RSSConteXt is king, part 2
Put together on April 20, 2008 7:48 pm by Dimitris
What do you think?
With the previous post as a given, for most of us, not all of our experiences can be ‘processed through’ the digital medium. We need at least some of them to stay analog, personal and clearly distinct from the rest. However, our personal resources (our attention, our energy, our time) are limited and presently are being sucked away by the (increasingly digital) media. This may seem somewhat extreme to some – but I personally feel it and I think the effect will only spread in the coming years – both to more people and to a larger scale. Even worse, people may already be under its strain – and not realise it.
It seems that what we need therefore is indeed a digital filter. It will serve us to ‘contain’ the resources we need to spend on digital stimuli. And it will allow us to focus better on our equally necessary, personal needs – which perhaps have become somewhat neglected. Perhaps, we need a tool that will ’shield’ us from all this media attack while at the same time let in as much as we need to make sense of things – neither more nor less. Go over the top in letting things through and you’re overwhelmed. Let very few go through and you feel (and are) left out. We need a fine-tuned and personalised filter. A versatile ‘butler’ of sorts which is customised to our needs and that channels all our ‘impersonal’ input, rejects immaterial items and lets the rest be brought to our attention.
A… butler, you say?
Although this might start sounding like science-fiction, the ‘butler’ I’m talking about could simply be a developed version of our mobile phone or palmtop – or a similar such device. It has to be something which we all carry on ourselves pretty much all of the time and which equally easily can be left behind or switched off. First of all, all media (TV, radio, the internet, films, series, gaming, etc) could then be adapted to be routable through that single personal device (e.g. using wi-fi). For example, when you decide to sit in front of the TV or YouTube, the mobile could ’sync’ with the available TV stations and sort through the multitude of channels, shows and information and suggest (or simply only allow) those that fit your preferences. Obviously, such ’settings’ can always be bypassed when you want to share a film suggested by a friend of different tastes – or the last episode of Lost.
Secondly, apart from input you choose to include in your everyday life that device could handle more unintentional experiences. For example, I’m sure it’s even now feasible to record all conversations you participate in within a day and probably all video of what you see at a low-enough resolution. Such recordings could happen non-intrusively (i.e. not by holding the mobile under your chin) and then be manually or automatically cut and stored for future reference while again obviously all archiving could be turned off, e.g. to isolate it only to work-related environments.
Thirdly, the device could be trainable to constantly alter your preferences depending on the mood you’re going through and your current interests. For example, consistently viewing short videos or listening to latin music could affect future suggestions by the device. That way if certain content becomes irrelevant, it simply falls through your viewing list. Taking the concept only a small step further, such a personal device could even automatically understand if e.g. a piece of news moved you, by measuring your heart rate change.
In addition to handling your input, that ideal device should be able to provide connections between items already existing in its memory and database (which could also be considered an expansion of yours). Pictures and songs, videos and online discussions you picked up e.g. on the web could all be categorised and associated with each other – and with the ones you generate yourself as mentioned earlier. That way new insights about existing experiences might arise.
And of course all these experiences could be automatically associated with where you were when you lived them – now that’s a good GPS use – as well as with whom you shared them. Indeed, other people could also have a limited presence in your device – either as people you shared an experience with or as people whom you exchange content suggestions with. And that’s an actual use of the tool of social networking (in contrast to lots of current Facebook apps, for instance).
Now, all these thoughts apart from being totally blue-sky (but not that far-fetched) are associated with obvious difficulties like privacy concerns (what happens if such a phone gets stolen?), data portability (both across platforms and physically), battery life and holy-grail-like suggestion and classification algorithms for all these data – to name a few of the possible problems. Most importantly, in the worst case scenario such a platform could just transfer the problem of information overload from the PC to the mobile resulting in an even more hectic and attention-deprived situation than now.
But as content gradually becomes devalued it’s helpful for a challenge like this to be put in context…
Already efforts have started on the front I’m describing – see e.g. Microsoft’s MyLifeBits or the smaller scale Evernote. Some of the hardware may also be already here. And with mobile platforms opening up with Google’s Android and Apple’s iPhone SDK, things like what I’m describing may be closer than we think.
tags: analysis, idea |
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