Fresh from Amsterdam a few thoughts from the innovative Picnic'07 to kick off your weekend on the creative side. Bruno Giussani at Lunch Over IP has been reporting on many of the key sessions this week.
I will list some of the core thoughts and key speakers. Then we'll come back and vote for their ideas.
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Dr. Emile Aarts from Philips Research Labs -- the company is moving away from obsession with technology to an emphasis on experience. Lab meets life and "creativity meets innovation". For example -- Philips has created products to make children who need hospital care and procedures comfortable. Children choose themes for wall projections powered by Philips products in their rooms. They can play with child-sized Philips medical scanner replicas and they can press buttons to initiate their procedures. Philips' goal is to create an experience which makes children relaxed and cooperative with hospital staff.
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Blaise Aguera y Arcas, from the Microsoft Live Labs is the architect of Seadragon, an engine that allows you to visualize, manage and zoom into a large body of photographs into a 3D space. This application is called Photosynth (demo here). Some exciting applications include: 1) Photo Tourism -- people from all over can share photos to create tourist attractions; 2) print ads-- Web site readers canto zoom from Web pages into ads and photos to see detailed specs of products; 3) the next generation of zoomable interfaces such as very detailed maps which don’t lose details at close range; and 4) commercial environments in which physical spaces such as stores are used to generate similar Web environments. To Blaise, Photosynth “brings the concept of geo-spatial life to the Web”.
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Jonathan Harris, a self defined artist and storyteller, is dubbed the next generation storyteller on infinite ways of slicing and dicing experiences. He presented WeFeelFine, a project he's been running for a year and consists of scanning blogs for materials like text and images that indicate feelings and forges it into mini stories. Since the inception, the volume of material tallied to 9 million, about 20,000 per day. It's a software that tracks our online footprints. Another project is Universe -- from the individual scanning to the global stories that are affecting our lives, this could be the presentation of the next news page that is based on relations. Who is at the center of your universe? The Whale Hunt is a sophisticated picture album he is building of an Alaskan whaling expedition to experiment with new interfaces of human storytelling making use of tags -- which metastories and substories will emerge?
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Jiri Engestrom, Jaiku, talked about social objects and the social graph during the panel on social networking. "We are forgetting that people are connected to each other by objects". Jobs, hobbies, etc. are social objects, as are shared links (de.licio.us), photos (Flickr), videos (YouTube) etc. "So if we think of social networks, we should start from this question: what is our social object?" "We went from browsing (Yahoo) to search (Google) to sharing
(Facebook). If PageRank (the Google software that looks at who links to
what) was the most valuable software code in the era of search, will "Facerank" emerge which will look at social proximity, physical proximity, or shared objects to determine relevance?" he asks. From search to social proximity.
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The part that really intrigued me was the debate featuring David Weinberger, author of Everything is Miscellaneaous, and Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur and the question of authority in a miscellaneous world. From Giussani's post according to Weinberger:
First principle of change is: leaf on many branches. If you sell a digital camera, you put it in one shelf, you can't put the same camera in multiple stores.
Second: messiness has a virtue. If you post something online and there are so many links to it that you can't even follow them, your post is a huge success, because each of those messy links adds value. Messiness is good online, you can sort through using a computer.
Third: no difference between data and metadata. In the real world we understand the difference between them, we don't confuse the label and the thing. Online it gets messier. Online, if you search Herman Melville, you will get the content of his books or a picture of the author -- there is no difference between data and metadata.
Fourth: unowned order. If you go into a clothing store, the rational thing to do would be to create a pile with all things your size, because all the rest to you is just noise, useless. But if you do that the store owner will throw you out, because he owns the organization of the store. Online, it's exactly the opposite: there, the user of the info controls the organization. The site may offer a classic "tree" (menu) but systems of faceted organization allow you to select "only items under 200 USD" or "only this specific brand" etc. The user decides what the order is. The other way to take control of the organization is through tagging (he shows the de.licio.us link-sharing site).
Do bloggers make things more complex? I would challenge that.
Weinberger, says Keen, brings together two worlds: philosophy and marketing. "What you heard today was a philosopher selling the web to you, in a sexy, seductive way".
There is one issue in which fundamentally they disagree: complexity. Weinberger says we want more complexity, more complexity is interesting.
"I believe he is making a categorical error. He's mixing up media with the world. Let's assume he's right, human beings are indeed complex. However, what David wants is for media (Wikipedia, etc) to reflect the world.
Media should not reflect the world. For me media need to educate, inform and entertain. It doesn't have to reflect the world. The most successful media is not complex. Doesn't need to be utterly simple, am not arguing in favor of dumbing down. But the job of media is to simplify the world, so that we can understand what is happening in the world".
I've sided with media before, along with Giussani. In my mind this is a conversation on complementaries and not adversaries.
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Leave to an anthropologist to say that written communication is here to stay. Stefana Broadbent's observations on people's behaviors indicate that our ability to multitask is based on the fact that "everything is moving into the background." Because we keep adding to our number of tasks, private life is blending into work life and we're always on, but partially. Give us choices and we are forced to break the routine, the background, and focus our attention on one specific thing -- maybe something unusual or new. I check my email every day at the same time early in the morning, after my invigorating run. For example, how many of you read the same blogs or same type of blogs? That is the routine that allows you to integrate a few new things into your media life -- the known fades into your background.
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This is quite a bit to digest. Which of these ideas will stick? [multiple choice]
Hi Valeria, I stopped by this morning because your misspelling of picnic as "Pincnic" in your title tickled my juices to see what this was all about. OK, now you know. :-)
Have a great one.
