Spatial dissonance

3D TVs have barely hit the shelves, and there are already claims that they will result in brain damage. Whether that turns out to be true or not, I don’t think 2D screens have done us any favours either.

I had a fairly typical day at the office today, doing the usual stuff, and trying to crack a new idea that’s been brewing in my head for the last week or so. By the late afternoon though, I started to get really bored and distracted, and found it hard to concentrate on work. Tried flicking open some Facebook and forums, but those weren’t doing it for me either. Nothing unusual, right? Happens to everybody.

Knock-off time. As I started walking to my car, the ideas started flooding into my brain, and I thought to myself “why does this always happen?” Maybe it’s happened to you too: your best ideas have come to you while driving, in the shower, walking the dog… but never behind your desk. My take on this is that we’re spatial beings who live in a three-dimensional world. Our brains and bodies work best in 3D space, and it takes a surprising amount of effort to confine it to a flat surface. Therefore when I finally made a break from my work (and not just a temporary respite) my mind was freed from its boxy jail.

I dub this condition spatial dissonance – the encroachment of the flat virtual world into the real world. The problem is, my career and hobbies are all currently critically dependent on interfacing with a screen, and while I can quite easily take up new hobbies that don’t involve monitors or TVs, I’m at much less liberty to make similar changes at work.

I guess that’s why found this TED talk video so interesting. In it, John Underkoffler makes the point that User Interface design has lagged significantly behind increases in speed and capacity, and gives a live demonstration of a real-world implementation of the spatial interface technology that he helped to design for the movie Minority Report.

I can’t wait.

—

Here’s the video:

Is paying for news bad news?

You’ve most likely read or heard about the various news agencies starting to erect “pay walls” around their Web sites – that is, instead of being able to view the content for free, you’ll have to pay or subscribe before you can access it. The problem is that content has traditionally been delivered via a physical medium, i.e. paper, which consumers have been happy to pay to receive. As physical beings we implicitly understand when we get a wad of printed material, that it includes the total cost of its production, manufacture and delivery. Online however, the lines are blurred. We already pay for the distribution medium, i.e. internet access, so if the publisher is charging separately for the content and we get nothing more than information (which in the case of news is so fleeting and transient), we feel as if we’re being ripped off.

The Internet has devalued information. Take the Encyclopaedia Britannica for instance – once the epitome of human knowledge, now relegated to bit-player by the likes of Wikipedia. Here’s the interesting thing about Wikipedia: it is nothing more than a repository of information sourced from brains like yours and mine, written down (or typed out, as it were). Everybody knows something. It might be common knowledge such as “the sky is blue” or it might be highly specialised knowledge, but if it’s in your head it costs you nothing to access. Taking this idea further, maybe your mum works for Centrelink (hi mum!), you have a friend who is a doctor, or you attend church and know the pastor. Therefore when you have a question about government benefits, health, or religious views, you can simply ask those people and again, it costs you nothing to get that information (other than maybe time, both yours and theirs). Now imagine that you’re friends with the whole world – and you’ve got Wikipedia.

But back to news. News is one of those things where timing is everything. Also, you don’t just want to hear one side of the story – in order to make up your own mind you need to get a balanced view of the topic. Hence – and this is just a partially formed opinion – the value that Journalism adds to the ecology described above, and the areas that it should focus on, are announcing and aggregating.

• If a happening is of interest, and pertinent to you and your social circle, you’ll eventually hear about it through the grapevine. An announcement means not only that you know about it as soon as possible, but that it is as close to first-hand as possible so that it doesn’t suffer from the Chinese Whispers effect.
• For complex issues, particularly in the area of politics, people will inevitably take sides and therefore be biased. Journalism, therefore, is a unique profession in that its workers are paid to thoroughly investigate both sides of an issue and report on it in a fair and unbiased manner. (Whether that happens in reality and how successful they are is a whole other kettle of fish.)

If media outlets were successful in delivering that, I’d be happy to pay for it. Sadly most news sources today are soundly beaten by a bunch of nerds on the Internet with blogs funded through advertising. Many of these are even quite reputable now, like Ars Technica – one of my regular haunts – which was bought by Condé Nast Publications a couple of years ago.

There’s talk of a resurgence of pay-for news as publishers look to the Apple iPad as their saviour, stitching up content deals and offering new interactive media experiences. But it’s foolish hope, since any amateur with a bit of design skill can offer a compelling interface – just look at the plethora of rags-to-riches stories brought on by the iPhone. If there’s any hope of salvation for the news industry, it’s going come from providing something greater than simply communicating information, which the Internet is already helping more and more people to do each day.

Goog or bad?

Nobody likes advertising. Don’t get me wrong, some ads are very artistically creative, and others are entertaining. But as a whole, we find advertising intrusive – that’s its nature: to inform you about something that you otherwise wouldn’t have known about.

There is a flood of information out there, and part of our lives involves wading through and picking out the bits that are relevant to us. We’ve essentially reverted back to a hunter/gatherer species, except with abstract needs such as information and entertainment instead of the basic needs of food and shelter.

