[-empyre-] yes, but, well, and...

[Jon Winet]

Andrew =

On the fly - great comments.

I think the mobilization and often miniaturization of networked
devices | communications bring into sharp focus, as it were, the
continuing power of large electronic displays in public spaces -
[Tokyo's Shibuya -
http://crab.rutgers.edu/~seduffy/Japan2007/shibuya.JPG | New York's
Times Square - http://dguides.com/images/newyorkcity/attractions/times-square.jpg
] and the roles still waiting to be played out as the two are joined
to create collective and individually electronically-mediated
experiences.

The joining up operation of the mobile device and the Big Screen is
taking a lot longer than we expected - see link to antique 1997
website documenting "Sunset," a project Scott | Dale | Margaret and I
produced on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood during that year's edition
of SIGGRAPH [ http://www.concentric.net/~jonwinet/documentation/9.html
+ http://www.concentric.net/~jonwinet/documentation/10.html ]. The
occasional experiment or cell-phone triggered polling in a stadium
aside, large scale public displays remain read-only for the most part.
Greater interactivity and the challenges and opportunities afforded
await us in the near future, and the work Scott | Anne | Dale | Onomy
Labs undertook suggest some of the most humane, and surprisingly
intimate possibilities.
[http://www.onomy.com/blue/gallery/interactive-09.html +}

I'd love to see a list of your top picks for books | readings on
mobile devices and public.


On Mon, May 7, 2012 at 5:17 PM, Andrew Schrock <aschrock at usc.edu> wrote:
> I've been greatly enjoying the discussion thus far, and hope I'm jumping in
> at an appropriate time. [super quick intro: I'm a USC Annenberg Ph.D student
> working with Anne at the public interactives research team/PIRT, where we're
> working on a digital book on tinkering called Ways of the Hand. My
> perspective comes out of mass communication, micro-sociology, and media
> studies, which have many resonances with Anne's work]
>
> I would be curious, following from the mention of Arab Spring, to hear
> responses from the group about the role of interfaces as they shift towards
> mobile devices. Scott raised the question about mobilities and mixed-reality
> interfaces. When I hear "public interactive" I think of public layers that
> can be punctuated with everyday devices and afford new visibility. Mobile
> devices are increasingly adopted in developing countries and present a
> primary mode of going online. So it seems that many concerns raised under
> the guise of public interactives shift towards different types of devices,
> even though they are so visibly and functionally different. And even though
> it is (as Dale reinforces to me) mobile devices are a fundamentally
> different experience than large screens and other forms of public
> interactives where people can come together; we shouldn't forget the
> collectivity question.
>
> Beyond mobilities lies the "cloud computing" that enables it. Back to Anne's
> statement of "Our data will move freely, but we will not" (maybe all trapped
> in megacities.... from home to the coffee shop to work and then home
> again). The question seems to come back to one of power, reproduction vs.
> production. It's interesting to me that several recent books on mobile
> devices in public spaces, although they provide very rich descriptions of
> relationships with mobile technologies and initial forays into this area
> over the last decade in the arts, do not coherently address
> power. Consumer-facing advertisements for "the cloud" paint it as an
> unencumbering force to take away all the worry of thinking about data -- "To
> the cloud!" But shouldn't we learn to think about data? To be literate? I'm
> worried we are getting apoplectic about copyright, but whether a
> middle-class American can use Oasis as a soundtrack to family videos on
> YouTube is not the big battle.
>
> There is a fellow named Curtis Fletcher in the STS cluster at USC who I'm
> working with on a workshop tentatively titled "The Fate of Interpretation in
> the Era of Big Data." By which I take to mean, what does it mean to claim
> that we can capture data and essentially extract questions from it? Be
> guided by data? Lev Manovich's latest turn is similar, essentially
> advocating for data to speak for itself and work with computer scientists,
> not those in the humanities. So "beyond" lies claims of the death of ways of
> knowing outside of concrete empiricism.
>
> A
>
>
> On May 7, 2012, at 11:39 AM, Scott L. Minneman wrote:
>
> I don’t remember there being much mystery about where things were headed
> with the potential for collecting lots of information about us and inferring
> ad nauseum for purposes of advertising and such.  We saw the advent of
> recommender systems (and applauded when we discovered a movie or a new band
> via these mechanisms) and marveled when a search engine seemed to make good
> sense of the drivel we typed their direction.  Folks jumped at free services
> in exchange for surrendering their info and eyeballs.
>
> These days, the algorithms are seemingly trying too hard, or
> maybe….well.…perhaps they just don’t know me as well as they think they do.
> Amazon seldom suggests a purchase I’m interested in, and I actually wish for
> a switch on Google so it would just stop trying to be clever.  And I’m
> sorry, friends, but I think I can count on a single hand the number of times
> when the “personal results” portion of a Google search have yielded
> anything.  I can no longer tell you to click the third search result…odds
> are it’s not the same for you.
>
> As we begin to see bigger corporations (including the biggie) looking
> seriously about how to directly augment our experience with mixed and
> virtual stuff, be it with glasses or tablets (or eventually contact lenses
> and brain stimulation), the slope gets disturbingly slippery.  The world,
> even if we’re in the same place, at the same time, starts to no longer look
> the same.  You’re hungry, so you’ve got the “food specials” layer turned on
> (if you even have control of it, perhaps your Nike “Fuel Band III” has
> detected that you need some calories and switched on that overlay for you).
>  The person next to you is a tourist, so they’re subscribing to a
> “historical landmarks” layer, and their son is playing some mixed reality
> first-person shooter.  Your views of the world are much different.
>
> […and all of them have their peripheral vision blocked by banner ads and
> never see/hear the bus that runs them over – physics still doesn’t care.]
>
> I’m seemingly not as worried as Mark about what the powers that be are
> learning about me.  I’m more worried about how poorly it all works, and
> about how much stock they seem to be putting into their lame inferences.
> What they think I was asking becomes more important that what I really
> asked.  And then they infer more from our reactions to the junk they put in
> front of us.  Complicating matters is that our whole culture is highly
> dependent on shared experiences, and those are in flux and becoming
> increasingly scarce.
>
> Not sure where I’m going with this, but I’ll toss it out into the public
> interactives and interactive publics ring (oooh….there’s a name for a book
> Anne and I should write).  Hopefully Google won’t re-write it for each of
> you, in an attempt to relate my text to your recent searches for tips on how
> to get 3-Stars on the 27th level of Angry Birds Space (or whatever).
>
> slm
>
> Scott L. Minneman, PhD
> Professor and Industry Liaison – CCA
> Principal – Onomy Labs, Inc.
> onomy.com & slminneman.com
> 415 505-7234 - cell
>
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>
>
> Andrew Schrock
> USC Annenberg Doctoral Student
> Twitter: @aschrock
> Email:  aschrock at usc.edu
> Phone:  714.330.6545
>
>
>
>
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