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

Jon Winet jon.winet at gmail.com
Fri May 11 21:54:23 EST 2012


Dale | Andrew [ | All ] -

Thanks for the book list and link to "Sunset" patent.

Likely something of a side issue to the overall discussion:

Dale's comment raises the monetization issue, how mobile devices <==>
large scale public displays might and likely will, as Anne noted in
reference to magazines, deliver consumers to sellers.

Cellphone users vote on which model is featured in a Calvin Klein
underwear add? Crowd-sourcing the choice of color for a new building?

This thought jogged my memory of a 2002 Mars campaign to choose a new
color of m & m:
http://adage.com/article/news/m-m-s-45-million-campaign-pick-color/33712/
"M&M's $45 MILLION CAMPAIGN TO PICK NEW COLOR"
Consumers Worldwide Asked to Choose Between Pink, Purple or Aqua

Goes without seeing, but I'm saying it: the examples points to push
the use to use technology beyond the relatively low-hanging fruit of
imaginatively and creatively to the more challenging ethically and
genuinely transformatively.

In a parallel universe I will be spending the rest of today thinking
and writing about this thoroughly ...


On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 8:55 AM, Dale MacDonald
<dalewmacdonald at gmail.com> wrote:
> Jon - The citation you don't make
> is http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=6,243,740.PN.&OS=PN/6,243,740&RS=PN/6,243,740
> If I assume the assignee (Xerox, though it could be PARC, Inc at this point)
> is paying attention, then so far there isn't enough money being exchanged in
> these joinings of experience to warrant attempts of enforcement. Will there
> ever be?
>
> Andrew - One of the things I think the work Jon, Margaret, Scott and I did
> as well as the work Anne, Mark, Scott, and I did were moves in the direction
> Matt Jones called "From introverted to Extravagant Computing" in "Journeying
> Toward extravagant, expressive, Place-based Computing," interactions Volume
> 18 Issue 1, January + February 2011 (paywallled, unfortunately) where he
> laments,
> "So, perhaps, the job is done. The
> infrastructure and interaction
> ideas are in place for a world that
> will be fully indexed, where every
> curb and every tree in every park
> will be mapped, documented, and
> accessible at the stroke of a seductively sleek smartphone. We will
> never be lost; we will be guided
> away from wandering or wondering
> and will no longer need to guess or
> take a risk.
> While these services are
> undoubtedly useful and used by
> increasing numbers of people, as I
> gaze onto a “streetview,” I am left a
> little cold. Where is the “streetlife”?
> I am left pondering the dangers
> these innovations pose to the joys,
> surprises, and even discomforts
> of exploring our cities, hills, or
> beaches. "
> ...
> "systems that are “always beside us,
> to guard and guide us…all around
> us, all the time, not too obvious, a
> quiet supporter.” Hymn-style, this
> presenter invokes a world that is
> made safe, calm, and solid by pervasive intelligence. Look through
> the lens-life: reality augmented to
> guide, guard, and provide for your
> every need."
>
> Our use of mobile devices was very much to enhance the discovery of a place
> and to some extent the place's discovery of you.
>
> Dale MacDonald
> Technology Manager
> Annenberg Innovation Lab
> University of Southern California
> http://annenberglab.com
>
> On May 10, 2012, at 5:19 AM, Jon Winet wrote:
>
> 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
>
>
> _______________________________________________
>
> empyre forum
>
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>
>
>
>
> Andrew Schrock
>
> USC Annenberg Doctoral Student
>
> Twitter: @aschrock
>
> Email:  aschrock at usc.edu
>
> Phone:  714.330.6545
>


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