Simultaneously embodied, recently developed futures.
Despite the fact that the history of new media as they are adopted throughout technically and economically developed societies is fairly recent, this history has managed to create at least three distinguishable bodies of future visions that had sufficient mass appeal to make it into concretely percieved present.
Of course, specifically in the societal context of media en technology, envisioned futures follow each other up with an ever increasing speed. The funny thing is that the decay rate isn’t speeding up to the same extent. Once finance has found its way, and agenda’s, jobs and personal fates are committed, another time regime than that of the imagination takes over, and we get stuck with a severly mediated body of future visions for at least a couple of seasons.
So, that’s how we are currently living in at least three futures at the same time: Web2.0 is the warped but realised future vision of the early 80′ies hypertext believers, of the pre-dotcom and pre-www internet idealists for whom the net was to be the great democratising force - the means to spread all knowledge and power evenly.
Second Life is a beta version of an embodied future (rooted in the later 80′ies and early 90′ies) of the extropians, of the Californian Virtual Reality adepts that strove to leave the body behind and to upload consciousness into digital and (therefore) boundless realities.
And a third future - timebased in the second half of the 90′ies- that is being rolled out as we speak is that of RFID and GPS linked public data systems. It is the concretisation of the ubicomp dreams and the design ideology of ambient intelligence.
Web 2.0 and ubicomp’s currently embodied future seem to match rather well. RFID can in many relevant ways indeed be used as a social platform to exchange digital data related to places, objects and located people.
Second Life is a bit of an outsider in the currently realised futures - it seems to me the overarching idea of SL as a no-holds-barred place of the wildest imagination, only limited by a simple physics engine, and the amount of LindenDollars on your account, gets in the way of more interesting, more hybrid uses. But I’m not sure whether in the near future LindenLabs has some serious decision making to do, and possibly re-branding, or that it will be the users themselves who take SL in new directions (after all, SL is mainly what it’s user do with it).
Will SL grow into a tool for creative representation of First Life phenomena? A virtual office where everyone can talk to a pretty and helpful face instead of having to wait for an idiot phone robot to explain what number to dial to get offered the next set of possible problems into which your particular issue might fall? A YouTube cinema? - where you can meet friends and watch someones peculiar YouTube selection in a cosy virtual cinema, and chat about it, so you don’t have to watch alone.
A place where activists come together and wield political power by sheer number again? Blocking the entrances of virtual offices with their avatars to put pressure behind their demand for a pay rise?
Tags: ubicomp, second life, hybrid world