Click here to view the embedded video.

Billed as a dive into the “rapid evolution of data visualisation tools”, last week’s ‘Future Human: Transparent Life’ could have lost its audience at ‘hello’. Data viz may have become a hot topic in recent years, but there was also plenty of healthy scepticism in the room relating to its publicity hungry off-spring, AR. Ah yes, Augmented Reality.. which, until very recently, has had to work hard not to be dubbed Awkward Reality.

Yet a few minutes in, the event’s organiser and first speaker, the journalist Ben Beaumont-Thomas, had held the audience’s attention, wise-cracking his way through a history of human motivation behind how we portray ourselves in public (the 1970s neatly summarised as a ‘me’ decade of solipsistic confusion; the 1990s as an ‘us’ decade, the start of social transmission and an accompanying loss of privacy), before moving swiftly up to date, to focus on how we consciously and unconsciously allow increasing amounts of information about ourselves to be generated and left in the public domain: the ‘transparent life’ of the event’s title. And with that, the talk became less about bytes of visualised data and instead about something both simpler and more profound: human identity and the blurring boundaries between our private and public selves. 

Facebook’s Timeline as an online record of our life history and CCTV cameras (jacked into facial recognition technology) recording our every move offline are simply the start: what trade-offs are we prepared to make between protecting our privacy and freely accessing digital services that purport to improve society and/or our social lives? We hold onto just a few crumpled photographs of our grandparents today, but our own grandchildren, poor blighters, will be able to find out what we had for breakfast any day of any given year this millennium. Are we, as we’ve said here before, the last generation to care about what is ‘virtual’ versus what is ‘real’?

As the talk continued into a panel discussion with Keiichi Matsuda (designer and filmmaker behind the series Augmented (Hyper) Reality), Callum Rex Reid, (CEO, Digicave) and Luke Robert Mason (Research Director, Philter Phactory, ), two quite different interpretations of a data-dominated future started to emerge.

The case for Dystopia

Beaumont-Thomas drew our attention to the sub-terranean layers of personal data used for commercial or security reasons, scraped from places you’d expect (social networks, mobile network operators) and places you might not (tollbooths, even keycard entry systems). Not to mention services like the “People Search Engine”, Spokeo, a frankly creepy directory that displays any data it can find about an individual, including their estimated wealth, photos, contact details etc.

And if you needed more evidence that our public personas are increasingly not our own: we heard the story of the two British tourists summarily deported from America on arrival in Los Angeles a few weeks ago, having joked on Twitter about partying there (“@MelissaWalton free for a quick gossip/prep before I go and destroy America?” went one tweet). The couple also had their luggage searched for shovels by Homeland Security agents in response to another tweet about “diggin’ Marilyn Monroe up” (a joke from Family Guy, in case you were wondering).

Keyword scraping for security purposes has become the norm and we may look on with a mixture of amusement and despair at the tourists’ judgement or the common sense radar of the agents in this case, yet questions still arise: where should the line be drawn between public good and personal privacy? Have we lost all reasonable rights to privacy once something appears outside your own home or, in fact, outside your own head? And who’s watching the watchmen?

The latter gets more interesting when faced with the very early prototype bionic contact lenses recently announced by the University of Washington in collaboration with Aalto University in Finland. With wiring a thousandth the width of a human hair, in theory these Terminator-style accessories promise a route to a better augmented reality user experience, right before our very eyes. And if the thought of “emails transmitted straight to your retinas” sounds like your idea of hell, it only gets more controversial when we consider the opportunity, so often explored in near-future fiction by the authors William Gibson and Cory Doctorow, to overlay data about the person standing in front of you. Will anyone talk to you if they know your credit rating, or can evaluate your social standing just by looking at you? As Beaumont-Thomas put it, will our “sexy mystic evaporate”? Well, in the past few months we’ve just inched closer to that reality.

Stepping closer to adland for a moment, you may have seen film maker Keiichi Matsuda’s short film “Domestic Robocop” which portrays a future world in which a plethora of commercial messages are projected in ambient space. Initially visually mindblowing, it’s an extreme version of a data-dominated world that would be unbearably invasive (witness Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror episode, 15 Million Merits, for a similar experience).