Posted by: Robyn | September 28, 2007 at 08:17 AM
Good morning to you, Robyn. That's what happens when you write at midnight ;-) Thank you for stopping by. I hope the conversation itself will stimulate your creativity.
Posted by: Valeria Maltoni | September 28, 2007 at 08:30 AM
Hi Valeria, I was very stimulated by all the different dishes you brought to the picnic. Kept me thinking!
Posted by: Robyn | September 28, 2007 at 12:30 PM
I can't say I agree with idea that media is supposed to "simplify" the world. The news media exists to explain the world, not simplify it!
Or should all media follow the example of Fox News?
They simplify, and they lose context, information and accuracy in the process. The Economist doesn't simplify, but elucidates the story as simply and as accurately as possible. And that is a world of difference from "simplifying" the news.
Simplifying things in order to understand them is a perfectly legitimate activity - in the right context. Simplifying the news so you can understand it? I'd suggest the proponent of that point of view simplify their reading habits to include children's books. "Idiots" is a term I'd use on my own blog for such a proposal!
Metadata and data are not the same: one describes the data. They share some of the same attributes, but only as an abstraction. They are clearly not the same!
To argue they are would be argue that a description of a picture is, in effect, the same as the picture. Which is nonsense: metadata, or information about information, is a method of describing the data. It is not the same as the information itself.
Unless you decide to simplify everything. Like a Fox News story, maybe? Or an argument that misunderstands what media is.
The "social proximity" thing continues the theme of mistaken simplicity. We have a primitive form of this with the blogroll/technorati thing. But I can't help but think that what this idea proposes is the "cult of personality". Just like in school, some people will be more popular than others. But popularity is always mistaken for "competence"; I point to the various popular stars being asked their opinion on world events as evidence. Yes, they have an opinion, but that in no way credits them with competence in the subject they are opining on! (Bono, Geldof, Jolie, and a few others excepted. They have credibility because they have taken time to become familiar with the subjects.)
I think Charles Dickens observed this (Great Expectations), as well as that wild man of language, Bill Shakespeare. (Was it in "Richard 2nd"? I can't remember! Sorry.)
Simplicity is a fine concept, but it has a context that has to be observed. Simplifying the news (information) is a definite no-no - unless your name is "Hannity", "Coulter", "North" or some other name usually associated with the simplifying dimwits of Fox News.
Carolyn Ann
PS I guess I should offer some apology for being so caustic. The premise that the news should be simplified irritated me, though. I'm an adult, and I can read: I think I can hold a complex idea in my head. More than one, in fact. In fact, I'd guess that most of us can do that, too. So, I won't offer an apology. I think the guy who suggested that the news should be simplified for apologize for suggesting that we're all as dim as he thinks we are. /CA
Posted by: Carolyn Ann | September 29, 2007 at 11:55 AM
Thank you, Robyn. I do enjoy our exchanges here and at Brain Based Business.
Carolyn Ann -- yes, I think the attempt to capture any one thought so that it fits nicely into a bucket may lead us astray. I'm a fan of in depth reports and opinions. I admire writers like Mr. Giussani who is based in Switzerland and can read and think/write in many languages -- expansively and pointedly. While Weinberger seemed to err on the side of chaos, Keen seems to weigh too heavily on the side of short attention spans. As I'm found of saying, the truth or "a" truth usually makes its home somewhere in between. I buy your distinction of simplicity vs. simplifying.
Regarding social proximity... I am fully prepared for people being unpredictable, complicated (in a good way), and immersed in their own lives. You bring up the concept of visibility and popularity. There is an aspirational transfer -- someone is liked, we would love to be liked, their ideas and opinions must be good because they are liked, etc.
I have always been a proponent of not going for the minimum common denominator in education. I think that sometimes that provides an excuse for not trying. Then again, I was trained in classical studies -- lots of richness and meaning in Greek and Latin works.
Posted by: Valeria Maltoni | September 29, 2007 at 12:28 PM
We have to learn to simplify and provide specific details at the same time. Sometimes I need to hear a synopsis of the news expressed simply, but with great clarity. There is complexity in expressing ideas simply.
On the other hand, when I want to review the specific details I go to the New York Times and dig deeper. Sometimes, given our own circumstances we come to catch the news with a very different purpose. In my mind we need both.
Thanks, Carolyn Ann, for helping us see another view.
Posted by: Robyn | September 29, 2007 at 01:19 PM
For the poll, I think I like the 3D online immersion the best. With Second Life being so popular and all those new animation movies coming out, I think it is one area that is being developed faster than the others.
Posted by: Admin | September 30, 2007 at 11:44 AM
Hi Valeria, I've been there and I can confirm what Giussani reported (who couldn't).
It has been a full immersion into experiences and ideas and inspirations.
Of course debates derives from different point of views, but what is important is having an event like that to share ideas and toughts
... by the way Europe Alliance of Creative Conferences is coming.
Posted by: GianlucaArnesano | October 03, 2007 at 08:09 AM
Robyn --
Exactly. We have the tools to research deeper, the circumstance determines what and how we choose to read.
Gianluca -- I should have thought of you being there with your company based in the Netherlands. Giussani's point of view agrees with mine most of the time; and I'm familiar with his writing in print as well. It may be a product of thinking and operating in more than one language.
Posted by: Valeria Maltoni | October 03, 2007 at 08:57 AM