watchers' points function precisely like hit points; each bite of food does damage until you've used up your daily amount, so you sleep and start all over again. Play well and you level up — by losing weight! And the more you play it, the more you discover interesting combinations of the rules that aren't apparent at first."
-
"A global map of all the debates that enables us to visualise and deepen our understanding of the ways in which different debates are semantically interrelated, and ways in which these interrelated debates shape, and are shaped by, each other."
-
Manifesto: "Create services, and products as artefacts of services."
-
"It is easy to have a knee-jerk cynical reaction to this and accuse Mother and Eurostar of sneaky advertising tricks. And ultimately a good film has been made, which has already garnered awards and rave reviews."
-
STOP!
-
"3D video visualization system improves assessment and response in security and video surveillance for military and high value installations. Simply fly over buildings, sites, and cities and automatically manage cameras to observe activities."
-
'I heard this beautiful bit of advice once that said, “If you’ve got a list of 20 things you should be doing, pick the most important one or two and then just let go of the rest. You will never upload your music to every one of these sites. You will never contact every person. You will never enter every contest. Just take the one or two things that would make the biggest difference in your career, do those one or two, then stop. Turn your attention to the next one or two most important.”'
-
DO NOT WANT. DO NOT WANT!
-
Too much fun!
Search Is Other People
The millions of searches that engines like Google record and store reveal the shifting desires and fears of individuals. They’re leading to a new fragmented sensibility among millions of people in the way they see and experience the world. Machines like Google know something about us as human beings that we really don’t want to know - that we are not individuals: ‘If you like this then you will like that…’. So Google is a paradox. It gives us the feeling we are wild and free individuals, powerfully reinforcing an idea of us as heroic figures in the consumer age. Yet at the same time it is powerfully proving the opposite - that we are completely predictable. Out of that is going to come some very interesting political ideas of how to organise society and also new artistic ideas. The really interesting question is whether it is really a cult.
— Adam Curtis on Pros and cons of a Google world
Via: Charles Frith
Links 2008-08-17
-
'Reality mining can also spot when a group is in a groove. Sandy Pentland, the MIT professor who heads up the lab where Waber works, has discovered that highly creative teams socialize in a "pulsing star" pattern: They fan out to gather information, then regroup. "People explore during the day," Pentland says, "and then later get very tight and inbred, with everybody talking to everybody."'
-
"Chi.mp is building a flexible, permanent home for your online identity on your own domain. You own and are in control of the facets of your digital life, not any one service provider. One place for your profile, your contacts & content, where you have control over who gets to see what."
-
"Interactive fiction, often abbreviated IF, describes software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narratives and as computer games."
-
"Zoom is a player for Z-Code, TADS and HUGO stories or games."
-
"Feelies have been a long-standing tradition in the days of text adventures, but sadly, there haven't been many games with toys and trinkets to impress your friends with in the years since Infocom's decline. But that's about to change!"
- Explore the tags for each link in delicious.
Links 2008-08-14
-
"We must stop dressing, drugging and humanizing our pets. It’s bad enough we encage animals in our homes, try to discipline them to behave exactly how we wish and either abuse or abandon them if they don’t comply."
-
"But just because television is dying as a commercial enterprise doesn’t mean it has to die as an art form. For producers looking to energize dramas and sitcoms, here’s one solution: set more shows in the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s and ’80s — eras when TV wasn’t dying."
-
"… neurotic parents don't need any more false scares to piss their pants over. They're already raising their twatty little offspring like mollycoddled prisoners: banned from playing outdoors in case a paedophile ring burrows through the pavement and eats them, locked indoors with nothing but anti-bacterial plasma screens for company, ferried to and from school in spluttering rollcaged tanks. . . Christ, half these kids would view choking to death as a release."
-
'Someone cleverer than me once described this condition as having an "Alfred Hitchcock mind". I prefer to think of it as being perpetually stuck in the opening moments of an episode of Casualty, where every stepladder, plug socket, and loose-lidded food processor is a grinning, lurking deathtrap.'
-
"Terror outrage: BRITNEY, ANGELINA and OBAMA all unaffected as hundreds die in SEXY agony"?
-
"Google Insights points out websites only used by Silicon Valley nerds"
-
Comment: jow: 'The bot wasn't "defeated". Infact Merc released a new version of Glider today to get round the new detection methods implemented in the patch that came out this wednesday.' — Real Bots don't die, they just multiply.
-
"NEC Corp has developed a digital signage system that determines the gender, generation and other attributes of a person standing in front of a display using a face recognition technology and outputs advertisements on the display according to them." — My face is my passport. Please verify me.