The case for Utopia

It’s Matsuda’s second film in the series, “Augmented City”, however, that starts to hint at the positive implications of what’s possible with advanced access to data. Here the user is able to overlay their own data in public, customising their own identity. You’re able to switch through different layers of the augmented space on your terms and at your own pace (“you can’t eat the whole thing at once”). He imagines a creative synthesis of data when a group of people come together: a unique environment everyone there has contributed to. As Matsuda said simply: “This real-time 3D future can give us agency over the city we live in.”

Callum Rex Reid described 3D scanning technology that’s so life-like it would enable a collection like the one in the British Museum, say, to be distributed to schools in 3D and wearable technologies like a next gen Nike+ that takes into account environmental factors like terrain. He stressed the fact that this is absolutely about creativity: citing the Conflux Festival, that sees MoMA NY filled with new work by super-imposing an augmented layer of imagery on the existing work, and the ‘sculptural photography’ created when he saw his company’s tools recently put to creative use by a high end fashion photographer.

Flipping several years forward, the panel discussed the unimaginably rich data future historians will have at their fingertips (just looking back at something like Street View now, in 2050) compared to the data we have on previous centuries today. And the questions that arise when we’re faced with what William Gibson describes as our generation’s “consensual hallucination” about what we consume or own: so who inherits your iTunes when you die? If you can capture virtually the things we don’t need to touch (eg a picture on a wall), do you need to own them? Does more value get ascribed to things that are physically there?

Luke Robert Mason talked about his company’s Weavrs (we’re fans of Weavrs around here: here are one or two we’re particularly fond of), the bots that use web APIs to find and remix social data, effectively becoming the digital alter egos or research agents of their creators. If that weren’t enough, he recounted how they’d placed Weavrs modelled on Alice in Wonderland characters in Berlin, brought them together to enact a story (“digital replicants that ran through the streets virtually”) and allowed users to interact with them via the AR app, Layar.

Back to life, back to identity

This brought us back to an exploration of identity, specifically our human right to anonymity vs our sociocultural need for authenticity. Beaumont-Thomas is quick to point out that, despite the importance of appearing authentic to one another, the “persona we create are an easily consumable version of ourselves, not the crazy thoughts in our head”.

Are data tools actually distorting human identity online or offering a better representation? Google and Facebook would argue the latter: neither allows a user to participate on their social platforms unless they are open about precisely who they are. In their view, this improves the Search experience for users, ensures fair and accurate attribution or credit to a source and helps deter trolls and spambots, whilst also, of course, protecting their own revenue streams. Relying on ‘you being you’, so that you can be effectively targeted and reached with advertising. 4chan’s founder, Christopher Poole, puts forward a counter-argument:

“Google and Facebook sort of think of you as a mirror. That you have one reflection. And the reflection that you see in that mirror is what everyone else sees. Not true, people are multi-faceted, people are more like diamonds. Identity is very complex.. we ought to allow that flexibility in a web product.”

Poole goes on to stress you can incorporate something like Facebook Connect to authenticate a user, but that doing this doesn’t de facto require a business to make a user post with a full name and a profile photo. As one of the speakers at Future Human put it: “Identity is not real names.. it’s about accountability in a community, anonymous or not.”

Whatever happens, this stuff isn’t going away

As Matsuda put it, “Bridges between our online persona and physical self are going to happen, it’s just a matter of HOW it’s done and when.”

And boundaries continue to be pushed at the fringes – whether that be Biologists at Berkeley pioneering ways to read our minds or Anonymous’ latest release of a hacked call between the Met and the FBI – providing radical provocation around data and privacy that it will take society some time to come to terms with.

“Everything is okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end” (Anon)

So why shouldn’t we run for the hills? Well, it strikes us we humans are programmed from birth to seek out choice and difference. We tend to self-regulate when backed into a corner… eventually. For the majority right now, our digital social experiences are governed by our own personal rules about how much we wish to reveal about ourselves, within a framework dictated to us by the existing mainstream social platforms. Platforms that are themselves, to be fair, in a constant state of evolution. Together, we’re going to have to deal with what we’ve got and slowly find new ways to create more sophisticated personas to suit us.

As Mason added in closing last Thursday night: “The tools we have today are not the tools we’ll have tomorrow – we’re naive if we think so.” To which Reid responded: “It’ll be our fault at the end of the day. There is no swooping external force, tearing at our freedom. [The good news is..] We’re extremely good at surviving.”

Ben Beaumont-Thomas’s Storify of the event here.

For more about Future Human and their events in London, check out their site here.

