blog.plugimi.com ( Sascha Pohflepp )

I might turn this into a bit of a visual sketchbook in the future.

We’ve just announced this and you’re invited–

Stuart Candy is a multimedia futurist at the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies in Honolulu and the first Research Fellow of the Long Now Foundation in San Francisco. A pioneer in so-called “guerrilla futures”, both his widely read blog the sceptical futuryst and his PhD research at the University of Hawaii at Manoa are about the communication of foresight through the design of future-evoking situations and artifacts. In 02006, with colleague Jake Dunagan (now at the Institute for the Future), he started FoundFutures, a public art initiative devoted to making future scenarios experientially available in everyday life. Late last year, Stuart served as Game Master for the world’s first massively multiplayer forecasting game, “Superstruct”, and he is currently leading development of a public alternate reality game about pandemic influenza hitting Hawaii.

March 16th at Demos, 19h. Free but limited capacity, please RSVP on Meetup

Earlier tonight at Indian take-away, checking Twinkle. Randomly checked the ‘near me’ tweets, noticed lots @stephenfry. Didn’t mean much to me, turned attention back to TV screen where a documentary was showing, and it took me a few moments to realize that it was by/with Stephen Fry, who is in fact a British journalist. All the people were twittering him comments about his show, scene by scene. I keep being amazed by Twitter, especially by what people make of it in times of elections and such.

Visiting a friend’s place that has before been heavily featured on Flickr is no different from visiting a set where a familiar movie was shot. The similarities between social media and narrative media, as we tried to sketch with this project in 2005 are becoming increasingly visible and are merging into one stream.

Everyone’s an actor now, creating a great number of what Jyri Engeström calls Social Objects on the way. Maybe even TV shows like Big Brother were an early sign of that, in the way that they turned the private (although it is a scripted private) into a form of entertainment. Consequentially, according to psychiatrists in Montréal, there’s now what they call the Truman Show Disorder, which has people believe they actually are actors in a script.

News from an optimistic future, curiously plausible with sunny Sunday afternoon, Jonathan Richman and Yo La Tengo playing. (Via BB)

The other day, thanks to Jyri, I became able to use Spotify, something I had long been wishing to try out. This happened mostly through Twitter and mobile e-mail, so when I got home to east London and installed the software, it seemed to me as if someone had given me a million CDs on the bus and said “here you go”. It’s sounds funny, but I still don’t quite know how to use it, because the step from having your songs on your device to having all songs (let’s just assume their service carries everything) in the cloud seems quite big. And there’s different aspects to it as well–

iTunes, as an example, basically mirrors a physical record collection which is naturally limited by factors like storage space and money. The notion of the collection however, also implies something else, which is really important with music as a personality vehicle. A collection reflects its owner’s taste and thus serves to distinguish him or her from others, something that usually comes into full effect in puberty and, at least for me, although less strongly, has functioned like that ever since. So, with iTunes, that paradigm is still intact, it even gets extended by people browsing each others iPods on the go and, probably most importantly, constantly exchanging digital files of songs they love.

If you look at the notion of a server-based everything always available-paradigm now, there’s a problem, because, at least in the case of Spotify which even though it works wonderfully, is still lacking any true collection building-features and/or social exchange. These are things that are probably relatively trivial to implement, but they need to be considered. Last.fm, who have recently announced a future business model that is also largely cloud-based, originally came from a completely different corner, because they started with the social aspects. Only now they are including actual playback possibilities, at least for complete songs. As a result of that, the networking aspects of their site are extensive and recognize the social function of music well beyond anything else, with personal data that often reaches back tens of thousands of songs, event attendance and not always successful taste-matching. Presently, they seem to be in a much better position, because if they give their uses access to everything, the framework for showing off, liking, hating, and having a crush on someone’s musical taste will already be in place.

And, I can’t forget to mention Soundcloud here, the lovely people who introduced me to Spotify in the first place on some afternoon in Berlin. Their approach is much more low-level and allows you to get in touch with the music and the musicians on a post-and-comment basis, almost like Flickr for music. They take the social aspect even further, towards interaction, and I’m really curious how that will shine.