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Life Imitates Art at Intel
figa writes "Eric Paulos and Elizabeth Goodman at Intel's Research Laboratory at Berkeley are using the Situationists' exploration of urban space and psychologist Stanley Milgram's social experiments to design wearable devices."
Imagine bluetooth enabled wearable computers, that could become clusters when in close proximity of each other. Image everyone at a soccer game wearing them; not only do you get to enjoy the game, but you make one huge super cluster.
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I hope they're not designing the devices based on the experiment where Milgram asked subjects to electrocute other people strapped to chairs for getting answers to simple questions wrong. (They weren't really getting electrocuted, but they acted as though they were) Though, I guess it might be kind of funny.
The history of that experiment wasn't very humorous, however, as several participants sustained substantial psychological damage after they later realized they'd been willing to essentially kill another person via electrocution with only simple prodding to justify it. (This is one of the more interesting experiments along these lines that happened in the last half-century)
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
I highly recommend Steven Strogatz' book "Sync" and also Mark Buchanan's book "Nexus" for more in-depth information about the small-world theory and its relation to complex networks and human interaction.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
If A identifies B as a familiar stranger, then wouldn't B most likely identify A as a familiar stranger also?
A real relationship requires interaction (even if it is to ignore each other), so if a familiar stranger is a relationship without any interaction, is it a relationship at all?
It was about a service called Dodgeball which basically takes the whole concept of Social Networks that's been the recent fad, and puts it in cellphone form. You can send out a message, and friends and friends of friends can see where you are, and a picture of you.
When I was in the UK I heard about a similar service which was basically like Match.com for the cellphone.
I think that once these are developed further, and people become more accustomed to them, it will be quite common to meet new people on the street through the medium of technology like this.
The good news is the technology isn't that complicated, its the whole hurdle of social acceptance that will make or break its success.
I hope that if it doesn't take off here in the states, it at least becomes mainstream in the UK and Japan which tend to be more open to those sorts of thing.
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European philosophy and European social science ideas in general have an amazing tendency to get heavily suggared when crossing the Atlantic. Being Intel one of those quintessential American companies, I guess one shouldn't be surprised. Hasn't anyone warned this guys that Guy Debord is really dead?
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To judge from their sample scenarios they're building a doohickey that tells you whether you a) have seen people before or else b) feel socially awkward in a given situation - but only if everyone else is wearing the same doohickey.
Intel must have a lot of cash to burn. They're paying these people to reinvent what the human brain already does better than anything else in order to solve the first problem. For the second problem, the fancy social type events they're hoping to hock this to have already had a well-functioning solution in place for some time now.
As in Ghostbusters (except at the end) this is a classic case of don't cross the beams. French-style social theory and American-style sociology do make a tasty pie together. And throwing McLuhan into it makes things even worse. They could've got the same results by hiring a bunch of popular tech journalists from ~15 years ago
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