Tom Uglow and I will probably meander into this topic and more in our talk “Skynet vs Mad Max: Battle For The Future” at this year’s SXSW. We’re on at 5-6pm, Sunday 11th March, in Ballroom A at the Intercontinental. If you’re in Austin, please do come and find us there. cheers.

KPCB Internet Trends (2011)

This week ex-Morgan Stanley research analyst, now at KPCB, Mary Meeker delivered her latest Internet Trends presentation. As always, Mary’s distillation of trends is always good value and genuine insights are peppered throughout.

For the time starved amongst you, here are some highlights:

World view:

• Though still with some ground to make up, it’s striking the number of Chinese and Russian internet companies popping into the global top 25.

• What’s more, between 2007 and 2010 China accumulated 246million new internet users – that is more than exist within the USA.

Mobilising the people:

• Mary notes that even in recessionary times breakthrough technology and services can breakout. One need only look at the extraordinary first weekend sales of Apple’s iPhone 4S to confirm this.

• 2010 QTR 4 saw more mobile devices (which includes Tablets) sold than PCs and signs that Smartphone sales outstripping feature phone sales in US/EU

• That said. still enormous unconverted user base with 835 million Smartphone users against 5.6 billion mobile device subscribers.

• Apple getting plenty of headlines right now, but it’s Android mobile devices with the remarkable quarter on quarter ramp up – jumping from 20million to 150million units shipped in between quarters 7 and 11 post-launch.

• Global mobile success story continues with app/ad revenue up by a factor of 17 between 2008 and 2011 to a figure of $12billion.

Touchy, feely:

• Meeker calls out the latest trend in the evolution of human computer interaction being from text command lines to graphical user interfaces (GUI) to natural user interfaces. Yes, Steve gets a name check too.

Cash is no longer king?:

• E-commerce story continues to be one of growth through tough economic times but plenty of room to grow.

• Again the big story is growth in mobile commerce with ebay and PayPal doubling or more their gross mobile sales/payments since 2010.

• The uplift in mobile e-commerce activity has been of particularly benefit to local commerce through the plethora of location aware discount offer aggregators.

Power to the people:

• Meeker identifies overarching mega-trend as the empowerment of people via connected devices.

• She references the Twitter traffic patterns post Japanese earthquake, the fact that 200million Indian farmers currently receive government subsidy payments via mobile devices and 85% of global population are now covered by commercial wireless signals versus 80% being on electricity grid.

The digital landscape across Asia-Pacific has seen significant change in recent months, with enthusiasm for social media driving the broader adoption of a wide range of connected services and tools.

Although Internet penetration levels remain low in many Asian countries, the sheer size of those countries’ populations means that the numbers must be seen in context; for example, internet penetration in China stands at just 34%, but the number of social media users in that country exceeds the total population of Russia.

It’s also critical to understand how people in the East access and use the web.

We know mobile phones are already an indispensable part of life throughout Asia, and given the faltering state of infrastructure in much of the region, these are often the predominant means of communication and entertainment. Digging into the latest numbers still has the power to give us pause for thought, however. In India, for example, Mobile penetration is 50% higher than TV penetration.

As a consequence, the Asian internet revolution is skipping a step, with many people accessing the web and web-powered utilities uniquely through mobile devices.

In many Asian countries, this entails access via basic ‘feature’ phones (i.e. non-smartphones), but as in so many other areas, Asians approach these devices with a remarkable sense of resourcefulness. Simple apps and hacks for social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and their local equivalents abound, and this simplified access is helping to fuel astonishing adoption rates across the region.

Importantly, many tracking studies miss this mobile-only behaviour – a reality borne out by the fact that the number of Facebook users in Indonesia appears to exceed the total number of internet users.

To help make sense of all this data and the broader Asian picture, BBH Asia-Pacific has been profiling the digital, mobile, and social media landscapes of a number of countries around the region.

You can see the latest China report above, while reports on India, South-East Asia, Indonesia and the Philippines are all available to view and download via SlideShare here.

For more info on any of these reports, please leave a comment here or get in touch (@eskimon).

The most provoking part of the presentation is the Disruptive Innovation slide. PSFK had a great blurb on describing the importance of this theory:

Disruptive Innovation is what’s to blame for the success of smaller, nimbler but sometimes cheaper products or services that manage to disrupt the success or complacency of larger, traditional brand players. Think of Amazon’s continued growth and eventual ‘breaking’ of Barnes & Noble, or Netflix’s killing of Blockbuster. Meeker’s presentation lays out two ways in which this disruptive innovation can happen

The two ways that Disruptive Innovation can happen. The first is a Low-End Segment Strategy by offering a product or service at a very low cost and then move up market. The second is called a Non-Consumption Strategy which basically means true innovation where consumption didn’t exist prior to the product being available.

