Focal Points

SNL last night was an interesting glimpse into how the internet is evolving and how social media is growing up. Years ago people talked about "growing up the internet". But there's nothing we need to do to make things grow up because life just happens to it. The coronavirus is an inflection point and speeds up the growing process for all types of things--even before we've had a chance to think about how the process should unfold. They have a life of their own.

Inflection points are traumas--trigger points that can have ripple effects for generations perpetuated partially through technology used in daily life (the medium is the message) and for the archiving of memories (messages from the medium).

Teleconferencing is now the new old thing.

Roy Ascott was talking about "telematics" and "telepresence" almost 30 years ago. (Note that there's an interesting glitch ~5:00 on the word "disrupt").




I was also reminded of the 2000 film Timecode by Mike Figgis--with its split-screen surveillance camera monitor interface showing real-time in 4 "live" views.



Now that group chats are having a revival, what happens to other technologies which we thought would be the next big thing--like VR and AR? It's my prediction all-new technologies will be developed in response to the current inflection point. Even AI is less important because it's not what's popular--or will be used to assist everything that is populist.

It gives us an attention span and focus we lacked before, but is it a good focal point?

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It's nice to see people playing music, or they have guitars, etc. in the background. Playing music for mental health!