Digital Sprocket

We are still in the very earliest stages of building digital environments, and we have little idea of what their long-term implications will be. Just as moving our activities from the field into buildings, so too will these new structures radically alter how we live and work. One change that is already upon us is an increased ability or need to multitask.

The other day, my wife was knitting. This in itself does not appear to be technology intensive activity, but she was sitting in front of her laptop as she whiled away the afternoon. Why was her laptop important? She was watching an instructional video by knitting legend Elizabeth Zimmermann while she worked. In fact she was following instructions in the video. Of course the knitting took longer than the instructions, so she would pause Mrs. Zimmermann, and switch over to an episode of “Private Practice” until she competed a section of the garment, and went back for more instructions. While switching between video sources, she would pause just long enough to check and possibly respond to emails. Let’s not forget about Facebook. She had to update her status and see what her friends were up to at the same time.

What’s amazing, is not how many things she was doing all at once, but rather how normal it all is. At work, we think nothing of checking the weather forecast between responding to our boss’s email and writing important documentation. As portable networked devices become ubiquitous, this will only accelerate. While waiting in line a Starbucks you’ll check sports scores while writing the next great American novel. At the same time your calendar reminds you of an old friend’s impending birthday.

Will this technology make our world better? It depends on how we employ them. Walls and roofs meant that we could continue to work even in bad weather, and provided a safe place to recover from illness, and store food. At the same time, walls can be built to control our movement, fracture societies, and limit our opportunities. We have it in us to determine the future of our newly constructed environments. But we must take control of them with knowledge and intention and wisdom.

I know theater sounds like a “soft” topic, but there’s a lot of technology employed in theater today, and it’s only going to get more tech-heavy as time progresses. Most theatrical performances employ strictly pre-planned lighting and sound cues, and static sets, but what if all of that could be changed on the fly, in the middle of a performance?

During the day, our concert hall is used by the Edutainers to perform plays and musicals for the general public, so it is fully equipped with modern technical theater equipment. At night, we use the space for a quiz game show for our students, as well as weekly opening and closing ceremonies. During these events, the booth operators are often called upon to change things without warning. The MC’s for the quiz game may throw in an arm wrestling or hoola-hoop competition on a whim. When that happens the booth person changes the lighting appropriately. If he has an ipod, he can also rapidly select audio tracks and pipe them out over the sound system.

We also make heavy use of the video projector to show PowerPoint slides during these events. What if you used a few projectors to create backdrops for theater? With appropriately structured libraries, it would be trivial to change the scenery at the same pace as improv artists make up their lines. Digital audio allows for rapid selection of soundtracks or even sound effects ranging from doorbells to explosions. Most professional theaters already employ digital lighting systems, so they are already prepared for dynamic theater.

I witnessed something today that presages the future of hand-held video communications. My wife and I were shopping for yarn in Seoul’s famous Domdaemun market. This is a mammoth textile wholesale and retail building with thousands of small vendors. While my wife picked out yarn for her next knitting projects I watched the pair of Korean women next to her. They were having a lively three-way conversation while poring over yarn swatches in the merchant’s product binder.

I did mention that these two women were having a three-way conversation, right? The third member of the group was on the other end of a video cell phone connection. The two women did not point the camera on the phone at themselves, but rather at the swatch book. Obviously their third, invisible partner was selecting the correct color and style of yarn with their help.

From this little tableau we can glimpse the future role these digital device will likely have. Anyone who does purchasing for a business will be able to use the video link to shorten their purchase approval cycle by showing samples to his boss while still out in the field. Speaking of out in the field, can you imagine a junior electrician who spots an oddity on while working on an electrical connection at the top of a telephone pole. He whips out his phone and calls up a senior electrician with 40 years of experience. He shows his senior partner the oddity and asks for advice before he blacks out the entire neighborhood.

Taking a photo and sending it to a friend or coworker is fine, but it is far more cumbersome than live video, even of poor quality, for real time conversations. This will allow us to share some visual information as easily as we share audio information. Personally I look forward to the day when I’m in the grocery store, and I point the camera at the shelves while asking my wife, “they have three varieties of soy sauce. Which one of these do you want?”

There was a day, long ago when no human lived inside a house. That’s a difficult concept to wrap your head around, because most of us spend most of our time inside houses, offices, factories, or other man made environments. In the past hundred years we’ve also built a wide variety of mobile environments like cars and airplanes. These structures provide many benefits. They help keep us warm in winter, cool in summer, improve food storage, protect us from predators, and generally make our lives better. It’s hard to picture life without even a grass hut or an improved cave, but there was a time before these inventions.

Humans lived for centuries before we invented structures. People were born under the stars, squatted in the wind and rain, found mates, and propagated the species without the benefits of buildings. The eventual shift from living under the canopy of the heavens to the ubiquitous use of buildings had a profound impact on human society social structures. Social interaction tends to shift from the family to the community of people living near each other. Hierarchies based on possession can evolve like city-states, and monarchies. Even warfare makes more sense when the warring parties own towns and cities. The changes that moving into structures has caused or contributed to are so widespread that they are often hard to identify.

Human society is on the cusp of a similar change. We are moving from physical environments to digitally manufactured environments. Now I’m not saying we live in cyberspace, but we are spending more and more time in electronically generated spaces of our own choosing. What is making this possible is the ubiquitous spread of portable digital hardware, especially networked devices. When I drive down the street, I see many people with head bowed and headphones in their ears. They are text-messaging friends, playing video games, or watching videos. The first thing many of us do when we return home, or enter our office is turn on the computer and jump into our email.

Other authors have previously noted how online relationships and communities are affecting society. They tend to be geographically dispersed, open to new members, but insular in ideas. New cell phone applications and handheld devices that take advantage of wireless networks are starting to allow us to take these communities with on the road, outside our structures. Add to that the ability to constantly choose our own audio input, whether that’s rock and roll, ocean waves, or an audio book, and the ability to choose video for visual stimulation, and you have something as profound as building a house. We do not know what impacts this will have on our society. After all, it took millennia for us to build houses with air conditioners, refrigerators, indoor plumbing, even furniture, and just as long to build the society I was born into. What form of society will our children be born into and inherit?