S04E03: Skim Reading & the Brand Experience
Gif based on New City: Taobao Village by Liam Young, 2018
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This week’s* reading is pretty lightweight and quite heavily influenced by Bruce Sterling, for the simple reason that Bruce kindly gave a shout-out on WIRED to the ThingsCon report on the State of Responsible IoT we published last week, and while looking for it I got sucked into the rabbit hole that is Bruce’s various blogs. And what an enjoyable rabbit hole that can be. So credit where credit is due.
*(hah! as if this had been a weekly exercice recently!)
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As always, a shout out to tinyletter.com/pbihr or a forward is appreciated!
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Skim reading
Skim reading — I bet you’re doing it right now! There’s a fascinating article on skim reading (Guardian) and its impact on our brains that’s been sitting in my reading queue. It’s by one Maryanne Wolf, who’s the Director of the Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA, and what a title that is.
I truly enjoyed reading it and am glad that I did despite my impulse to skip articles with titles like this one; all too often they tend to just go full physical-digital dichotomy: “Paper good, the smell of paper! Digital bad, just bits & bytes!” I’m exaggerating, obviously, but I think you know the kind of think pieces I’m referring to. And this is emphatically not one of those. This is great! Especially in how it ties the complex issues of incentivizing skim reading of a mass of shorter texts over deep reading of longer texts to real world impact beyond reading itself:
We should be less concerned with students’ “cognitive impatience,” however, than by what may underlie it: the potential inability of large numbers of students to read with a level of critical analysis sufficient to comprehend the complexity of thought and argument found in more demanding texts, whether in literature and science in college, or in wills, contracts and the deliberately confusing public referendum questions citizens encounter in the voting booth.
And this:
The story of the changing reading brain is hardly finished. We possess both the science and the technology to identify and redress the changes in how we read before they become entrenched. If we work to understand exactly what we will lose, alongside the extraordinary new capacities that the digital world has brought us, there is as much reason for excitement as caution.
We need to cultivate a new kind of brain: a “bi-literate” reading brain capable of the deepest forms of thought in either digital or traditional mediums. A great deal hangs on it: the ability of citizens in a vibrant democracy to try on other perspectives and discern truth; the capacity of our children and grandchildren to appreciate and create beauty; and the ability in ourselves to go beyond our present glut of information to reach the knowledge and wisdom necessary to sustain a good society.
I love the notion of the bi-literate reading brain. Anecdotally, I’ve long since started reading different kinds of things in different contexts because it helps me focus better: Really short stuff—everything skimmable—happens in the browser on my laptop or phone. Articles and longer blog posts I think I’ll want to process go to my Pocket queue, which I usually read on a tablet with all other notifications turned more or less off for less distraction. And long form, that is books and the occasional really long article or paper, go to a Kindle Paperwhite. The distinction being mostly along a spectrum of more notifications to less notifications.
I’m sure many of you have developed their own elaborate reading setups; I’d love to hear (and share back) some of them!
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Just put a chip on it. It appears everybody’s favorite normcore brand Tommy Hilfiger has decided to make a pair of jeans and gamify them by putting a chip on it:
“This style features smart chip technology that allows you to connect it to the new Tommy Jeans XPLORE game, available in the iOS App Store. Pair and wear your item(s), rack up points and redeem for exclusive rewards and VIP experiences.”
This sounds like the material of a standup comedian taking on IoT. But as anyone who’s been in meetings with enough ad and marketing people will testify, the line between standup and brand conversations is a thin one.
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Strelka started a New Normal think tank (via Bruce) a while ago, and somehow I missed it: “The New Normal is a three-year initiative launched by Strelka Institute two years ago with a focus on research and design for the city.” There’s some good stuff in there:
“A Copernican shift in the philosophy of design is needed, one that begins with sometimes unsettling implications of 21st century circumstances and technologies, one that may shift the balance in different ways from experiences to outcomes, from users to systems, from aesthetics to access, from intuition to abstraction, from experience to ideals.”
Concretely, they focus on three areas of research: ALGORITHMIC GOVERNANCE, INVERSE UNCANNY VALLEYS (“This research theme looks at uncanny valleys on the individual, group, urban, and geopolitical scales”), and HUMAN EXCLUSION ZONES (human exclusion referring both to high-automation zones and to ecological zones that cannot or should not have any humans in them.
Appears quite interesting.
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Greetings From Burning Man! In 1996, Bruce Sterling went to Burning Man festival (the 10th, I believe) and reports back. It’s hilarious. It’s 22 years later and stories coming out of Burning Man sound fairly similar, in a good way (I think)? Let’s just say you won’t find a brand experience there. I hope.
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What else?
Some ThingsCon related updates!
For the Trustable Tech mark, I’ve started formulating a Theory of Trust that outlines how we approach the issue of trust in our assessment. It’s still a little rough around the edges, but I’m confident it’s a solid first step.
Also, we’ll be having a ThingsCon event at Casa Jasmina where Michelle & Alexandra & I stayed a few years ago (2015, maybe?) as some of the first official guests and had a blast of a time, and joined their first IoT meetups. It was a short visit, but it impacted my thinking in all sorts of good ways.
M & I ended up writing a book-ish thing (Understanding the Connected Home, and Alex & I ended up running a research project (http://thegoodhome.org).
Side note: Alexandra’s new book Smarter Homes is about to come out and available for pre-order!
Long story short, we’ll be back at Casa Jasmina in September, and while the main event and workshop is invite only, M & I will also be speaking at CJ’s IoT meetup, Magic Monday (Turin, 24 September).
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I wish you an excellent weekend.
Yours truly,
Peter
PS. Please feel free to forward this to friends & colleagues, or send them to tinyletter.com/pbihr
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Who writes here? Peter Bihr explores the impact of emerging technologies — like Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence. He is the founder of The Waving Cat, a boutique research, strategy & foresight company. He co-founded ThingsCon, a non-profit that fosters the creation of a responsible Internet of Things. In 2018, Peter is a Mozilla Fellow. He tweets at @peterbihr. Interested in working together? Let’s have a chat.
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Images: Header gif based on New City: Taobao Village by Liam Young, 2018. Footer image from PutThisOnShop.com