The Internet is one such morass of information, and Google purportedly came along to help us sift through it to find what we want. Hooray! we think, under the delusion that this would slowly push back the ever-increasing encroachment of advertising into our lives. Oh how wrong we were… Google is now probably the world’s largest advertising company. It’s entire revenue model is based on the selling of ads, and the total volume of ads that we now see on a daily basis has increased, not decreased.

Will we ever arrive at the stage where we can be rid of advertising? Not if Google has anything to do with it. Their overarching mission is to dominate platforms where they can flog a product, or if that’s not possible, use it to increase the leverage of their other products that can (usually Search). The company  rarely innovates or invents, and simply refines and improves what already exists: Yahoo, Altavista and many other search engines existed before Google, Cloud-based applications were available long before Google Apps, and surely nobody is deluded enough to think that mobile telephones didn’t exist before the Nexus One (iPhone, anyone?)

That’s not to say what they do is without merit, but look at their business strategy: identify a technological category which could be monetised by advertising, assimilate it into the Google family, crush the opposition, and move on. It might seem benevolent for them to offer something that previously cost money for free, but in doing so they’re making the true costs opaque. Users of Google AdWords simply trust that the cost of bidding on a keyword is driven by “market forces” but how do we know that Google isn’t taking a bigger cut than they deserve?

Even more scary is their recent foray into the political realm, provoking China over the issue of censorship. Regardless of which side of the fence you sit on in regards to the Great Firewall, Google’s actions should be troubling: they are leveraging moral issues for financial gain, turning their corporate mantra of “don’t be evil” into a mission statement.

With its superpowers, will Google don a metaphoric cape and start fighting against what it perceives to be “evil” – i.e. countries, religions and political systems that stand in the way of its financial gain?

Too much awesome

The Internet is a veritable goldmine of information – between LOLcats, Youtube, Wikipedia and TV Tropes, you’d be hard pressed not to be able to find something to amuse you for hours – that’s why I haven’t sat in front of a TV for any extended periods of time in years.

This recent weekend though, I sat in front of the TV for a lot longer than I can remember doing for ages, watching both the men’s and women’s finals of the Australian Open. The match between Serena Williams and Justine Henin, despite being Henin’s big comeback after having a child, was largely uninspiring. Andy Murray however, put up a great fight in the 3rd set against Roger Federer, making for some truly riveting moments. While still not back to level of the glory days of Edberg, Agassi, et al, men’s tennis hasn’t been this good for a long time – thank God that the era of the ridiculous serving machines and baseline bashers is over (women’s tennis is still there though, no thanks to the Williams sisters).

Getting to the point, I experienced an epiphany while watching a sport that I used to enjoy. I found myself getting bored (Jenny quit watching as soon as Federer started winning). My mind started wandering during the longer rallies, and I was itching to go Google something in between every point (15-0: the recipe for green onion pancakes! 30-0: did anybody respond to my Facebook status? 30-15: am I missing out on a deal at OzBargain? etc.)

Non-existent attention span aside, my point is that the Internet has ruined me for the mundane. A daily dose of awesome, served up fresh to my browser via RSS at my every beck and call, has skewed my sense of the ordinary towards the extremes of FTW and Epic Fail. Think about it the next time you Twitter or update your Facebook status: are you self-censoring by only posting things that meet some kind of criteria of what you feel is worth your friends’ time? Against this tide of vanity, how can you not start to feel that your own life is inadequate?

I realised that this affects my writing too. I couldn’t marr my blog with any old crazy thought that graced my mind – each post has to inspire, demonstrate my clearly superior intellect, and impart knowledge that transcends mortal understanding. Likewise my poetry was for naught if it didn’t tear at the very foundations of your soul… you get the idea.

I resolve in 2010 to be more mediocre. Next time you see a boring blog post or status from me, you’ll know that I’m doing it for you.

—-

btw, I still haven’t found a good recipe for Green Onion Pancakes yet. Do share…

I heart blogging

I’ve been doing a bit of thinking about my “brand” lately. Besides the fact that cyberseraphic is well overdue for a redesign (it’s in the works; I’ve even commissioned artwork!) I’ve had to do a bit of soul searching to understand what this blog is actually for.

I explained in a previous post that one of the frustrations is knowing exactly what the scope of this blog should be. Am I “lifestreaming”? Am I sharing some quirky aspect of myself, or am I trying to find fame and fortune through building up a large group of followers? In the end, I think it’s probably none of the above. I’m just writing because my brain is overflowing with all kinds of information, and blogging is the best medium to receive it. So much so that I’m now actively maintaining 3 blogs: this, THRIFTerrific and the recently launched GeekReads. I’m cranking out at least a-post-a-week and still have enough topics in the backlog to last me a good part of the rest of the year.

Granted, we’ll see what happens after I’ve worked through that backlog (although of course new ideas constantly come up, just not at the same rate as when the concept was new and minty fresh). But I’m still pleasantly surprised at how much easier it is to write when the themes are narrow and focused.

On a separate but related note, I’m very excited about some of the revelations that I’ve received in regards to the Social Media space, and I have a few exciting projects lined up which I hope to have the pleasure of announcing here one day, although much depends on the other project collaborators.