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Another quick note on the changes that come with recording everything…

I have my instant messaging program, iChat, set to “Automatically save chat transcripts”, which is useful in every way remembering the details of a conversation could be useful. Recently, I’ve found myself referencing these transcripts fairly frequently; and so recently, I’ve found myself frustrated with the habit I have of closing chat windows after every burst of messaging. That is, my conversations are cut up across multiple transcript files since I don’t leave the window open for the duration of a conversation (iChat starts a new transcript every time a window is opened/closed). This obviously makes finding a particular bit of a conversation particularly cumbersome since that bit might be located in any one of a dozen or so files. This got me thinking that I need to break this habit so as to ensure contiguous conversations are saved as single transcripts. And that led me to the following thought…

When everything is recorded, people modify their behaviors so that the recorded information is easier to find in the future. continue reading »

After reading Henry Jenkins’ great overview of the ongoing Anonymous vs Scientology saga, I thought I’d watch Mark Bunker’s YouTube plea to Anonymous in which he encourages legal and peaceful tactics in the pursuit of the chruch/cult’s ruination. What I actually found most interesting about Bunker’s video is how, at the 4:37 mark, he mentions links he’s included in the video’s description and then manages to point exactly at the UI elements needed to reveal those links.

Couple interesting things happening here: Interface is influencing content. Content is now invested in unchanging interface. The inevitable adoption of this practice by other users. The emergence of design practices aimed at encouraging more of this type of behavior.

Interactive designers will frequently talk about the spatial organization of an interface. A strong spatial organization provides users with a kinesthetic understanding of where information is situated on- and off-screen, enabling users to thoughtlessly begin moving towards elements prior to locating them visually. But I don’t think any designer has ever considered the implications of an interface’s spatial organization on users who become the content.

Just starting to dig a deeper into the cultural impact of exhaustive recording – part emerging technology, part byproduct of ubiquitous computing. The question is simple: What changes when everything is recorded? What new consumption and production practices emerge in such a future? I don’t mean to imply there will ever be a time when everything is recorded, but the trends I’m seeing are definitely, um, trending in that direction…

Last Sunday’s New York Times ran a story on a company called Replay Solutions. They record computing:

For software developers, the flaws that cause crashes rank among their biggest problems, especially the ones that can’t be reproduced, like the proverbial noise in the car engine that disappears when you visit the mechanic.

Mr. Lindo says he and Mr. Daudel found themselves overwhelmed by bugs they couldn’t find while working together at an Internet start-up in 2002. “We were spending almost all of our time not fixing the issues, but trying to get to the point where we could just see the issue, and we said, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could just TiVo this and replay it?”’ Mr. Lindo recalls.

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Reading Nicholas Nova and Fabien Girardin’s pamphlet, Sliding Friction, I was reminded of Pareidolia, the phenomenon of perceiving something random or immaterial as familiar or significant. As Nova has noted before, a common form of pareidolia is seeing human faces on inanimate objects. Just take a look at the multiple flickr pools dedicated to spotting these abstract faces.

[photos by raumoberbayern, Red Larry Yellow Larry and Alecu2]

But Cory Arcangel’s “Permanent Vacation”, an installation of two computers endlessly responding to each others’ out-of-office email replies, reminded me how much more human computers become when they adopt human behaviors, as supposed to human appearances.

[Permanent Vacation, 2007, Max Wigram Gallery, Ridley Road]

In this case, a seeming rejection of idleness suggests interests beyond those of its owners. “Psst, they’re gone. You up for some Outlook tennis?” Maybe that’s why some find screensavers so fascinating. Do the same expectations that lead us to characterize people without their own interests as boring lead us to desire our computers have hobbies and activities of their own? continue reading »

I noted before how the 21st century seems keenly intent on trying to capture and compile a single recording of all of reality. But whether or not a networked crowd of people and things can manage to stitch together the torrent of videos, photographs, sounds and descriptions into a single digital account is maybe more than I’d like to tackle at the moment. What I do want to consider now is, operating under the assumption that everything is recorded, what changes? And more specifically what I’m interested are the new assumptions, behaviors, production practices and consumption patterns that might emerge in such a future.

Consider Casio’s newest marquee digital camera. The EX-F1’s draw-dropping top-line spec is that it can capture sixty 6-megapixel photographs in one second. That’s 60fps at a fairly handsome resolution (it can also push 1200fps at 336 x 96). But the thinky bit is the workflow that’s been designed around this capability. The EX-F1 can be set to continuously capture images so that the camera offers it’s owner 60 photographs, 30 of which were recorded before the shutter button was ever pressed. continue reading »