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Editor's Notes

• #11: This is interesting and mental- that I can name “friends” people I don’t recognise. Clearly it is something which is worth a bit more digging…
• #12: 120m log onto fb at least once per day 120 hours youtube/ minute Average 14 hours week excluding emails for adults- probably more for most of us. Ondi Timoner- We live in Public Intel- 48% women and 30% men would give up sex rather than internet for 2 weeks
• #13: 48%! Maybe its time to start worrying- either about our internet addiction or else the sexual abilities of modern men.
• #14: Nicholas Carr argues that the web is making us stupid by encouraging us to rapidly skim between information, rather than delve deeply into topics in the way books encourage us to. We Live in Public is a film by the great Ondi Timoner on the first internet entrepreneur, whose dystopian predictions on a connected society are slowly becoming realized in some senses.
• #15: One way to make the web work for you is to simply disconnect yourself from it to stop it sucking any more of your time. This extreme reaction has nonetheless had some supporters recently. Top Left- Whopper Sacrifice revealed the superficiality of online friendship by swapping friends for burgers. &0,000 friends were deleted in 2 weeks. Top Right- Restart Is the first internet addiction centre, which opened in the US in 2009. Bottom Left- Sepukoo became infamous when Facebook tried to ban it. It promises to be a “virtual suicide” which will delete your online identity and leave only an RIP page. Its popularity coincided with the furor over Facebook’s privacy changes, and the coming release of That Facebook movie, “The Social Network”. Bottom Right- March 20 is now the National Day of Unplugging, where you switch of your phone, don’t go near the computer, and spend a day without using technology. Those who took part last time described feelings of anxiety and stress, followed by relaxation.
• #16: Aside from switching off altogether, which is not a long-term strategy, we are finding value in the real world experiences which cannot be replicated online. Top Left- Cadbury spots vs Stripes is based on getting people to play and become involved, inventing their own games. Whether or not it works, experiences seems to be the holy grail at the moment for advertisers. Top Middle- The blackberry work focused on this disparity between online friends, and real experiences which their work. Top Right- The Facebook Roadtrip, which was subsequently replicated by Windows for their spectacularly unsuccessful Kin phone, was the journey of an individual to meet all his Facebook friends in person. It was described as a way to show they are more than just names on a page. Bottom left- Dentyne’s campaign built on the idea that real connections are more powerful than their online equivalents. Bottom middle- You are Really Rich placed a monetary value on experiences, as a way of redefining what is valuable. What is truly valuable turns out to be relationships, connections and experiences. Bottom Right- Red Bull’s strategy has been experiential for a while now. Their model is to put on a great live event, let people experience it, film it and put it online. Repeat. In fact since T-Mobile Dance, the participatory experience model of communications has become mainstream, even when there is no reason to make something “participatory” (shame on you Kingsmill Confessions and Pantene Swish)
• #17: But more importantly we are weaving the web into our lives. Mobile technology liberated the internet from the static screen, while the time we now spend online has meant we need to find ways to better live with the web, so it has a positive not negative impact on our lives. It is sometimes called Post-Digital. Top Left- Aram Bartholl is an artist who focuses on the tension between on and offline life. His work often takes the norms and conventions of the online world (such as Google map symbols or captcha boxes), and places them in the real world. Top Middle- Blogs are being printed out in huge numbers. Russell Davies’ fantastic Newspaper Club shares printing resources to allow anyone to create their own papers. He argues there is something inherently more satisfying about holding stuff in your hands, than looking at it on a screen, and I tend to agree. Top Right- I can’t remember a presentation in the last 2 years which hasn’t mentioned Chalkbot, but here it is. Something about printing tweets on a road and removing them from the virtual space makes them a lot more exciting. The interaction of the real and the virtual is exciting to us. Bottom Left- Monopoly City Street brought the Monoply game into the real world, letting people play in the city by buying streets on Google. Bottom Middle- Telepresence is going to be developing fast in the next few years, and the travel industry is predicted to lose $3.5bn in plane fares. The idea is to bring interactions off screen and into the room. Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro of Osaka University has invented the telenoid R1 to mimic human interaction and avoid misunderstanding which are common with text based communication, giving it gestures and facial movements. Clearly though it remains utterly terrifying and sat firmly in the “Uncanny Valley”(http://ow.ly/2S5Py) Bottom Right- Location based services may still rely on using your mobile screen to access the information, but they certainly let you live in the “real world” to a greater extent than PC internet access. Foursquare, Scavenger and now Facebook Places, integrate the internet into your daily life, and serve you wherever you are, rather than being a portal you have to go and explicitly log on to.
