Future Minds: the map of how screen culture is changing how we think

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My colleague Richard Watson, building on the success of his book Future Files, has now launched Future Minds, which explores how screen culture is changing the way we think today, and how it will shape our future.

When I read the Contents and Overture to Future Minds, my first thought was that Richard and I should organize a public debate. In contrast to Richard’s tone of caution I think there are immense opportunities in having our brains shaped by digital culture (though certainly also things to be wary of).

Here is the map that Richard has created to acccompany the book. I saw early drafts of this as long as a year ago, so this has definitely not been cribbed from other recent maps with a similar look and feel.

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Click on map to view as full-size pdf

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The top tweets from Future of Crowdsourcing Summit 2010 #foc10

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Things have been crazy for me for a little while now. It’s now two weeks since Future of Crowdsourcing Summit 2010, and I am only just now able to download some of what happened at the event. The feedback from participants at the Summit has been consistently excellent, and we have been keen to share some of the great insights at the event with the world at large.

We do not have full video of the event, however we do have audio, and we will be sharing that before long, together with some written excerpts from what the speakers said. In the meantime, here is a small selection of some of the more interesting tweets from the event. (Note that since Twitter search only goes up to 10 days ago, I have retrieved the tweets from Topsy, which has an excellent search though I’m not sure that it has captured all of the twitterstream.)

You’ll notice some emerging themes from these tweets – I’ll expand on some of these later.

@bhc3: #foc10 Winsor: Victors & Spoils are developing reputation ratings for creatives based on their crowdsourcing contributions.

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Culture jamming is where it’s at: morphing the news into a Billboard hit single

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At the turn of the decade I selected Culture Jamming as one of the top 10 trends of the 2010s.

We have a fantastic example of that in the Auto-Tune the News series from members of the Gregory Brothers band. These take actual TV news coverage and use auto-tune to create songs.

The latest song in the series, Bed Intruder (below) has hit #25 on the iTunes top sellers, and solely on that basis (since that is the only way the song is distributed) it is now ranked as number 89 on the Billboard Hot 100.

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Key trends in media and communications usage

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Ofcom, UK’s communications regulator, annually produces what is the most detailed study of the local communications marketplace available anywhere in the world. Every year it provides deep insights into many aspects of media and communications usage and the state of the industry, and Communications Market Report 2010 is another gem.

Depending on your interests different data will come out – here are some of the results I found interesting. All charts are from the Ofcom report.

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The results that have received the most attention is the multi-tasking in media usage. Everyone multi-tasks, but younger people more, to the point of 29% of media usage being concurrent in 16-24 year olds. Back in our Future of Media Report 2006 we described how simultaneous use of media would drive future media consumption.

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Lessons from iPhone4 Applegate: social media augmentation of consumer voices and the need to listen

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A few days ago I was interviewed by ABC’s Newsline program for a segment they did on Apple’s response to the iPhone4 ‘Antennagate’ problem.

Here is the second part of the segment including my thoughts. To see the full piece go to the Newsline archives and click on ‘Bad Press’ dated 21/7.

Despite the way the piece was edited, I was not scathing about Apple’s response. I think their solution of a free Bumper case is, so far, reasonable. However there are two important points.

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Twitter uncovers the real-time mood of the nation through the day

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Some lovely research from Northeastern University uses sentiment analysis to show the changing moods of the United States through 24 hours.

In the video below showing changes over the course of a day, colors indicate people’s moods from red (unhappy) to green (happy), while the size of the state shows how much Twitter activity there is.

A few things that stand out: Early morning and late evening are far happier than other times of the day, California and Florida are the happiest states, and from other research on the site, the unsurprising finding that people are happier on weekends than weekdays.

Click through for the detailed research including a high-resolution pdf summarizing the findings.

