Bell Towers
Yesterday… oh no, time is running, must have been the day before yesterday, while everybody in the so called two-point-o scene seemed to be able to spend the day at FOWA, I resorted to follow the event through the virtual echoes bounced via twitter.
In the end, that gave me a brand new perception/perspective of what was going on there: I knew for instance that Tom Coates was late in the morning, that Tara Hunt was cool enough to tweet even from the stage, while others were engaging conversation in the backchannel as it usually happens at such geeky conferences.
What also happened is that I got a pretty accurate “clock” of the event, as Pedro (among others) was promptly broadcasting as every new speaker conquered the stage.
What I didn’t get though was a proper summary of the “content” of the speeches (beyond the title, that is).
Now one could think that means that nothing useful was to be taken from this “ultra-light” form of remote lurking, but the funny thing is that even from these rarified bits of information, the very fact to be able to witness the reactions of those who were attending the conference was enough to give me a whole set of useful, if subtle, information, ranging the general mood to the pace of the day.
I ended up thinking of this disembodied echoes as a sort of sound of a virtual bell tower that, though apparently carrying a straightforward simple message, actually doubles as a powerful landmark in the four dimensions of time and space:
in the same way as you can use a belltower to pinpoint your position relative to a city and time of day, that background noise of fowa related chirps, twitters and screeches helped me to keep a share of attention on the event itself, on the themes that were discussed there, and on some of the reactions they generated.
Vir(tu)al Spaces
The second insight came a few hours later, as I dived in the digital world of Second Life to attend the MeetTheMediaGuru conference with John Maeda.
The meeting was happening in Milan (ironically at no more than a 5 minutes walk from my ex-flat), but has been extended to the Idearium island on Second Life by the brave Leeander & co.
It was the first time for me to be able to attend to an event on SL for its whole duration, and that gave me the opportunity to come up with some considerations on that type of experience:
. The quality of the audio/video stream from Milan was surprisingly much better than I expected. Sadly, it was still far too poor to let me appreciate it thoroughly. But hey, I’m the guy who hates talking at the phone because of its lo-fi… so probably it’s just me being fussy.
. the use of space in the virtual auditorium is still sub-optimal. I think this has to do with the inherited habit of replicating physical-life behaviour in SL, but the fact is that pretty much everybody was just standing in front of the virtual megascreen, with his avatar view zoomed on the videostream, without actually make any use of the Linden world (e.g. taking 3d notes on the fly, sharing resources or links on a potential parallel screen). Being that the case, a quicktime stream coupled with a chat and/or collaborative notetaking could have granted a higher-fi.
. On the other hand, there’s something wicked in being able to be there in a same place (even if, ok, it’s not anything physical) with other people to share an experience: you feel instantly part of a tribe, are more willing to collaborate, you start addressing yourself as “those from Second Life” and push all the group to achievement (in this case being noticed by Maeda and make him answer some of the questions coming from the second audience).
. Having the video embedded inside another complex environment had an interesting effect on my attention level: I was perceiving Maeda’s videostream as the second layer, and as such less urgent / meaningful than a bunch of other apps that were popping and flashing and making attention-magnetic noises.
Thus what happens usually is that the application that I have in the top window gathers most of my attention, and I can (hopefully) get things done at a decent rate.
What happened this time is that the signal was filtered by the layer effect I just described and therefore the noise more often broke the attention threshold and got me totally.
That said, I had a lot of fun and I hope more events like this will keep on coming, so that we’ll be able to explore properly how to make out the most of it.
Hard Covers
Last but not least, after Maeda’s talk I rushed to Amazon and bought books. Plenty of them. All sharing one characteristic: hard cover. Nice, tangible, beautiful hard covers.
The point is that I start feeling like if I love a given book as an artifact, if I appreciate its aesthethics and had to make an effort (i.e. invest a significative amount of money) to get it there’s a good chance that two things will happen:
1. I’ll definitely get to the end of it
2. I’ll learn more, as my experience will be more intense and therefore my attention much sharper.
I’m falling asleep now… better stop here and hit “publish”.
Your Voice