• #18: The “internet of things” is part of this same trend, where everything around us is being connected up and communicating with each other. Last year carriers added 2.6m devices, much of which is down to “things” rather than mobiles. It closes the divide between on and offline when our real world objects are connected up. Top left- Stickybits allows you to scan barcodes with your smartphone and attach content to them- photos, comments videos. It is yet to find a use, but is interesting in its scope. Top Middle- Itizen is a service which lets you tag objects, and upload a story about them. It is built on the idea that we attach a lot of value to objects because of the stories behind them, and this is a place to share them. Top Right- RFID chips are being inserted into clothing to collect data. It could be used to trigger music when you enter a store or get home, find data on the individuals buying particular lines, and even show where they are worn. It is no longer niche either, and Marks & Spencer ( a large British retailer) is demoing them in stores as it allows individual items to be tracked down the entire supply chain. Bottom- Pachube is a platform for connected objects which supports data from a wide range of inputs. Actually a lot less boring than it sounds- it contains a huge mass of data just waiting to be put to good use. Bottom Right- The “Boris Bikes” just released in London are embedded with RFID chips so they can be tracked around the city, timing how long they are away from a docking and how far they go.
• #19: While the “internet of things” works behind the scenes, the internet can also be a layer on top of our world, adding information, entertainment or social connections onto reality. Top Left- The great app for the Museum of London superimposes historic photos on the current landscape, using GPS and your iphone. Top Middle- One of thousands of location based apps, Nike True City gives recommendations from local opinion formers. Top Right- Google Goggles offers the impressive ability to search without typing. Taking an image of something on your phone will automatically search for it, whether it is a brand, a building, a painting or others besides. Bottom Left- Jamie’s Oliver’s iphone app is, again, one of many cookery apps, but I mention it because I have it and it has genuinely changed my behaviour. When walking around Tesco I now choose what to buy using his app, never writing down ingredients or shopping lists. Bottom Middle- It is not just information being layered on top of reality, but also game mechanics. Scavenger is an attempt to “build a game layer on top of the world”, creating a platform for users to create their own scavenger hunts. Bottom Right-
• #20: Interestingly even when we are online, in a virtual world, we seem drawn to things which are “real”. One of the first virals was subservient chicken which gave the illusion of there being a real man on the other end of the video. Top Left- The branding of Youtube videos as “Fake” as become a running joke on youtube, but there is a significant community of people who police youtube for videos claiming to be real which are not. Top Right- The most popular videos are virtually all unscripted snapshots of real life, such as “Charlie bit my finger”. Bottom Left- T-Mobile Dance, with its 20 million views, was successful not because it created a choreographed dance in “Adland”- I.e. a nice 30 second ad on a set. It was successful because it was done for real. Bottom Right- Chat Roulette, for all the unreality of sat talking to a man dressed as a cat, the excitement is about the sudden and unpredictable connection with another real person. If it was avatars instead of live video it would not have achieved anywhere near the same level of hype.
• #21: The internet is only just reaching this point where it becomes socially interesting and useful in our lives. The technology is built and we seem to be using it less as a novelty now but rather working it into the fabric of our lives.
• #22: In Summary the internet has grown more mature, and has therefore become useful rather than just novel. There were a lot of “novel” uses back in the day like Second Life, but arguably usability issues killed them. It is now no longer a platform trapped in PC monitors, it is everywhere around us, in everything we touch, and affecting every aspect of our lives.
• #24: Apologies If I have missed anyone- a lot of people have written on similar subjects.