Today is one of those defining moments in my career in digital media – we have just switched on a new world called the Echo, which corresponds geographically with the surface of South Africa.
I don’t often do technical posts but I spent so much time trying to find a solution to this one that I had to put it up for others.
The Problem: Several Samsung and Cricket devices (predominantly in the US) seem to have problems accepting cookies from mobile web sites.
This is a set of two mood maps for South Africa based on the moods set on the Grid yesterday (12 Oct 2009). You will notice that we are now rendering these based on aggregated data matched to suburban shapes rather than dots like my previous post.
It was hard not to think FAIL as I read Snow Crash. Ever since VRML (remember that? a ’90s term for a modeling language for virtual worlds, acronym for Virtual Reality Modeling Language) and Lawnmower Man there has been a sort of dream about virtual worlds that most poignantly failed with Second Life. That’s just my opinion, take it or leave it. Second Life generated enough hype and some realism to its economy, enough so that big brands spend some cash buying islands and amplifying the hype. Now its just a fetish den for avatars, which is not necessarily a bad thing.
The Metaverse Roadmap seems a little more serious in its approach to the governance of virtual worlds. Their 2016 roadmap is quite weighty, conceptually and points to the complexity of something that is a little more substantial than William Gibson’s cyberspace or Neal Stephenson’s metaverse:
We contend the metaverse sector, growing from today’s mostly 2D and early 3D digital media (including film, games, geospatial web, television, and wireless), will encompass and redefine each traditional economic sector in coming decades, the way each has done in its own historical emergence. Providing plausible indicators and examples of metaverse sector development is a major goal of our roadmap.
Heavy, and necessary, I am sure. Maybe its better to thrash out some standards before the thing actually exists. It would have been pretty useful if the developers of Web browsers had done this but, then again, if things were always perfect life would be too boring to continue.
I have been working on a project that flips the relationship between ‘reality’ (that physical thing that bumps your shin or funny bone) and simulacra (the almost ‘reality’ that is almost always better is some way or another but somehow also the same). Fiddling with location at this early stage of mobile application development and veering into the area of creating a world, it has become clear to me that the data is frequently more real than the place you are standing in. To put it another way, a place of significance gains its significance only through the information which tags it as significant. As an example, recently in Berlin I walked past a few nondescript buildings but discovered later that some pretty brutal and historically significant events took place there half a century ago. The truth of a place is not the place itself, but the data that haunts its geo-coordinates.
One could state the problem like this: humans who rely on information-enriched or augmented reality will soon lose interest in the object of the enrichment and become fixated with everything about it. And so it looks to me like one of the strongest candidates for a metaverse is the planet we live on; judging by the way we are treating it it will soon be a concrete crust anyway, its inhabitants retracted like claws into the shell.
I travel long distances reasonably frequently and I consistently find the journey itself is unremarkable because my attention is always filled with media. I do my utmost to make sure that every long flight I take, or even the short ones, I have enough media with me to forget I am sitting still for way too long. So I have a bag with a PSP, Nintendo DS, a book, a magazine, my laptop, my phone and sometimes a newspaper. Sometimes, serendipitously, there will also be a good movie or something interesting in the in-flight magazine. When I drive, I make phone calls. Most of my productivity happens in the car, when I am away from the Internet and the social space.
The result is a sense of the physical world as a series of islands separated by a placeless space. For me, the inside of an aeroplane is all that exists between Johannesburg and London, because that is all I have experienced. Of course, objectively, I know this is not true but I can’t really prove it except by hearsay and the media, or exploring for myself. Regardless of how insane that may sound, it got me thinking about how much information we are expected to trust every day that we cannot verify except by comparing it to other similar information, and how much we never question.
We don’t think about where the water goes when you flush a toilet; where the electricity comes from, or what it even is, that we plug into; how our cars work when we turn the key; why people obey the rules of the road, or whether they might have changed during the night without you realising it. Most of the things that happen around us, things that our lives depend on, operate according to a set of rules we don’t know or understand.
So it requires surprisingly little actual verifiable knowledge for a person to remain functional in society. It is also not surprising then, that religion and ideology are making a strong comeback in the East and the West, or that the media seem to have lost some of their authority, or that girls no longer faint and scream at rock concerts.
A good part of what I have been doing at Vodacom over the past month-and-a-half is thinking about how location-based storytelling changes the physical environment permanently once you get started.
When you walk around cities like Rome, you might have experienced a sense of immense gravity that comes from the awareness that so much history exists below and around you. It’s almost as if time crystallises around you in the form of a lingering significance.
My experience, more recently, has been the polar opposite. While using the Grid (one of the products I am focussed on at Vodacom right now), I have started to feel a type of lightness as I move from place to place, a sense that above me there are layers and layers of private data attached to that place, like a wind blowing into the sky. It’s a strange sensation, that there is something invisible around me, and yet liberating at the same time because my experience can always, only be seen in relation to those other invisible dots.
The reading of a map has always been a two-way decoding – on the one hand you decode the map to locate yourself in the physical environment, on the other hand you decode the landscape to locate yourself on the map. As maps become richer and offer more information, the second type of interaction is becoming more prevalent.
The physical world is becoming a map of a deeper and more complex digital world. It has been flattened by high-speed travel, global communications networks and the instantaneity of the media. It is both private and public, synchronous and asynchronous.
The obvious question, I suppose, is whether this is a good or bad thing for those who find themselves existing in this way. I can only speak from personal experience, and my personal experience tells me that it becomes increasingly difficult to know yourself when all you are is a mirage of data. Tied to that the curiosity of unfolding never-ending layers of information about the place you are or the thing you are doing or the people you are doing it with means you miss most of the experience itself. What you have then are false memories of a presence not fully occupied, and this will leave you feeling empty if you pry under the veneer.
On the other hand, if memories are fleeting, does it really even matter whether you had full presence or not, as long as you have the tweets, photos, blog posts, video clips and other records of it. I think it does for the simple reason that we learn from experiences, so it follows that we would learn less from experiences in which we were only partially there.
I often find myself in a conversation I’m not listening to because I’m having several on my computer, or my phone at the same time. In the past two years I have started to find it harder to have a conversation that feels ‘real’, and I have started to seem more and more aloof when actually, I think I am suffering from the consequences of using the Internet so much for every single thing I do. The reason I found this out is because a few months ago, for some reason I can’t quite explain, I had a conversation that did feel real. It was an afternoon with my family, but what was different was that I felt like I was giving so more attention and presence to the people around me and I felt like I was myself again, for a few fleeting hours.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m saying I feel like have to be different person all the time, its more like I only feel like I’m 50% there. To feel real you have to be generous with your presence.
The solution I have come up with, not that I actually do it, though I plan to very soon, is to divide my time between the real and the virtual. More specifically, to allocate time for experiences that I give my full attention to, like playing with my son, talking to my wife and family, looking at things again, like art or architecture or the colour of leaves.
This morning I did the opening presentation for final day of the Digital Africa Summit, a gathering of about 150 CEOs and CTOs from around the continent. My presentation was short and sweet and my argument was the following:
It wasn’t a tough sell, it didn’t take very long and I enjoyed delivering a positive message. If Slideshare wasn’t broken I’d upload my presentation, I’ll try again later.
He has worked in the online media industry since 1996, has presented papers at many international conferences and specializes in profitable innovation in emerging markets.
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