Lamps that let your neighbors know how much electricity you consume. A couch that lets your friends know how much you dislike Lynette Scavo while watching Desperate Housewives. Real-time real-life reviews for the salesperson at the department store. A refrigerator that notifies your mother about your eating habits.

The future of products is in products that have communication and community built in.

People have a natural need to communicate and interact with their community. Until now, designing products that included the two, required you to gather your customers in the same physical location. Not anymore. Communications and community can be achieved regardless of where your customers actually are.

In order to do this, companies will have to become customer centric instead of product centric. It will not be sufficient to just make a product and sell it. The focus will have to be on the experience, not the features.

“In such a world, learning to think for oneself could well be more important than simply learning to read and write.” 

The Economist has a nice article that explores the future of literacy. Worth checking out.

A tough one, eh? I know what a television is for. I know what a book is for. I know what a window is for. But, what is the internet for?

Entertainment, news, music, shopping, hobbies, births, deaths, information, gossip. You name it. The internet has it.

The only conclusion is, that the internet is for living and everything that comes with that. Messy, boring, obnoxious and funny. Sad, mad, exciting and frustrating. Life.

No wonder businesses are clueless. They are trying desperately to stay in control. Just like they were in control with other mass media.

But wait, it is not a medium at all. It is life. How do you control life?

When you think about it that way, it actually becomes utterly ridiculous. The local grocery store trying to shut you up when you realize that the milk you just bought has gone sour. “Mr. Customer, our terms of use prohibit you from telling anyone about the milk”. The local bookstore coming over and telling you that you have to put your books in a shelf, instead of in a pile on the floor. “Our company policy states that books must be kept vertical at all times”. A record label demanding compensation when you sign a lullaby to the kids. “Sir, you are in violation of copyright law”.

Life. Deal with it.

I am very fortunate to have had two grandfathers that were enthusiastic amateur photographers. I have spent many magical evenings looking at the glass negatives (yeah, that old) they have taken. Wondering about the people, the time and the legacy that the pictures represent. And perhaps secretly hoping that my grandchildren will do the same when it is their turn.

About 1200 people between the ages of 20 and 40 died last year in Finland. The internet penetration for that age group is virtually a hundred percent.

What has happened to all the emails, blog posts, photos and other digital things that these people have created? What happens to the Facebook, Habbo and Flickr accounts these people put time and effort into setting up and maintaining? Not to mention that the internet is not just for young people anymore. Everybody will soon have some sort of digital presence. And everyone must pass away eventually.

Even though the internet never forgets, I fear that something is being lost. How will the family members get access to the digital parts of these peoples lives? How will they even find out what these people have been doing online?

The good thing is that most of what everyone has created will go on existing for a long time. The internet never forgets, they say. The bad thing is that most of the stuff might never be passed on to future generations because it will never be found by anyone that cares.

As digital penetrates deeper in to our lives, more and more of the sentimental and actual value that we leave behind will be composed of bits. I think the time to start figuring out how to pass the value on to those it belongs to is now. Before the glass negatives are covered with digital dust.

Since the invention of mass media we have been taught that media is to be passively consumed. Someone has already done all the hard work for us and we are supposed to sit back and enjoy the show. The business model of selling masses of passive readers/listeners/viewers to advertisers actually requires that the consumers can not react to non-relevant content or advertising. When the consumers have a voice, media companies have to work twice as hard to please both advertisers and consumers.

I believe people are fundamentally lazy. We like consuming media the easy way. Sitting back, relaxing and accepting anything adequate. And that is fine for mass media, they can offer us content that just barely exceeds our threshold of acceptability. Content that gets as many people as possible to watch/listen/read and not go away. Lowest common denominator -content.

The question is: just how lazy are we? If we really are as lazy as it seems today, then mass media is going to be just fine for quite a while. People still will not put in the extra effort required to find the content that they enjoy more than the content that is automatically pushed to them. On the other hand, if laziness is just a bad habit then mass media is in for the ride of its life. People will trip over themselves to find all the wonderful content about the subject they are passionate about. And that will truly change the media game.

The smallest form of participation is actively finding content that suits your needs. Not being content with content that someone else thinks suits your needs. And there is the participation divide. The divide between people that are willing to actively search for personally relevant content and those that are happy with the stuff that is pushed to them.

Digital natives have already crossed the participation divide. Old habits do die hard, so I am predicting that it will take a few years for the masses to start hopping over.

I think one of the defining characteristics for humans has always been the desire to dream up technology that can help make life easier. We would not be here if our ancestors had not stuck their heads out of the cave and started to explore what they could manufacture from nature’s offerings.

If you look at this from a very wide perspective, all the analog objects that we have can be considered to be life enhancement technologies. Clothing is “skin enhancement technology”. A bed is “rest enhancement technology”. A book is “learning enhancement technology”. Most everything we have has been invented to make life easier and better in some way.

What does all this have to do with digital technologies then?

The digital world is still very young so mostly it has been restricted to its own domain. The digital world has been considered to be virtual and people have been even experimenting with stand-alone virtual worlds (Second Life etc.).  Slowly but surely the digital world is crossing the border and creeping in to the analog one.

