Cool: Being offline

Using social media has become a mainstream activity - this is at least what surveys like Social Media Tracker wave 3 (byUniversal McCann) tell us. If that is truly so, being active in networks, blogs, tweets etc. must be already yesteryear's fashion to the trendsetters and early adopters. Its simply not cool to be main stream!

In fact, the world is ripe for a counter trend to constant online activities, since constant networking also means perpetual disruption which translates to stress and productivity loss.

But how can anyone who makes a point of being part of an elite of forerunners show that offline is the new black?

One way of going offline with style would be to turn logging out into a luxury. In a way, power napping in spas (like Yelo in New York) or with special equipment (like the napshell or the EnergyPod) offers just that.

Another idea could be to have a zero communication service (by telecommunication providers ?)which holds back all communication in a defined area for a selected time. At a premium price, of course. Have not seen this yet but it is just a question of time...

Companies can also reserve rooms where employees can work completely uninterrupted. Would it not feel like a privelege to work for a company that frees staff from stress?

At any rate, stating that one decided to quit a network or an online habit may become just as main stream as joining one of the community services. As an added value, such a statement adds an aura of no-nonsense down-to-earth rationality to the person who made the statement.

Come to think of it, such a statement started yesterday's Iconoculture newsletter: "I committed Twittercide the other day. And while I'm sure it was disappointing to the couple hundred Twitter followers who had gotten used to updates on what I ate for dinner (usually lasagna) or my level of exhaustion (high), I retired my account for many reasons — one of which was the fact that I wasn't having much fun with that aspect of my identity anymore."

Related: Communicate Less

Picture by OmirOnia (sxc)

Living in "the One"

In the video below, Kevin Kelly, founding executive editor of Wired magazine, talks about the future of the web. His starting point is that the World Wide Web is just around 5000 days old. And yet, it has already transformed from a net where computers link to each other to a web in which pages link to each other. The next steps will be interlinking data, ideas, whole databases and physical objects. As a result what we now know as the Web will transform into the Internet of Things in the next 5000 days. The Internet of Things will possibly be more like an organism, and we are a part of this encompassing "One".

Not only the idea of "the One" is interesting but also how Kelly supports his vision. He refers to the dated vision from 5000 days ago that the future would be about "TV, but better". This has proven to be a wrong prediction - and what can (or must?) be learned from this false prediction is that something that appears impossible today has a likelier probability than something that is within the confines of our today's perception of reality. In that sense "the internet, but better" is not a likely end point of the next 5000 days.
Kevin Kelly also compares our total dependence on the alphabet today to the total dependence on "the One" that we may experience in the future: It will not be frightening, it will be the usual.

In a way, we have already started to ask "the One" about ourselves. Look at Gartner's prediction that trend watching will become a must for many companies in the future (see this posting). Demand for behavior monitoring is fuel for tools that can intelligently make sense of the blogs, comments, news that are being produced every day through semantic processing. Such tools already exist (e.g. Audience Wisdom of Active Inspire) and they will learn to become better.



Now, here some food for thought: When we will be totally connected to "the One" we will forget that we are connected. When we never plug out, we will lack a notion of being plugged in.

What if that has already happened and we are so wired into "the One" (or call it "the Matrix" :-) that we cannot even imagine what it is like to be outside? Well, I don't know but at any rate this is fuel for the Simulation Argument that I mentionend in an earlier post.) And, yes, I would like to plug in and out according to my own choice...

Video found through freshcreation

Mobile Graffiti

Stumbled across a really cool mobile tagging project in Edinburgh called Spellbinder:.

"Spellbinder is a new interactive digital medium based on camera phones and image matching. Using Spellbinder, digital content can be embedded in the real world by taking a photograph of an object or place. The digital content can be released by another user by taking another photograph of the same location. Spellbinder does not require special markers or barcodes to be placed in the world and works indoors or outdoors. Unlike tracking technologies such as global positioning systems, the focus is onwhat specifically is being looked at rather than where the user is. "

Currently, the system is used for an Edinburgh Invisible Art project (see picture from the interesting BBC article about this, but, as Dr Mark Wright of the Division of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh told the BBC, not just locations but practically everything could be linked to the virtual world. "With Spellbinder, the real world becomes a computational resource."

Fascinating: Take a picture of a real life object and get information, pictures, sounds, comments from your community,... in return. Lots of applications possible. But what really entices me is that mobile tagging based on real objects instead of code is one more step towards living in a world where virtual and real are no longer distinguishable. Yep, I fell for the Simulation Argument which says that if mankind is at some point able to build a simulation of the real world (and it looks like we're getting there), then chances are we are already living in one. And I think that is a consolation :-)

Renewable emails?

Shocking news: emails, avatars, blogs like this - well everything that is part of the internet is adding to climate change! Süddeutsche wrote today (based on an NYT article) that a single Google search requires the same energy as a 11-Watt-light bulb per hour and a Second Life avatar needs an average 1752 kwh per year - more than some real humans for instance in India. Research from Prognos Institut estimated that electricity consumption for internet is responsible for CO2 emissions of 4 million tons per year in Germany alone, putting Internet on the same level as the aviation industry. As data traffic is constantly increasing, internet is a real (climate) killer application.
This puts a lot of internet offers - from eco-innovation blogs like the one at treehugger to established green brands like greenpeace and every one in the LOHAS (lifestyle of health and sustainability) customer segment at a serious dilemma. An equivalent to recycled paper is needed: Recycled webpages? Well, close: If you choose a black instead of a white background for your site, this will substantially reduce energy consumption for most monitors. For the clear eco-conscience, you can get a CO2 free e-mail address from atomstromfreies Internet an initiative of Greenpeace Energy. A great idea is also to ban email, at least for one day, as U.S.Cellular did with its "email free friday" (see story in Wall Street Journal), an initiative meant to ease workers' overload. Or just pull the plug.