Interactive Media Environment to Drive Next-Generation Collaboration

A key feature of the contemporary media environment is interactivity. From clicking big data into information visualizations to personal digital assistants to MMORPGs to crowd-produced digital art to on-demand video content integrated with real-time social networking, interactivity is the underlying expectation of any contemporary media experience.

So far, the interactive media environment and its deployments have been realized mostly in the areas of entertainment and information, and at the level of the individual. While it can be argued that ‘interactivity as a feature’ is an obvious progression in the evolution of technology, something much more profound is happening. At a higher level, the interactive media environment is facilitating the fuller development of the individual, and also of groups.

As Clay Shirky heralded, online interactions are progressing from social networking to content sharing to action-taking. The expectation of interactivity and sociality as a feature of web properties means that an interesting next level of human collaboration can be envisioned. Some of the examples of this include eLabor marketplaces, software communities like Wikipedia and Linux, and problem-solving groups like Foldit and EteRNA.

What are the Next Media for Art?

Any prominent societal ‘currency’ is taken up by artists (and technologists and engineers) as an experimental medium. "Every culture will use the maximum level of technology available to it to make art" - Scott Draves, Generative Artist.

Recent societal currencies of prominence and dominance have included technology, information, biology, and raw data. All have been taken up by artists, scientists, laypersons, and other practitioners through the ease of widely available Internet-based tools (Examples in Figure 1).

Figure 1: Digital Art, InfoViz, BioArt, DataArt

The question would obviously arise as to ‘What are the next media for art?’ (e.g.; the continually new New Media). One way to answer is to prognosticate upcoming societal currencies. Some advancing societal currencies could be 3D printing feedstock (already starting to be exploited as an artistic medium), and pink goo – having more granularity and diversity of categories in synthetic biology.

Reliable access to an objective reality

Already people obtain their ‘news’ from a variety of sources, a mix of traditional media and new media, especially tweetstreams and blogs (for example from NPR’s Andy Carvin (“The Revolution will be Tweeted”)). This suggests that more different versions of reality are being created and perceived.

The issue of ‘what is objective reality’ and reliable access to it could become more important over time. Reality-confirmation tools could likely proliferate. One example is the contemplated arrival of thousands of privately-owed microcams descending to film any situation of interest and posting opensource footage or auctioning it to bidders (proposed by David Brin in Kiln People). Like blogs and phonecams, private microcams could further counter the influence and propagandizing of media, and provide a more reliable confirmation of reality.

In the longer term, individuals may have a more explicit ability to manage the realities they access. Different realities could be shared at different times per volition and convenience (an extension of Nancy Kress’s shared reality concept in the Probability Trilogy).

Twittering Dante

Is medium sacred or could any content be served up in any medium? As vast content libraries are increasingly available on the web, content consumption should take whatever form is convenient and preferable to the user.

There is user-generated content and user-specified content is the next logical step. The amount of content available in multiple forms is growing, some examples are Audible books, and talks and interviews presented as transcripts, podcasts and videos.

User-specified content
In a robust platform, users could select content topic, format, level, detail tier and social dimension. Content topic is the main parameter chosen at present. Delivery formats could range from the text formats of book, academic paper, article, blog post and tweet to the multimedia formats of audio, video, slidecast, video game, etc. The level of content could be most basically popular vs. expert. The detail tier could be summary, outline, article, full detail and annotated version. Social dimension would include comments and reviews by others. These could all be drop-down menus at the top of Wikipedia.

Medium purists will insist that the only way to view the Mona Lisa is to hike up to the humid corridor at the Louvre and squeeze in to peer at the small canvas with the rest of the crowd but others are moving with the times. Who will be the first entrepreneur to do a twelevator pitch - twitter a business plan - to a VC, which VC will be the first to request twelevator pitches? If you can't explain your business in 140 characters or less, fahgetaboutit!

New literacy content and medium synesthesia
The new literacy is that the educated person of today is able to express ideas in a variety of media – in some combination of the traditional reading and writing AND in computer programs, 3d virtual worlds, synthetic biology, video games, 3d printing and visual storytelling. Does the new literacy mean that there could be a representation of all content in all media? Is there an opera of Cornell fab@home objects? What does an Indiana Jones movie look like in synthetic biology? What is a kinesthetic experience of protein folding?

Universal voices, Message separated from Medium, Ubiquitous choice

Doug Rushkoff at the 2004 PopTech conference makes several great points related to some of the ongoing themes discussed in this blog, listen to the talk here.

Theme: Increasing democratization of the world
Rushkoff cites the European Renaissance as where media (e.g.; books) became distributable and everyone could access it and have opinions, it was the birth of the individual; the Renaissance human tech culture is currently going through is that everyone can now be an author. Some examples are via personal websites, blogs, building our own software (open source), applications (free APIs), games and new online mini-worlds/experiences. It is interesting to think about how collective consciousness models and other tools may evolve for orchestrating and making accessible not overwhelming all of these voices (15-20 million blogs as of Jan. 2005 and growing exponentially). They'll likely (self?)organize into like streams but should they?

Theme: The medium is the message - the tool is the innovation
Rushkoff cautions that the sexiness of the medium heavily influences the message, for example, because TV was new and personal and invasive in the home, Dan Rather could end newscasts saying "...And that's the way it is" and everyone would believe him. We don't believe the newscasters any more as full arbiters of the situation they are discussing. As critical thinkers, we need to separate the message from the medium and evaluate the merits of the message on its own. The message may be much less powerful and overwhelming than the medium, especially with a lot of new media likely on the way - holographic, 3-D, brain-implanted, etc. How are blogs as a medium influencing the message?

Theme: Shift away from market-centric life structure and value systems
Another interesting point Rushkoff makes is that yes, we are awash with choice, which is good, but it is only in a market context. He uses the example of if you are in love with someone, the only current societally accepted way to act on that is to be married. We don't yet have true choice in lifestyle and many other areas. Take work, for example, it is rare that it's not structured as location and time specific, when being efficiency specific makes much more sense. In the tech world is an example of a successful efficiency-based transition: search is going from statistics-based to relevancy-based. Hopefully new attention on the presence of choice in some arenas and not in others will allow it to be drawn into where it is not.