justin bacon

Change - generational pull, not technology push

Just a quick comment on Seth Godin's post today "Welcome to the frustration decade (and the decade of change)": http://bit.ly/DecadeOfChange
I wholeheartedly agree with Seth's assertion that the maturation of the first internet generation has incredible significance as a dominant force in shaping the coming decade. I like to think that this will accelerate the pace of innovation and adoption of new technologies in HCI. For example, why has it taken so long for the touch-screen to make it to consumer products (not just in ATMs and kiosks) - to me that's the unspoken achievement behind the wild success of the iPhone: it brought touch-based interfaces mainstream. How will that, along with other HCI innovations, change not only our interactions with systems but also the design of the systems themselves? (And in asking this, I mean a cybernetic view of a system in that includes the functions and processes both technical and social - I touch on this ever so slightly in my earlier post, here.) Granted this success is as much about the technology that made the UI so popular. The tech savviness of the internet generation together with the advances of technology promises to be a powerful force of change, innovation and growth.

Renewed Social Web - only just the beginning of innovation

While my personal thinking about this topic has been all over the map, I recently gained a small bit of clarity while reading a post by Viplav Baxi's titled "Social Networking - the last innovation wave." I see the social networks of the web 2.0 world to be a natural evolution of the promise of the internet since it's invention as a way for scientists to share their research (insofar as we use "the internet" interchangably with "the world wide web" in today's lexicon.) The argument that the web has been social since it's beginning (not just recently with the rise in popularity of "social media" as a convenient label) has been a point that I've made throughout 2009 in many of my conversations with Robert Stanke, Jeff Pesek, Tony Vitali, and many more, some of which I wrote about in my earlier post "What I think I learned in 2009 about social media." Certainly there have been innumerous advances in computing power, speed, bandwidth, etc that have changed since the birth of the world wide web in 1990 but fundamentally the underlying principles are the same. The most significant transformation can be boiled down to the evolution of Human Computer Interfaces (HCI) themselves as an abstraction that is meant to gloss over debates about the details of various technological advances, not diminish them. Combine the advances of ubiquitous computing to micro computing to wired and wireless networks everywhere with the maturation of the www generation (individuals born since 1990 when the WWW was invented) and it's hard to imagine that innovation ends with the social networks of the modern internet age. To make my point a little clearer, think of how significant the change from a text-based to a point-and-click windows-based paradigm has been on the evolution and utilization of technology today. Granted, there were also incredible advances in computing power (faster, smaller, and cheaper.) Now think about transformations that may result from the popularization of other modes of HCI. For example voice driven UIs and touch-screens that are already increasingly in use today. And then imagine how transformative gesture-based UI's will be when they move from the lab to the mainstream. And it's fun to imagine what will be next. Emotive interfaces? Or thought-based interfaces like those being developed for amputees learning to control prosthetic limbs with their thoughts. And put this all together in virtual worlds / augmented realities - worlds in which point-and-click seems so out of place. What happens when our experience with these virtual worlds are no longer constrained by a 20th century construct like point-and-click? This all sounds so Gibsonian, a la Neuromancer, but it's truly more fact than fiction at the begining of 2010, than it was in 1984, before the world wide web was even invented! There's so much more I want to explore here on this topic, but all I can do is make note of it at this time: -what will it mean when we reconnect the mind-hand correlation with how we interect in social web (virtual or not) and not filtered by intermediary devices souch as a mouse or a stylus. This is not something a quick observational test could reveal, but it is really an exploration of transformations of systems over time intereacting with other systems, a la cybernetics and sociocybernetics. -if/when these virtual reality spaces go mainstream with the evolution of computing power and HCI, how will virtual economies arise and overlap with "real world" economies? -what will be the interplay between the evolution of these new interfaces and how we communicate not just with other people but also with AI enhanced machines - and how will our understanding and implementation of AI change. There's certainly room for a lot of expirimentation and research! Twitter seems like an excellent sandbox for this experimentation by the way. Plenty of new data available daily for training some sort of genetic programming engine.

What I think I learned in 2009 about social media.

As November is winding down and we're on the brink of another new year, I've been reflecting on what I've learned in 2009 and all the cool new ways that I see the world, my place in it, at large and in my local community, and how I might be able to make a difference all around.  I didn't sit down tonight with any intent to catalog these things at this time.  Instead, what I do want to do is to share a recurring theme that has struck me time and again over the past year and that I think is indicative of more to come.

Before I go any further with this I'd like to clear something up.  A lot of people, me included, are weary of the crush of self-proclaimed social media experts.  I'm not positioning myself as a "guru of new".  Yes, there are true experts out there.  No doubt about that.  I’m not one of them though. I'm writing this as a guy who's been watching, listening, learning, talking, reading and basically living through what I think is a really transformative time. Besides all that, I've got an opinionated mind and gosh darn it I like to talk about what I think.

There's no doubt about it that 2009 has been the year of social media. I'm not making any observation here that you, dear reader, aren't already aware of - all of these things have been hard to ignore:  Facebook's ascendance to over 300 million users worldwide, Twitter's improbable and seemingly sudden popularity, the continued popularity of blogging, vlogging, podcasting, and the consumerization of smart phones (thanks to the iPhone they're not just for business users anymore.)  All these things, among many others, have lead to the creation of jobs with titles, let alone collections of specialized skill sets, that we rarely heard of before, if ever.  At least, I never did.

I have had numerous conversations over the course of the past year about the buzz cum clarion call that is social media, exploring what it means, how can I use it, and how are things changing.  That exploration started for me in earnest when I had the good fortune to be introduced to Jeremy Epstein via LinkedIn.  Granted, this was an exchange through several email conversations and a brief phone call where I mostly listened and asked questions.  I'm still applying what I learned from those early conversations today (to varying degrees of success!)

In February I was also lucky enough to connect with Robert Stanke and Jeremy Lattimore, two individuals from whom I learned a lot through our conversations over the course of the winter and spring.  It was through these conversations that I demystified the fuzzy "social media" terminology when I came to understand that the internet, since its very inception, has always been social.  Granted, that was in a much less ubiquitous way through bulletin boards and relay chats.  I also explored this with Jeff Pesek when we met back in July.

I agree, the statement, "the internet has always been social" isn't an earth shattering insight.  Nonetheless to me it was a powerful one.  I couldn't put my finger on why until I read the phrase "Attention Economy" somewhere in one of Jeremy Epstein's blog postings.  I don't remember what the rest of the article was about.  But here's what it did for me:

In a world where it's easier than ever to connect with people who share common interests, passions, goals...

In a world where, because of these connections, more and more of us can self-organize, self-teach, self-lead, and self-identify with ease and at little or no cost...

In a world where we've "had it up to here" with disenfranchisement on the one hand (in whatever flavor resonates with you: economic, political, professional, etc) and noisy loudmouths dominating the local and national dialog on the other...

In such a world, the maturation and socialization of the internet promises to transform the idiomatic paradigm of the "Attention Economy" to one of a "Conversation Economy." In this transformation, engaged, informed, intelligent discussion and participation can win out over sound bites, punditry and passive consumption. An impassioned and empowered economy of ideas that is far more inclusive than what we have so far sounds good to me.  This is not a new idea - in fact it's been underway for quite some time.  The social media sea change (this includes blogging) just brought its potential mainstream.

At least that's what I think!  What about you, what do you think?