Currently the biggest obstacle is connectivity. Most of us have to possibility to be connected at home or in the office, but staying connected while on the move is still quite a hassle. It is only a matter of time when that problem will be solved and connectivity will be ubiquitous.

The constant connectivity will bring with it a new kind of reality. It will be a reality where analog and digital life enhancement technologies merge and bring us new enhancements. GPS-navigation technology is a good example of merging the analog and digital. There is no longer a need for a scaled down presentation of reality (a map), when in essence technology makes the map life-size.

Slowly but surely the analog life enhancement technologies that only have virtual value (the value is not in the physical properties of the object, but in what we can accomplish with it) will begin to slide in to the digital world. Staying on the subject, take for example street signs and maps. There is no value in the signs or maps themselves. The value comes from people easily finding where they are going. In an analog world you have to manually combine two enhancement technologies, the signs and the map, to find the shortest route to your destination.

Today, we think of the virtual and real world as two separate domains. The analog world is slowly being augmented with digital technologies. I am betting that sometime in the near future we will come back full circle and consider analog and digital to just be different aspects of the same real world.

One thing I have been pondering a bit lately is the wear and tear that inevitably happens to things in the analog world. We all own things that are very dear to us. Some of them we (or others before us) have used for a long time. A book that has been read a thousand times. The favorite pair of jeans that feels just right. A chair that looks too worn to sit on. Both the look and feel of these things signify that they have been significant objects that have induced a lot of use.

Wear and tear also often serve as reminders. They remind us of significant events or people that are somehow connected with the objects. There are also some things that we appreciate even more as they get older. Wine, cheese and vintage instruments, to name a few.

There is no grace in the degradation of digital things. Either you have a digital object or you do not. Even copies will look and feel exactly like the original. In a sense, there are no antiques when it comes to digital. You might be able to distinguish older digital objects from never ones by its design, but then again the old one could have been made to look old on purpose.

My question is, should we start to design degradation into digital objects, so that the old and new could be distinguished? And is that even possible?

Just a few hundred years ago oral communication was the reigning mode of communication. Reading and writing were skills that only a few people possessed. Mostly people with religious associations, priests and such.

The rise of printing technology made books the first, albeit a very crude, form of mass media. Suddenly, it became possible to effectively communicate with a large audience.

Information is power. Printing technology was the first revolution, a revolution that distributed power to those individuals that had the ability to read. No wonder the people in power tried to hold on to the right to control what is published. Many still try today.

If you think about writing, it is actually a very crude way to transfer ones thoughts or ideas to another person. First of all, getting ideas on paper  is extremely difficult. The world is so rich in nuances that describing all of them, to accurately paint a picture for the reader, would take forever.

And then there is the recipient. The human brain is built to automatically fill in stuff that is missed by our senses. The same thing with reading. We fill in the blanks with things that we have experienced ourselves. If someone wrote about a red car, I would most probably picture it something like the car my mother had a few years ago. For anyone else, the car would be totally different.

Digital tools are changing all this. It is no longer necessary to communicate by writing about something. We can just as easily show what we are thinking about. Using a camera to capture images and video. Letting the receiver actually see what we are seeing.

Digital tools even allow us to combine content from different sources to get our message across. This is what the red car looks like. This is the song I was listening to. These are the shoes that I was wearing at the time.

Digital devices also allow us to use sound and icons to convey meaning. Reading and writing are no longer essential skills that one must learn to acquire and transmit information. That is a major shift in power.

It is a totally new form of communication. And at the same time it is the exactly the same as thousands of years ago. Show and tell. The only difference is, that it is not show and tell your tribe members in the cave. It is show and tell the world.

I started this blog to help myself nurture ideas about what the future is going to look like. And possibly inspire someone, as I have been inspired by others.

My theory was (and still is) that digital is taking us back to the cave. The rise of mass media and the industrial revolution has somewhat skewed society. Our actions have been guided by outside forces, not forces that are inherent. Call it human nature if you will. This “human nature” has existed as long as humans have. Therefore it is a thing that can not be changed in a mere hundred years.

My posts seem to have drifted off the subject a bit, more towards daily problems than I initially planned for. The amount of work and the lack of time to think are the two biggest reasons for the misalignment.

Anyway, from now on I will try to stay on subject and keep the focus a little further in to the future.

Thanks for reading!

There always seems to be a topic of discussion that is prominent for a couple of days. Lately it has been social media and more specifically the definition of it. Several discussions with clients and co-workers, quite a few blog entries and even a recommendation by the Finnish consumer agency on what kind of viral marketing is suitable, have all touched the subject.

I did already kill off social media in a previous post but having to discuss the topic has brought me back to it. I am not changing my view that social media is going down. It seems I need to deal with the issue daily, so a definition might come handy.

All the definitions I have seen, seem to be quite long winded. They go on and on about the tools currently available or activities that people can perform with these tools. The impacts of social media are also widely discussed, but I still feel that something is missing.

In all simplicity, my definition is this:

Social media = A medium where downstream and upstream are equal.

I would love to hear if anyone has any other thoughts on the subject.