We have the presentation embedded here for your enjoyment. Please tell us what you found interesting? What worries you about this data? What excites you about this data?

Slide 7 is especially impactful. I was born on the left hand side of the chart, probably around when there were 5 million computing-capable units globally. On the right, just ten years from today, the forecast is for 10 billion+ units. Extraordinary.

I’ve written about social media flings before, but all the recent buzz about privacy issues got me thinking about this subject again. Brands are obsessed with friends and fans in social media environments when a much more relevant (and achievable) goal would be a less committed relationship: a fling. Why ask so much from a consumer when most brands fail to deliver on expectations anyway? The number of brands I’ve met with an editorial calendar and iterative community management strategy is so few, I can count them on one hand. Yet, the gathering of fans / followers / cults prods aimlessly on, justified via the value of earned media. The idea of talking to a million people whenever you want — that’s just too good to not pursue, right?

I just don’t get it. Maybe I’m too demanding as a consumer, but I have a tough time with the “in or out” invitation posed by most brands. I was talking to @hashembajwa about this recently and he cited the following example: “I love and am loyal to Virgin Atlantic, but that doesn’t mean I want to hear from them at any point other then when I have London on my mind.”

That comment really struck me. For him, it was about context. And that’s really what a fling is. It’s like a camp friend— that kid you were super close with at camp. You couldn’t imagine a scenario at camp he or she wasn’t a part of. But, once you got back home,  regardless of promises to call and write, it didn’t happen. It just wasn’t relevant to stay in touch back in your normal life. But hey, next time you were at camp, you two picked up right where you left off, no? That’s the perfect camp friend.

So why aren’t brands OK with relationships like that? Context isn’t such a bad thing. It’s what good media planning is all about. And if the main arguments for these ludicrous fan numbers I hear brands chasing is rooted in earned media, it seems only rational they would evaluate said media based on quality, as they do with all media.

And that’s the rub.

You see, context of any kind is where brands face the privacy issue square in the face. They need to know as much about a person as possible to have these flings. Most brands on Twitter, for example, wait until you’ve called them out by name before @-replying because they fear otherwise their tweets will be viewed as spam. It’s the same expectation you’d have as a consumer in Facebook. What if a brand waited until your status was relevant to them to reach out to you? “@hashembajwa, I see you you’re excited about dinner in London, would you like some help planning your trip? – Love, Virgin.” Scary for many people. But enticing as a brand. And that’s why most brands are going to sit quietly while Facebook takes its lumps and sorts out privacy on their behalf. I guess they’ll depend on creating their own context via campaigns, but that’s pretty darn hard.

So, if you’re a brand with something at stake here, would you step in? I can’t imagine brand managers want any part of that conversation, but I think it’s important they have one. Without some understanding of what the pros and cons of the privacy issue are, Facebook is left alone as big, bad brother. In reality, lots of brands would help consumers tremendously if given the opportunity via this type of context. Yet no brands are stepping up, even as a collective, to help consumers understand if there is another side to the privacy issue. How can we expect consumers to make an objective decision about something when they aren’t hearing any upside?

Because, talking to a million fans about camp while they’re in school might feel like a relationship, but I’d argue making out with them while they’re at camp is a lot more social.

Or at the very least, it’s more fun.

We are so consumed by the communities that Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare (and our local knitting website) foster that we often forget to take a step back and think about the lessons to be learned from these communities. Within each of these online ecosystems, participants, aware of it or not, share some of their most intimate secrets with the world. Conversations about relationships, ridicule for certain social behavior from the night before, bragging about their new iPad, and most importantly simply being open all seem commonplace.

Coders admirably follow the same model however on a significantly different level. Most, I believe, have taken this notion of community and have truly found the value in it for what they do, and there is much we can learn from that. Coders who have affectionately adopted the open source mantra are out there sharing their code, encouraging others to take it and well pretty much do whatever they want. The idea is that by making the work available to be built upon and expanded, it will be built upon and expanded into something better and exponentially more worth sharing.

