You’re in the future now, Konvergenz Boy

July 22, 2010

To my middle, most media-savvy son, the record player is the stuff of legend. Could a needle bouncing through wiggly grooves on a disc of black plastic truly recreate music as faithfully as the bits and bytes that play the part today?

On a rainy July Saturday afternoon I stagger from the loft with my old turntable and a box of vinyl dating back to the mid-1980s. For my first trick I play music the boys already know, the stuff we have as MP3s. Somehow transparency of operation makes the old technology seem more miraculous than the new.

Then we dig a little deeper into my teenage listening habits, into the stuff so embarrassing or forgettable that it never made the cut when formats flipped to CD and then over to digital. That’s where I find this forgotten future.

A follow-up to Sigue Sigue Sputnik’s “Love Missile F1-11,” “21st Century Boy” is all space hotels and acid rain. It features the news from 13th July 2011. Back in 1986 it hit number 20 in the UK singles chart, apparently. I have no memory of how it came to be in my attic.

But look closely at 21st Century Boy (Modelled, I guess, by Tony James et al.?) He is:

  • Compu-Boy
  • Phone-Boy
  • Video-Boy
  • Disc-Boy
  • TV-Boy
  • (and, um, Rocket Baby. Best not go there.)

He is clutching all the technologies that we now see clamped together in the disruptive embrace of communications, information, entertainment and education convergence.

He is old enough to be my 21st century boy’s granddad. He is Device Man, and he wasn’t far wrong.

And that’s just Side 1. Side 2 is “Buy EMI“.

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We got everything we need right here

March 30, 2010

There’s a common narrative pattern in which a protagonist is saddled with some differentiating characteristic – big ears for example, or scissors for hands, or flatulence.

At first said characteristic causes the protagonist to be shunned by their peers, but in a different context it turns out to be an advantage, enabling them to overcome a seemingly impossible challenge and win the respect and adulation they deserve.

Recently I’ve been thinking about the coming age of digital storytelling, of e-books and mobile apps. And I’ve been wondering about the authoring tools that might be required for easy and ubiquitous content creation, whether purely digital or crossing over into print.

Based on my experiences putting together the cards and mobile web pages for 1794: A Small Story it seems the would-be e-book author needs some kind of easy templating system, adapted to page or screen…

… then an outliner to sketch out the flow of their book…

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Brought to book: some subtleties of social interaction

January 11, 2010

It’s a pleasure to see – at risk of sounding like a Key Stage One Literacy Coordinator – that reading is hot right now.

Into this maelstrom come the Mag+ concepts from BERG for Bonnier. If you haven’t seen the video you should watch it now. Beyond the thoughtful work on the interaction within the user interface, I like the thinking about ”how the device might occupy the world.”

And separately, Christian Lindholm has some interesting ideas about linearity as a low-involvement user experience, perfectly suited to mobile.

Everyone’s talking about how it feels to be the reader – how he or she will be empowered to enjoy the best aspects of printed and digital media rolled into one wafer-thin device. It’s all very user-centred.

But I think to succeed eReaders must not only meet the needs of the direct user, but also of those around them, the friends and family who may not welcome their loved one’s absorption in this exciting new media. They are the “next largest context” within which the new device must win acceptance.

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Posted by mattedgar

Forward planning

February 21, 2009

21/02/2009

Originally uploaded by mattedgar.

Dear Lazyweb,

Please make a product/service where:

  1. I pour large quantities of Lego into a hopper.
  2. The Lego is sorted by colour, shape and size into its original sets, as defined in a freely available online database of Lego set contents.
  3. Those sets are offered for sale on Ebay or similar with a reserve price set at reasonable market rates.
  4. Subject to receipt of payment, the sets are boxed up and dispatched in on-demand-printed replica packaging.

Based on the ages of my children, their anticipated interests and maturity, and current rates of Lego acquisition, I expect to require this service for approximately five cubic metres of Lego (and occasional Megablox etc.) some time in or after April 2019.

Thank you.