-
"BioWallet is a biometric authentication system currently supporting iris based authentication." — And then the kids just knife out your eyes.
-
Mobile = Shopping. OK. We get it.
-
Samsung's ode to The Prodigy's 'Smack My Bitch Up' video using YouTube's new annotations feature to create an interactive drama. Shame the related videos give you advance preview of all the likely outcomes. Doh!
-
"DreamAuthentics is the worldwide leader in custom video arcade gaming and edutainment systems. DreamAuthentics is the ultimate platform for personal happiness, corporate fun and family togetherness."
-
"The hope was that footage like this would appeal to customers who need to visually convey a mood of modern disconnectedness. Leaving aside the bleak and omnipresent nature of the subject matter… I was startled to realize that stock photo and video purveyors actually *create* material in anticipation of demand." — 2nd or 3rd order simulacra?
- Explore the tags for each link in delicious.
Links 2008-08-13
-
"Performativity in discourse produces action. Performativity in video games couple gameplay to real-world action. Performative gameplay describes mechanics that change the state of the world through play actions themselves, rather than by inspiring possible future actions through coersion or reflection." — Great examples: The Grocery Game and Bankquest
-
Sulka Haro: "I guess I really don't look so much at the definition of "game" as much as I look at the definition of "play." If you look at Habbo, nobody can say that people aren't playing in there. People really do play in all of these environments, so I would use that as the unifying metaphor for discussing the different environments and products you can use to play. It's more clear."
-
"Once core fun is identified and refined, building a great game is actually pretty straightforward… The Stardoll team knows that their core fun is dressing a paper doll. Apparel is dragged off hangers and onto the paper doll. It can be placed anywhere on the screen, and that simple mechanic yields a good deal of fun… As soon as fashions hit the runway or the retail shelf, they are available in Stardoll… All of this makes Stardoll one of the most powerful branding and lead generation tools thats ever been available to the fashion industry."
-
"Creating a copy of online behavior and programming an avatar to respond to stimuli in the way the user has been during their digital life…. A digital representation of life could continue unhindered in a virtual environment, after real-life has ended. Maybe Google with its seemingly endless storage capacity will one-day also host our virtual afterlife."
-
'Children talk about an “animal kind of alive” and a “Furby kind of alive.” Will they also talk about a “people kind of love” and a “computer kind of love”? The new objects … play … on what they evoke in us: when we are asked to care for an object, when this cared-for object thrives and offers us its attention and concern, we experience it as intelligent, but more important, we feel a connection to it. The old AI debates were about the technical abilities of machines. The new ones will be about the emotional vulnerabilities of people.'
-
Sherry Turkle: "When technology brings us to the point where we're used to sharing our thoughts and feelings instantaneously, it can lead to a new dependence, sometimes to the extent that we need others in order to feel our feelings in the first place."
-
"I end Life on the Screen by calling into question the notion that we are at the end of the Freudian century. For me this challenge is deeply felt. Some say we are moving from a psychoanalytic culture to a computer culture, but the reality is more complex. The people who do best in this brave new world, the people who make the most of their lives on the screen, of having multiple identities on the Internet, are the ones who approach technology in a spirit of profound self-reflection."
-
"*I will never be the first to solve a puzzle. COROLLARY-I will only find out about puzzles after they have already been solved. COROLLARY-My name will never appear in the Trail, Guide, or any other game-related website. COROLLARY-If I do actually solve a puzzle, the solution will have been posted by somebody else minutes before."
- Explore the tags for each link in delicious.
Links 2008-08-12
-
Join this group please.
-
"Our idea is that Coca Cola could use their distribution channels (which are amazing in developing countries) to distribute rehydration salts to the people that need them desperately. Maybe by dedicating one compartment in every 10 crates as 'the life saving' compartment?" — Brilliant! What is Coca-Cola good for? Distribution. — So, Coke. You gonna make a *real* happiness factory?
-
42 Entertainment’s 5 ARG Tenants: '#3. The 18-35 demo has grown up in a marketing-saturated environment and has developed a sophisticated set of tools for avoiding the vast majority of marketing messages. As a rule of thumb, the bigger the neon sign the faster they’ll run the other way. So the premise here was, instead of shouting, go the opposite way and whisper—hide it. Finding it becomes an act of discovery—something they can feel proud of and are willing to talk about with their friends. It shifts entertainment presentation from exhibitionist to voyeuristic. #4. In doing so we turned those other media elements from “must be avoided” into “must be dissected.” For a very small amount of additional media dollars, it turns your large investment into something people will seek out.'
-
"01. There is a double spooking the world, the double of abstraction."
