It’s common practice today to think that the solution to every problem is to be found in technology. This video is a concept video from the 2009 Challenge your World competition reminding us to not to fall into the trap of that kind of thinking.
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Welcome, Human 2.0.
We may not realize it, but the Internet has given us superhuman abilities. We acquire new capabilities each year, and technology lets us to do things that would have seemed impossible 30 years ago.
Here are ten superpowers that you and I have today:
This short (20 minute) film, “Play”, by David Kaplan and Eric Zimmerman, explores a world where the lines between augmented reality, virtual worlds and computer games have become so blurred that people begin to lose track of reality. Drawing on themes explored by films like The Matrix, Surrogates and Total Recall, this film is fascinating, thought-provoking and just a little disturbing.
Canadians spend more time online than watching TV, according to new research. Not surprising, since most of the content we encounter is born online. Blogs, e-mails, tweets and YouTube videos wouldn’t exist without the Internet. You need a connection. And since it’s largely just computers and phones that have Internet connectivity, this often means digesting this digital content on devices that weren’t designed for consumption. Read more »
In this Sep 2009 episode of NPR’s On Point, Tom Ashbrook interviews Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell, authors of the new book “Total Recall: The E-memory revolution”. Gordon Bell has, for over ten years, been digitizing his entire life as part of the MyLifeBits project, inspired by the concept of a “Memex” (pictured left), put forward by Vannevar Bush in 1945. Bell outsources much of his memory to computer systems designed to make him more effective. The book (and the podcast) explore the ways in which this e-memory revolution has already begun and will transform aspects of society from privacy and healthcare to learning and extra-marital affairs.
Listen to the episode (streaming audio provided by NPR).
Image credit: Memex image by p373 on Flickr
This concept video demonstrates a powerful application of augmented reality. With technology that exists today, retailers could bring their wares to your living room, solving one of online shopping’s biggest drawbacks – a flat 2D representation is often not enough to make product decisions. A 3D online furniture store could allow you to try out different furniture in the real physical space of your living room with minimal effort – something that both physical and online stores can’t currently do. You can read more about the video and how it was made on phedhex’s blog.
Have you ever found yourself using your computer and thinking “No! That’s not what I meant. Isn’t it obvious what I’m trying to do?”
Today you can use your computer for an ever-increasing number of activities – planning a holiday, reading the news, creating music, chatting, shopping, budgeting or just satisfying an idle curiosity.
But there is a problem; your computer is fundamentally stupid. You have to tell it exactly what you want. Often you have to enter information many times in different ways. The computer has no understanding of you as an individual, so it must ask for your address and billing information for every online purchase. It has no understanding of the context of your request, so it can’t know when you type “Java” into a search engine whether you are at that moment interested in the programming language, the island, or the coffee.
The only way for computers to get smarter at this is for them to learn more about you. Fortunately, a number of companies are now building software that shows that if you allow your computer to watch and learn from you, it can become far more helpful.
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Back in mid-2008, Twitter was just another Web 2.0 application. Industry watchers were beginning to take notice of its million or so users and speculate if it might be the start of something bigger, but most people hadn’t heard of it or didn’t “get it”. Here at Bitcurrent we pondered the rise of microblogging and the scaling problems ahead, noting a few teething problems along the way.
Towards the end of 2008, people outside of tech circles began to take notice, especially when it became a key form of communication during the Mumbai terror attacks in November. In December it became clear that Twitter was not just another social site, but a protocol for a new form of communication. By the end of the year, people were exploring all sorts of new uses for Twitter, and the Twitter pantomime was born.
But 2009 was the year that Twitter really took the world by storm.
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Backchannels are all the rage at tech events these days, connecting presenter and audience like never before. They allow audiences to get more value from a presentation by communicating with each other about it. And the audience can feed back to the presenter, which helps him stay on track and know that he is being understood.
But there’s a point where a backchannel goes beyond adding interactivity to an event and begins to undermine the event itself. In November, I witnessed this at the launch of UXMTL, a community for user experience design in Montreal.
Twitter has made setting up backchannels trivially easy — with or without the consent of conference organizers — since anyone can start a Twitter backchannel simply by using a hashtag. Unlike Google Moderator or Backnoise, no specialized software is needed. At UXMTL, the event organisers simply announced that audience members should use the hashtag #uxmtl on Twitter, and all tweets for that tag were displayed on a large screen behind the panelists, using Twitterfall. For me, this completely changed my experience of the event, both as an audience member and a backchannel contributor.
This week, many people have been given beta access to Twitter’s new Retweet feature. Unfortunately, rather than seizing the opportunity to pave the cowpaths by building a feature that reflects the way users are currently retweeting each other, Twitter have launched something which behaves quite differently.
You have to change your retweet behavior to use the new feature. This has angered many users, myself included, so I’d like to explain how I think the new feature should have been designed. To start with I’ll look at where retweeting came from, I’ll then explain some of the problems with the way it works currently, how Twitter are trying to address these problems with the new feature, and finally how I think the problems could be better addressed.
Why do we need a retweet feature anyway?
With more and more things to remember every day, will we trust computers to back up our brains? Find out in this interview with Sunil Vemuri. (read more...)
Patents have spread from products to processes, algorithms and even genes. This documentary examines the dangers to society of patenting everything. (read more...)
Like all images on the site, the topic icons are based on images used under Creative Commons or in the public domain. Originals can be found from the following links. Thanks to wecand, philosophy_rebel, maniya, victornuno, splityarn, barnetcouncil, istio, jeremymates, botheredbybees and leonardodavinci.
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