Will the future of social networking be open and distributed? Here comes Plexus

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I just caught up with my neighbor and fellow futurist Mark Pesce, who over a coffee at our local briefed me on his new project Plexus, which he publicly announced at his recent keynote at Pycon Australia, for Python developers. His excellent speech, titled How Not to be Seen, is below, and the transcript on Mark’s blog.

In his presentation Mark starts with his long relationship with programming and finally moves on to describe his project Plexus, which will provide a new platform for social networks.

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Headlines around world for Facebook doll censorship story but NOTHING in the US media yet

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Quick update on the Victoria Buckley Jewellery Facebook doll censorship row:

The latest news is here. In short: The ‘Save Ophelia from Facebook censorship‘ Facebook group was simply deleted by Facebook without a trace (AFTER they had deleted the offending doll images leaving only the discussion of Facebook censorship), and Victoria has had to take down any images showing a trace of porcelain (the doll equivalent of flesh) from the Victoria Buckley Jewellery Facebook page.

There has been more coverage of the story overnight. Victoria particularly likes the coverage by Toronto Sun in a story titled Facebook censors nipples on $40K doll which brings out her thoughts on some of the issues at sstae here:

“I’m tired of the female form being an object of prurience exploited by men. I think people are so becoming used to the female form as a symbol for lust, that they have trouble reading it as a representation of other values.

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The digital intensity of weekends – a critical dimension of life we can choose

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Over the last six months, I suppose it is, I have been engaging a lot less online during weekends. Of course it isn’t a coincidence that our younger daughter Phoebe was born just over a year ago. However it is more recently that I’ve pulled back more.

Most visibly I don’t Twitter (that) much on weekends, and these days I rarely return emails on weekends. I used to keep on top of email during weekends.

Anyway, it’s just a personal choice and reality that the cycle of my digital engagement is focused over five days, then I pull back for two days. It’s not that I’m totally off the computer – for example I’m able to write this blog post now as Phoebe is having her afternoon nap and no doubt I’ll be touching base with the world of the web later today.

However it is an absolutely critical dimension to our lives. Some people choose to keep away from technology – or at least a desktop computer – completely during weekends, and even set rules about it. Others keep on engaging in exactly the same way on weekends as during the week, or even intensify their presence as they indulge in their favorite pastime. Many like to keep on top of their communication so they don’t start Monday morning with a backlog to deal with.

How do you spend weekends? Do you connect to the world on the net more, the same or less on weekends than weekdays? And is that how you want it to be?

So much of our future is about us choosing how we use technology.

Facebook’s arbitrary, unwarranted, and unexplained actions: it needs to learn from its mistakes

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VBJ_composite.jpgApologies if you’re sick of this story – I am too. But the latest in this sordid saga needs to be reported.

The background: On Saturday Facebook threatened closing down Victoria Buckley Jewellery’s Facebook page because it showed an unclothed doll (top image at left), prompting widespread media coverage and global discussion. Many mainstream media such as Sydney Morning Herald and London Evening Standard used the original picture, suggesting that they didn’t think it was objectionable.

As Victoria was scared of losing her Facebook page with now close to 2,000 fans, a key way of connecting to her customers and community, she deleted images of the doll from her fan page, and replaced them with self-censored images, black bands hiding what Facebook presumably considered to be ‘nudity’ (middle image on the left). She put the original images on a new Facebook page Save Ophelia – exquisite doll censored by Facebook. Facebook promptly deleted the images from the site, and shortly afterwards closed down the site completely. Given all the offending images had been already deleted, they presumably objected to the discussion of Facebook’s censorship.

The latest: Facebook have now deleted the self-censored image of the doll from the Victoria Buckley Jewellery Facebook page, leaving her with nothing (bottom image on the left, though she has now replaced it with an image that contains no trace of either flesh or porcelain, for safety’s sake).

Since Facebook have yet to contact Victoria, or to my knowledge respond to the many media requests for response on this issue, we can only guess what they found objectionable about the censored image. Her chin? The way her legs are crossed? The length of her hair?

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