I had a chance to go to the Mobile Muse 3 Project Showcase today. Mobile Muse is a project out of SFU CPROST supporting new mobile applications in various ways and doing research on its impacts on communities, cultures and business, all the while. It was an excellent chance to see what a lot of people are hoping to do and where they’re thinking of going with neat mobile applications. (Assuming, of course, this all doesn’t take until 2012 to happen for reals.)
At the same time, I had a couple of surreal moments, only the surface of which my event twitters touched upon. Mostly, it had to do with the unending stream of buzzwords. I really enjoyed the Fearless City and Public Dreams Society’s presentations. Somewhere into the thick of it, I started thinking of the splintering of attention spans that happens when you find yourself in places or in the midst of experiences so densely layered with information that everyone else seems to have access to, that you don’t. The buzzwords were flying fast and furious. Throughout history, the physical space has had a monopoly on our senses, but, these technologies and applications promise, this will be no longer. Now it’s a configurable stream populated with citizen cameras, short codes, signals, all to be opted in or out of at will – at least that’s what the web apps look like, and I think increasingly they look more and more like models for the way we’re approaching our own attention.
I guess I’m really poking at the robustness of want, and how we conceive of it in terms of our moment-to-moment experiences and what we feel is possible. Then again, that’s just because I went directly from that presentation, to reading Matthew Good – always enlightening. Though it brought me back to thinking about structuring experience, artifacts of it, the meaning we infuse in those artifacts. The meaning is not the problem…so I’m not sure what is. But in that room, there were definitely a multitude of ways of conceiving of meaning, community, connectedness and personal expression, and it was interesting to see an audience watch all those meanings demanding different types of currency and legitimacy from the audience (and ultimately the jury who decides which projects will be part of Mobile Muse 3) in the guise of a call for proposals.
.
One thing is for sure – if I ever find myself pitching a proposal, I will need to find a way to have some sort of buzzword counter, and to set a limit for myself. If the words used around another word are all making reference to other poorly-conceived words, without making reference to actually meaningful, well-articulated or illustrated concepts, the communicative aspect is lost. It might as well be the infamous yadda yadda yadda. But I was hardly the intended audience for the presentation, and it was probably the most potent, rocket-fuel distillation of the mobile stuff I’ve ever had in three hours, so it’s more than likely that I’m just being grumpy.
It was a good 3-hour distraction from the fact that the State of Wireless in Canada Sucks, as Tom Purves would say.
