The Future is Augmentation
Danah Boyd is right on in this post from a few weeks ago:
If you look at the rise of social tech amongst young people, it’s not about divorcing the physical to live digitally. MySpace has more to do with offline structures of sociality than it has to do with virtuality. People are modeling their offline social network; the digital is complementing (and complicating) the physical. In an environment where anyone _could_ socialize with anyone, they don’t. They socialize with the people who validate them in meatspace. The mobile is another example of this. People don’t call up anyone in the world (like is fantasized by some wrt Skype); they call up the people that they are closest with. The mobile supports pre-existing social networks, not purely virtual ones.
If you follow the comment trail from the post, you’ll see some Second Life backlash. I actually think Danah and those posters are actually agreeing on the important parts.
I messed around quite a bit with Second Life–(born 9/18/2005). I know, at that time, there had been much less hype on it. To me, if I had been 10 years younger, I would have been all over exploring and creating in it–just for the fact that it was a new playground. But, I think there is still plenty to do there. It is an environment that levels the playing field to many real world constraints… you have the freedom to design, test, build, code, and make things come alive. It is fascinating in so many ways.
However, what bothers me is how people see Second Life, reading the tea leaves and predicting the future. How do you interpret Second Life as a faint signal on the fringe? First — what is it really (what is it similar to now and in the past, how is it different)? Second — how big is its impact (scale–people and $ and time, growth–of those same variables)? And finally, what are the secondary and tertiary impacts of all the time, money, and people involved?
But I don’t want to answer those questions in this post. What I want to do is loop back to the quote from Danah. The future is not about being virtual, online or offline, digital, etc. All of those descriptions are less meaningful. The future will be richer analog deepened by digital. Life will be augmented by technology. We won’t define going online or offline. The Web won’t be something we connect to. Those distinctions fade away. I will “see” hyperlinks in the real world. My social networks will exist on my phone, in space and time, at my backyard barbecue.
I think the deeper trends that portend this are things like presence, persistence, identity, privacy, high-speed wireless connection, unlimited bandwidth, cheap recording and production tools, etc.
Second Life is what it is because it enables actions and experiences that are more difficult or impossible in our analog life. But the same can be said for my analog life–it will be very difficult for Second Life to replicate some of my analog experiences. So rather than getting caught up in the “virtual” part of Second Life as a signal for the future, perhaps you can read it this way:
The best virtual environment is an analog one that enables me to do what I can’t do in the analog.
It’s a paradox of course. A koan. But that little riddle is the future.
Until I have enough for a second post, I’ll keep adding comments and more on this topic in the single post page.
I had forgotten about Sterling’s article. It’s more about him signing off then the topic itself… but this quote is more than relevant.
For instance, Pew daintily inquires: In coming decades, are people going to vanish into the Net, permanently absorbed by addictive VR-style experiences? The reaction stretches predictably from “You must be nuts” to “Of course, it’s happening already.” And what’s the centrist opinion? If an innovation works, some people will thrive on it, while others who are screwed up to begin with will face severe new problems.
December 27th, 2006 at 10:46 pm
Isn’t augmentation here and been here for a while? As a whole, it is subtle. As a little spark that may affect your personal life, it seems amazing.
I do agree that we will always use digital methods to enhance our very analog human life. I have recently visited with three octagenarians. They don’t see the digital world changing their lives, but it does augment them without their knowledge or approval. Neither own a DVD player, Ipod, or use GPS to get to the drug store, but the technology used to enhance every visit to theif doctors goes unnoticed, yet augmenting their lives - literally.
December 28th, 2006 at 6:48 am
Yes, it has been here. But I’m not sure augmentation is always subtle — deep brain stimulation for treating Parkinson’s for example.
I think I’m more focused on what the web and connectedness are providing in the ways of augumentation, rather than tackling the entire world of technology. I think there is no doubt that technology, long before bits and bytes, even electricity, was the definition of augmenting the analog.
But in terms of virtual environments specifically, my theory on augmentation is the koan: The best virtual environment is an analog one that enables me to do what I can’t do in the analog.