-
'“I started asking people if they wanted to move out of their care homes and live with me and I’ve had dozens of offers. They are queuing up.” She hopes the book’s royalties will pay enough so her friends do not have to move into nursing homes, something she dreads. She said: “It’s pathetic. It seems to me that in those places people just spend their time alone in one room and people come in and give them food."' :(
- Explore the tags for each link in delicious.
Links 2008-08-11
-
"The scariest thing about Stanley Kubrick's vision wasn't that computers started to act like people but that people had started to act like computers. We're beginning to process information as if we're nodes; it's all about the speed of locating and reading data. We're transferring our intelligence into the machine, and the machine is transferring its way of thinking into us."
-
Quoting a liked article: "what drives modern marriage? We believe that the answer lies in a shift from the family as a forum for shared production, to shared consumption … the key today is consumption complementarities - activities that are not only enjoyable, but are more enjoyable when shared with a spouse. We call this new model of sharing our lives 'hedonic marriage.' … As consumption increases, so too will the demand to have someone with whom to share these pleasures."'
-
"For Google, literally everything that happens on the Internet is a complement to its main business. The more things that people and companies do online, the more ads they see and the more money Google makes. Because the sales of complementary products rise in tandem, a company has a strong strategic interest in reducing the cost and expanding the availability of the complements to its core product. It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that a company would like all complements to be given away. To borrow a well-worn phrase, Google wants information to be free — and that is why Google strikes fear into so many different kinds of companies."
-
"Data has this really weird quality. In economic terms data has an increasing marginal utility. Anyone who took Econ 101 knows that most physical objects have a decreasing marginal utility. Data has the opposite characteristic. Each incremental point of data adds value to the ones you all ready have. Google’s services all benefit from additional data albeit in different ways. Google could potentially provide a better value proposition to the end user with an inferior algorithm powered by more data, sourced from a broader range of services." Comment: Greg: "total utility increases… marginal utility decreases."
-
"All this sort-of Web 2.0 stuff is nice, but you have to type stuff in. Things are never up to date, and unless you consciously know about something, you can't put it in. Reality mining is all about paying attention to patterns in life and using that information to help you do things like set privacy policies, share things with people, notify people when you're near them, and just to help you live your life." — !!! Everyware must default to plausible deniability.
-
"Here's how the partnership works. Apple is taking responsibility for "the user interface and people." It's designing the devices themselves, which will be typically elegant machines that run versions of OS X. While Apple puts together the front end of the integrated network-computing system, Google provides "the perfect back end" - the supercomputer that provides the bulk of the data-processing might and storage capacity for the devices." — Cloudbook.
-
"A research team has developed a BCI system that lets the user walk an avatar through the streets of Second Life while relying solely on the power of thought. The system consists of a headpiece equipped with electrodes that monitor activity in three areas of the motor cortex (the region of the brain involved in controlling the movement of the arms and legs). An EEG machine reads and graphs the data and relays it to the BCI, where a brain wave analysis algorithm interprets the user’s imagined movements. A keyboard emulator then converts this data into a signal and relays it to Second Life, causing the on-screen avatar to move. In this way, the user can exercise real-time control over the avatar in the 3D virtual world without moving a muscle."
-
"#11. People in networked markets have figured out that they get far better information and support from one another than from vendors. So much for the corporate rhetoric about adding value to commoditized products."
-
"The macro crisis is the reflection of a global financial system that wasn't built to last. It's riddled with moral hazard and adverse selection because incentives are myopic, information is poor, ethics are totally absent, valuation is a black art, models are divorced from reality - and that's just the tip of the iceberg." — Comment: Ray "add 'shallow innovation' to the list too"
-
Can Etsy organise the world's production?
- Explore the tags for each link in delicious.
One Verb Equity
This is a bit long tail now, but Faris recently reminded me of it…
What if Maurice Saatchi’s One Word Equity was simply misunderstood?
What if what he was really getting at was that brands must strive to become the verbs of life [1]:
- “I’ll Google for it.”
- “I’ll FedEx it over.”
- Erm…
By way of a one word hack, that would put the spirit of the idea much closer to the doing philosophy of the experience is the product.
You reckon?
*UPDATE*
I am very wrong! Check Faris’ comment below.
References:
[1] Zero Influencer - Doing Business As (A Mercenary)
Seth Godin - Nouns and verbs
Noah Brier - BrandTags Project
Faris Yakob - Brands: Socially Constructed Reality
John Grant - One word planning and the death sentence
Maurice Saatchi - The strange death of modern advertising
–
Image courtesy of sonek321
