Links and Thoughts 22: 7 June 2014
Bread – Make It With You
Good Afternoon.
Culture:
“After all, next year, we’ll be as far removed from 1985 as the filmmakers were from 1955.”
Entire Back to the Future town to be recreated for anniversary screening : Kottke.org
Media:
You Are What You Recommend: Publishers Must Be Vigilant with ‘Related Links’ Revenue : Mediashift
Media:
“Earlier this week, I was talking with a fellow journalist about three sites that everyone lumps together, for better or worse: FiveThirtyEight, The Upshot, and Vox. After running through the things I liked and didn’t like about each, I circled back to Vox and said that evaluating it at this early stage felt a little unfair. Unlike the other two, which benefited from a relatively long period of buildup, Vox was born quickly.”
How Vox.com was built in 9 weeks, not 9 months : Nieman Journalism Lab
Books:
Four Lessons Libraries Can Learn From Amazon : Digital Book World
Cities and Citizens:
How TV Predicted America’s Moves From City to ‘Burbs and Back Again : Next City
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Today’s Book Recommendation is Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now by Douglas Rushkoff (paberback isbn 9781617230103) — the title is an obvious riff on Future Shock, written by Alvin Toffler in 1970, and I was reminded of both by the Kottke.org article on Back to the Future [linked above] — especially the intriguing little factoid: We are as far from Marty McFly’s 1985 as Marty was from the 1950s.
We are always marching bravely into the future, most of the time blindly; occasionally running forward while looking resolutely back. Rushkoff differs from Toffler in that he says we suffer not from anxiety in some far-off, imagined future, but instead from the problems of the future now — we live in a sci-fi world (flying cars and jetpacks notwithstanding). Everyone’s favorite example is the smart phone: how do we explain to Marty in 1985 about accessing Google Maps, Wikipedia, and YouTube on the computer we all carry in our pockets? Marty doesn’t even know about the internet and web browsers yet. (Since Marty owns a walkman, maybe he’d get grounded if we started with Spotify or Pandora). State of the Art in ’85 would have been the very first generation of Macs: 8MHz processor, 512K of memory (up from the 128K in ’84s Mac), and a built-in 9” monitor with a resolution of 512×342.
The ‘thing’ about the web, and tablets, and a procession of gadgets and apps, is that everything largely uses the same vocabulary introduced by the Mac — even when we go from keyboard-and-mouse to touchscreen tech, we still point to pick, drag to move, tap to open. A double-tap replaces the right mouse button, but that’s about the only adaptation we’ve had to make. (We’ve all seen the youtube videos of toddlers—and cats—sitting down to use iPads. So long as this remains the UX goal of future designers, we will never experience ‘Future Shock’ with consumer technology ever again. The joke about seniors and VCRs will have to be explained to our great-grandkids; they just won’t get it)
So while a time traveler from 1985 would have to learn how to use a computer, or a smart phone, odds are good that anyone travelling from today to 2045 will likely be able operate just fine. We already know the ‘tech vocabulary’ of screens, menus, apps, windows — a world without obvious buttons, tech we now use even when we watch TV — on Tivos, DVRs, and Netflix. (In some ways, the future will be easier because the only store left will be Amazon, all the food will be Soylent, the GoogleUber cars will drive themselves, and they’ll be more than happy to drive you to the spaceport so you can board the Axiom.) Your toaster has a computer chip in it, your fridge is connected to the internet. The change we’ve seen in just the last 10 years has been enough for lifetime.
…and that’s the point of Rushkoff’s book: we’re drowning in the now, “the dissonance between our digital selves and our analog bodies”. We can always unplug, but for many of us, being offline just doesn’t seem like an option anymore. I take my laptop with me to pubs and bars; I’m a bit anachronistic that way, as most people are happy to sit there with their phone. Check messages, check email, send a text, check email again, if the rest of your friends are running late (someone is always running late) then check your Twitter or Tumblr or Facebook. And when it’s time to ‘have fun’ the phones get put away for a minute, but come back out so we can Instagram, Snapchat, and Tweet about all the fun we’re having. Sometimes you know where you’re going next, after the bar; sometimes you don’t: “When’s the movie playing?” “I feel like pad thai” “How late are they open?” “Here, let me Google that…”
I’ll get my to-buy links sorted out eventually. In the meantime, you can still use most readers’ preferred option.
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