A piece of work created this way, where the sum of the parts is less meaningful than the work in its entirety, or gestalt, becomes very powerful when considered in the context of the open source philosophy. Projects made up of libraries, code blocks, classes, and ideas whose authors individually poured hours into creating are incomparably more notable than their preceding work which undoubtably made it possible. This is the key most important value in open source. And it is that value that can be translated to other media and have the same result.

Open source technology has given birth to a large array of projects, from everyday utilities to intricate and involved interactive art installations. Each has a narrative behind it that has an impact on its own.

Firefox and jQuery are wonderful examples of utility-based projects driven by the ideals of open source. Firefox, one of the leading web browsers, has a powerful community behind it, thousands-strong, and constantly pushing it forward. The source code and SDK are available to anyone who either wants to tinker with the core of the browser, or develop add-ons to be distributed throughout. jQuery is an example of a company whose purpose has made anyone using the Internet happier, conscience of it or otherwise. It is a Javascript framework which now has hundreds, if not thousands, of plugins creating rich Internet experiences for us all. It started with John Resig’s idea and has been progressed exponentially by the community that has organically grown around it.

The story of these projects are most relevant to us in understanding how to use the ideas of open source. The two projects below carry strong narratives of how they evolved, lending a learning experience on a much different level than the end product. Thinking about the path that these projects took and the backstories behind their creation is an exploration of the creative process that went into them; therein lies the most powerful ideas.

http://www.random-international.com/you-fade-to-light-philips-lum/

You Fade To Light is a beautiful project by rAndom International (with software created by Chris O’Shea), existing in large part because of people who understand the power of sharing their work and encouraging growth. This project was born out of projects before it, borrowing code, leveraging libraries and frameworks to bring it to life. Audience, a separate project also by rAndom International (in collaboration with Chris O’Shea) adds to the narrative and creates its own. Have a look at that here.

http://iwantyoutowantme.org/process.html; A wonderful exploration of the process of creating 'I Want You To Want Me' from start to finish

I Want You to Want Me (IWYTWM) by Jonathan Harris (http://number27.org) and Sep Kamvar (http://kamvar.org/) for the 2008 exhibit ‘Design and the Elastic Mind‘ at MoMA in NYC was created using OpenFrameworks, an open source framework in C++ for artists, interaction designers and creative coders. This beautiful work is in debt to all the work before it. Fortunately the IWYTWM team documented their process, their narrative. It is a prime example of the power that the evolution of these projects exemplify and the value in sharing them.

So, how can we leverage this power of sharing creativity in our business when we hold our ideas in such high regard and guard them so jealously? There is so much buzz around crowdsourcing at the moment because the ‘power of many’ has been proven. That is simply my argument. We need to adopt this powerful idea and understand how to make it relevant and practical for our work. How does the story behind the larger collaborative efforts fit into our business and make our work better?

The easy answer is it doesn’t. But it could.

We can open our ideas and leverage larger collaborative efforts. We need to start with sharing honest explorations of the process behind an idea. Again, IWYTWM illustrates this beautifully, and if we can embrace this idea and run with it we will come out with a whole new level of creative work – perhaps a new breed of creativity altogether.

We’d love to see more examples like the ones above. And we’re always keen to hear what you think.

Came across this today. Tweet-o-Meter (link) is the beta version of a platform created by University College London’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis. The Tweet-o-Meter supposedly updates every ten seconds (not sure it does quite do that right now), showing the number of tweets in each city per minute. The ambition is to log and analyze all geo-located tweets in these major cities. Once logged, they will be used to show Twitter activity over time and space. Various kinds of maps will be the main output. I imagine a variety of delicious visualizations will be forthcoming.

We are possibly attracted partly by the simple analogue-feel, dial-based interface. But we’re also struck by yet another work-in-progress attempt to bring life to the data spawned by Twitter (see also Getting to Know Your Twitter Followers & Why that Matters from earlier this week).

Tweet-o-Meter is part of a broader project called NeISS (National e-Infrastructure for Social Simulation), another UK Government-funded project. Read more about it here.

And of course it also reminds us of of the work by Google’s Aaron Koblin on visualizing SMS messages sent on New Year’s Eve in Amsterdam in 2007 (see below). We imagine as Tweet-o-Meter moves forward through beta they’ll need to figure out how to marry Koblin-esque visualizations to their gushing pipe of data. Bringing magic to the mayhem.

Amsterdam SMS messages on New Years Eve from Aaron on Vimeo.

Amsterdam SMS messages on Queen’s Day from Aaron on Vimeo.