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Note to future historians: We know it doesn’t look good, but we weren’t really shallow time-wasters in the Noughties

January 14, 2008

Greetings from 2008! I’m really pleased you’ve picked the Early 21st Century Social History module this term. You’re going to love it.

But before you dive into the wealth of primary evidence we’ve left on the net, there’s something we need you to understand. We know it doesn’t look good, but we weren’t really shallow time-wasters. You see, the billions of pages of social networking archives through which you’re crawling don’t really tell the whole story. Before you condemn us as the idle generation who played Scrabulous while the icecaps melted, we’d like to put those texts into context.

Context #1. We were young. Your course notes may include some stats showing that lots of people in their 30s, 40s and beyond were signed up to the social networks. This is true, but the most active users remained in the under 25 bracket. They were finding their way in the world, and trying on new personalities. They lived for the moment and some learned the dangers the hard way.

Context #2. Even when we weren’t young, we were inexperienced. We’d only just taken the controls, like learning to drive a car. (OK, bad example. I guess you’ve seen one in a museum.) Looking back, our efforts will seem clumsy, lacking the nuances and vocabulary of other more-established communications media. With time we’ll get these things right, but you future historians probably look at our online efforts like we look at 1950s TV.

Context #3. Even when we were experienced, we weren’t serious. Surely this was the first (though by no means the last) medium to start with the trivial and scale up to the serious. It took decades for electronic communication to move, as Andrew Odlyzko notes “from Samuel Morse’s solemn ‘What hath God wrought?’ to Alexander Graham Bell’s utilitarian ‘Mr. Watson, come here, I want you,’ to the banal ‘How was your lunch?’ that is so common today.” Now we’ve moved from pull to push: we upload photos of our lunch without even being asked. For many of us posting stuff online is more a time-killer than a communications tool.

So while you’re flicking through our old Myspace pages and Facebook groups, please believe us when we say: The rest of the time, we were really busy doing mature, skilled, serious things. It’s just that we didn’t document that stuff. You’ll have to take it on trust.

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Posted by mattedgar

I have seen the future and it folds

October 19, 2006

Ten years ago I worked in a declining industry. Regional newspaper readerships were aging, as papers struggled to connect with their communities. Staff cuts and inflexible new technology at the paper I worked on meant we had a 9:30am press deadline for some localised editions – which rather made a mockery of the word “Evening” on the masthead.

Like many others in my generation of journalists, I quit print for a new media. The new media would be all the things that the old one was not. It would be instantly updated, interactive with its audience, and free to access. In the future the new media would become mobile, contextual and relevant. It would be like having someone come up to you in the street with the information you needed to know, exactly when you needed it.

Funny how the future arrives in the most unexpected form. For me it was just outside Edgware Road tube station, about 3:45pm, when a man came up to me in the street and handed me a copy of The London Paper.

Now I’m not going to go into a debate about whether this one is a better put-together product than the other contenders in London’s free paper war. To be honest, the design was faintly reminiscent of my student newspaper – lots of boxes and tints, and over-quirky headline fonts.

But what blew me away was the immediacy of the content. There’s something slightly Harry Potter about seeing the latest Tube information in print as you’re about to enter the station. And how refreshing to let readers vote by text on whether the comment writer should be allowed to pen another column. I’d gone for years thinking those things were the special domain of the digital media, yet here they were in print, in the palm of my hand, with the ink coming off on my fingers and everything.

The sense of everyday magic was compounded by the way the paper was delivered: no shouting unintelligible manglings of the title; no fumbling for loose change at risk of being mown down by bulldozing commuters intent on walking at exactly 4.2 miles per hour. Just a guy in a fluorescent vest offering the paper so I could take it without breaking my stride. He was standing strategically, moments before the point at which I’d need to put my hand in my pocket to pull out an Oyster card and thus be unable to take a paper. This user experience is what sets the bar so high for mobile content.

I’m not sure what all this means, except that to paraphrase Winston Churchill (I think), I used to think newspapers knew everything. Then I thought newspapers knew nothing. Now I’m amazed at how much they’ve learned.

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Posted by mattedgar