Let me say it upfront: I do not own an iPod. I bought one for Christmas two years ago for my son who was very happy with it, till one day its hard drive died, together with about 3,000 songs he spent weeks and weeks bringing into the iPod from his large collection of CD’s.
This does not mean I do not listen to music, for $10 a month I have instant access to 2 million songs on Napster. Their hard drives are more reliable, and the full screen color interface on my laptop is more convenient than the tiny iPod screen. Sure I do not “own” any songs, but the fact is that I am listening to more music now on Napster than I did when I only had access to 100 or so of my own CD’s which were typically lying all around the house which means that it inevitably took me quite a while to locate the song I felt like listening to. If you compare that to a 3 second buffering time for Napster streams, it really isn’t bad.
I do not own a Prius either, despite the fact that Silicon Valley highways are full of them. I imagine Prius owners are proud of the fact that they are doing something positive about our planet environment and for once both our conservative government and its liberal oppositions are united in their call for “alternative” fuel to lessen our country’s dependency on foreign oil.
I have a better solution to our country’s energy and pollution problems: No, I do not drive Mercedes to work either (the “other” Valley car:), the truth is that my old car is sitting in the garage 5 or 6 days each week as for most of the week I communicate with our distributed work force online from my home office. Cutting my gas consumption by 80% So I feel pretty good about my contribution to the protection of our environment.
The lesson here is that culture can be a powerful obstacle in the way of technological progress. Apple is selling 5 million iPods a month to users who feel the need to “own” their songs. Our country is waging a costly war in Iraq so we can physically transport ourselves by cars, plains or trains, to meetings which could often be held more effectively online. As cultural beings, we prefer our old “tried and true” ways instead of embracing alluring but risky new technology. If we only opened our minds, Napster would have a lot more competition and our country would not hopelessly lag behind Korea or even Eastern Europe in having ubiquitous high speed internet access.
In the end technology can not be stopped, only temporarily slowed down by old forces like our old guard US government fighting for “industrial” supremacy in a
post industrial information age or Hollywood content owners fighting the Internet tooth and nail, trying to hold on to their intellectual property like 18th century landowners tried to hold on their slaves fleeing to newly emerging industrial factories.
I am pleased to see that we are already seeing the first waves of freed post industrial slaves flee the yoke of Hollywood’s industrially produced and officially sanctioned content (i.e. music, movies and TV programs protected by forever extending “Mickey Mouse” Copyright laws) and creating their own “custom content” in form of user groups, blogs, but above all the meteorically rising new wave of “social networks”.
Companies like Amazon, EBay, Google and of course MySpace.com truly understand that the “real” content of the internet are users themselves. They provide a general platform and tools for their users to communicate and collaborate, repurposing user created content in new ways rather than trying to create proprietary content .
Amazon recommends books which were purchased by other users who purchased books similar to the ones I did. I may not know their names but I am sure thankful to my anonymous online book buddies for their excellent reading suggestions. Similarly on Google I will receive recommendations to visit web pages from other web users, Google’s powerful distributed servers simply aggregate millions of user searches giving “popularity” criteria precedence over industrial age “alphabetic” order. MySpace.com, the biggest web site today, gives its 110 million users an opportunity to express their true personalities and find friends online. Despite its much slicker appearance, the XBox Live web portal does not allow their user to do anything similar.
Sure MySpace.com user pages may look ugly and no match for the slick Hollywood productions, but those who criticize the poor production value of user created content are missing the point: the Internet is a new medium which is already creating an amazing new forms of online communities for work, dating or play. Rather than being a slave to print, TV, film or music industries, the web is finally becoming a medium on its own and user created content is a powerful fuel driving this process.
Now for my prediction: In a short period of time we will see rapid format transition of fast growing online social networks from today’s poorly constructed static HTML pages with blogs, static images and MP3 songs, to tomorrow’s photorealistic real time 3D environments remarkably similar in appearance to the next generation of video games but with users firmly in control of content.
While the current video games follow traditional Hollywood production model, taking years and millions of dollars to finish, the new 3D social networks will be created rapidly by the users themselves inside new, powerful, distributed 3D collaborative software platforms like trueSpace7, and their quality will approach Sony or EA style produced prepackaged entertainment.
Objects and events in these online spaces will in fact be synchronized with objects and events in the real world through myriad of live sensors like proliferating GPS sensors, smart phones or RFID tags on packaging. Just imagine Google Earth full of correctly located FEDEX trucks or Mac Donald restaurants and actual status of product inventories.
Sounds like virtual reality you say? Yes, but with one crucial addition: users themselves, represented by their online photorealistic 3D avatars will be working, dating and playing in these online 3D spaces, effectively turning them into “augmented realities”, parallel with their counterparts in the real world, superior to the real world in some ways, inferior in others. After all, users will bring their cultural baggage and their human natures into this new world with them. But at the same time, like North America in the 17th century, these new worlds will open new opportunities to rebels whose heads are hitting the walls of the real world today, soon new Mayflowers, overflowing with rebellious pilgrims, will be on their way to a new Plymouth. To me this dream is more worthy to pursue than our government’s new “Apollo on Foodstamps” space program.
In next installment I will explore the possibility of a 3D social network specifically targeted to the needs of the film and video production communities. You may be surprised how even these old “smokestack” communities will benefit from integration of its geographically distributed real time project participants inside a simulated real time photorealistic production set.
