Month long questions -- please feel free to add, re-interpret, modify, comment, etc. These are just some examples of the sort of questions you might ask yourself and spend a month researching and writing the answer.

If you could change one rule in a commonly understood and accepted paradigm of MIC technology, what would it be?


In the “age of twitter” when more and more MIC technologies will be geared to the most momentary of needs, thoughts and experiences, will there be a counter-balancing trend to increasingly long-term applications – digital goods and services that stretch on for years, even decades?

Although we generally think of MIC applications as geared to the individual consumer, how can we imagine a world filled with experiences that are primarily, even necessarily shared or social?

Does human nature shape technology or vice versa? Illustrate

Are we all avatars – from Barbie to Second Life to our roles as employee, student, teacher, etc.?

What is the difference between changing the rules and changing the fashion? And asking a different question?

If you were to design a MIC experience for Sunday morning, how would it be different – it at all – from the experience you might design for Monday morning, or late Saturday night?

What is the meaning or function of fashion in MIC technology? How does a new fashion change the meaning of the previous “hot” direction?

More?
Steve

Every MIC experience is an act of consumption and interaction – yes? This means that you, the recipient, are doing something crucial to the experience. Even if that means sitting quietly and receptively, this requires some concentration and discipline. Even if it means cutting your steak with a knife and fork then chewing and swallowing, then adjusting your tempo and combinational strategies: A little more salt, maybe? Or perhaps deciding to save the tenderest part for the last – or eat that part first? (As you can easily see, most meals are designed experiences, with a dessert saved for the last, like a reward. There may also be a physiological reason for serving the cake at the end: A burst of sugar satisties the appetite, psychologically “filling you up” and finishing your desire to eat. As you get older, you learn to appreciate the choreography of sweetness and bitterness that comes when serving coffee with cake. That bitterness is also a “closer.”)

One lesson to extract from this: The act of consumption is anything but passive and merely receptive. Consumption is inherently interaction. Let us take another step: This interaction may be thought of as beginning before and after the mediated “meal,” so to speak. We get ready for mediated experiences and follow them with various rituals or protocols. These protocols may be so important that they overshadow the mediated experience itself: E.g. going to a movie on a date. The “success” of the date, however that is defined, is generally independent of the aesthetic quality of the movie. It may help the event of the date to attend a good flick rather than a bad one, unless it’s so bad that sharing the experience of watching it – or walking out of it – becomes more meaningful or successful as a human-to-human interaction than the human-media interaction of simply watching the movie, enjoying it, and then agreeing it was a good film. And once we start this conversation it becomes easy to see that many mediated experiences are simply there as a centerpiece in the larger banquet of interactions that may also include human-human experiences, human-machine interactions in other venues or platforms, as well as “consumer created content” that supplements the pre-made experience. As such, we should ask where could or should the designer of MIC experiences begin or end the design?

Missions

At our last class meeting (which was actually our first), I asked that everyone write something about what they believed to be their individual mission. This was discussed briefly and without much detail. This was to leave as many doors open as possible to as many individual interpretations of what that might mean.

What is your “mission?” Certainly there is the religious sense of the term; being on “a mission from God” is a well-known phrase, although no doubt different people understand this idea in different ways. And certainly, although anyone is free to discuss them, such ideas are far beyond the scope of this class.

Instead, I hoped that each of you would use this as an opportunity to ask yourselves what exactly you wanted to achieve in your professional evolution, in your careers.

For example, you might have begun to fulfill the assignment by stating that you wanted to be the best movie director in the world, and win the Academy Award for best director 10 years in a row. But then you would need to go beyond this brave statement to explain WHY you wanted to be the best director, and what qualities of your movies would earn you that reputation. It’s the explanation that’s the hard part.

Deeply interwoven in that explanation would almost necessarily be some sense of the impact or effect you wanted your movies to have on your audiences. Once you start thinking about that impact, and how other people respond to what you have created, then you are beginning to explore the idea of mission. Although we often talk abut a “mission from…” some place of person or authority (“I’m on a mission from the President…”), we should also understand that the other side of the idea is the sense that any mission is a “mission to…” somebody or someplace or “a mission to accomplish” something that is beyond yourself.

In other words, it makes more sense to say, “I’m on a mission to make the most emotionally powerful movies imaginable, so powerful that people weep as they leave the theater and the world acknowledges me as the best director in history.” In other words, the title “best director” is simply a description or a badge that comes after you have accomplished your mission.

Let’s switch gears. Forget the Academy Awards.

What if you wanted to work in advertising?

As we discussed briefly in class, advertising may be the prime moving force in the development of the Web. We might even say that the Web itself is just one very, very large venue for advertising – in he same way that the Yellow Pages might be thought of as a type of advertising. In the so-called Information Age (That’s right now, in case you were wondering.) any and all information is practically a form of advertising, whether you are advertising a product, a service, a company, an idea of even yourself (What are online dating services except “smart” or “targeted” advertising venues for people?)

If your professional aspirations inclined you toward advertising, the question of mission will still need an answer, or at least a few minutes of speculation: What IS my mission in the advertising profession? To sell the most product? To make the most money? To match the consumer with the product or service he/she really wants? Or perhaps what they really need? (And that might be different.) Or would your mission be somehow to improve the world by successfully advertising an idea like “don’t pollute” or “get some exercise and stop eating junk food?”

There are no right or wrong answers to any of these questions. Nobody is saying you need to go out and “save the whales” in order to be a decent human being or a successful professional in the realm of media-information-communications (MIC) technology.

However, it is worthwhile to ask yourself, is there any connection, any parallel, any harmony between my individual sense of mission and the choice of MIC technology or MIC profession that I am pursuing? Another way to ask the question, does my personal sense of mission stand on or require a particular type of MIC platform?

In other words, does my mission to be the greatest movie director in history demand that I make movies that are seen in large dark rooms on screens 50 feet across? Is my entire idea of movies revolve around a central, traditional concept of the experience and meaning of “movie?”

What if you wanted to be a great novelist – would your concept of the reader’s experience (and thus your sense of mission to the reader) be built upon the expectation that the reader would be experiencing your creations on a good-old-fashioned paper-and-ink book? How would the soon-to-be-released Apple tablet reader (rumored to run approx. $1,000 per unit with all sorts of multimedia capacity) change your sense of that experience, and perhaps your sense of mission?

We can consider these and other questions in class.

Steve

Welcome to N503classblog

Welcome to our class blog for N503. Over the semester we will be sharing thoughts, insights, intuitions and observations, questions and answers, suggestions and even criticisms (although diplomatically delivered) of the ideas put forward in class. It will be our mutual responsibility to contribute to the overall growth of our collective understanding of the theory, practice, marketplace and application domains of digital media technologies.

This will involve an ongoing and wide-ranging dialogue and exploration of information resources. Some of that will occur in class. Some will take place as a solo, independent endeavor by each member of class. And some will take place in this blogging forum, where we will share observations about what we have said and written. This blog will be an online, asynchronous seminar to inform and reflect our class content and processes.

I am very much looking forward to this.

Steve Mannheimer