Worries of losing more life skills…

Most people have already lost the knowledge of phone numbers of those close to them through the use of a mobile phone’s address book. Our industrialized food production has allowed me to never learn how to kill an animal, but I still know how to cook a ‘processed’ one. How much knowledge of the world is needed to survive daily? How much knowledge is needed for the occasional loss of technology (power outage)?

Chris Hand’s social sensors relate to some of my concept. Mobile devices communicating a layer of hidden information to the physical environment.

Emotional, consumer robot. Older project but still a consumer product displaying ambient information.

I’ve been following Will Wilkinson’s blog, The Fly Bottle. He is an Iowan working at the Cato Institute (libertarian thinktank) in DC. Being a combination of a socialist and libertarian, I like some of his arguments relating to ethics, economics, emotions, etc. And he reminds me of my brother.

I read bits of Bowling Alone for my dissertation. Critics argue that although we may have lost some social capital, life is not going to go back to the jolly 1950s. Also, many new activities have replaced some of the nearly extinct traditional ones. I believe the problems Robert Putnam says exist are real but need to be modernized (even the book isn’t that old). Combined with Generation Me and Rise of the Creative Class, this book adds to the complexity of those stories.

After seeing some blog posts and almost getting in to see Clay Shirky speak at the ICA a few weeks ago, I snagged the newly acquired course copy. I only just started but am finding bits of it extremely relevant to my project and more original than I expected. I thought it would be a print version of what I get from my RSS feed.

I just saw a post at BLDGBLOG with a map from 1961 of the US in the future (1975). I wonder how societies dream of the future affects children’s aspirations. My mom would have been 15 at this time. The infamous 1964 New York World’s Fair described how we’d all be living in automated homes and moving sidewalks. With hindsight, these seem unreachable. Maybe in the booming post-war economy, anything seemed possible. I guess we are researching space elevators now in 2008 and commercial space-flight is just around the corner. My question is, if the future fantasies are too far from reach, are kids turned off by what they can accomplish? or am I so disconnected from reality that I can understand most technologies while most people still see them as magic?I’ve found it interesting discussing the social internet with people in and outside the RCA. Some people accept social networking sites as part of life and others respond that we should go back to not having cell phones. Without some sort of apocalypse, I doubt we will regress. Some digital services will lose their lure, but some will find a long-term (permanent?) role in the fabric of our lives. 

We are going into our third week of Easter break. I’ve been doing a lot of programming, thinking, and some relaxing. Before break, I picked up a William Gibson book at the library, Count Zero. In our studies, I define Design Interactions as trying to figure out how technology will fit into society. I’m enjoying reading some cyberpunk and relating the mid-80s visions of the future with where we currently are. Virtual reality was a fantasy for the future. A dream of a what our world could become. Those dreams have been lost in recent years. Maybe with the dot com burst of the late-90s we had a loss of innocence. Maybe it was 9/11 and the ridiculousness of US imperialism that are more cause for worry than foolish, future fantasies. It is somewhat cliche but I am intrigued by dreams. Dreams fuel passion and passion is a reason to live. Before cyberpunk, there was the space-race. I remember waiting in line and getting to shake hands with an astronaut at the Invention Convention which I participated in when I was about 10. I had developed an automatic bed-maker. I wanted to be a scientist! an engineer! I was young and these dreams passed, but the need for heroes has not. I discussed last night with my brother about hope Barrack Obama brings me. For the first time in my independent life have I seen the possibility of being proud of America. His hope is to solve the problems that any innocent child already knows, so his hope feels too near to me and too mundane to keep my interest. We need some new dreams for our society. Nanotech? too small for people to grasp.Biotech/genetics? it’s been talked about for ages.Space? as much of a socialist as I’ve been, privatization of space flight gets my juices flowing. I want to float sans gravity and to feel infinitely isolated. Weird fetish maybe?Robots? maybe as they become consumerized, there will be a similar adoption to the advent of personal computers. The Wild West of robot outlaws will give little Danny something to aspire to. 

I just had the largest emotional reaction I’ve ever had from a web page (not including receiving emails). I tried to find my brother on Facebook. Against my better judgement, I input my password to my gmail account. Facebook returned a list of 120 people of my email contacts who have Facebook accounts. I hit ‘unselect all’ then found my brother’s listing near the bottom and hit ’send’. Immediately, it shows me a list of email addresses with checks. Oh no! My stomach dropped. The gut reaction was that I just invited all these people. Luckily it instead was showing me a list of 590 more people I could invite to Facebook. No thank you and PLEASE for such a potentially embarrassing actioin, please allow me to confirm or give me feedback of what I just did.

The New York Times had an article, Midlife Suicide Rises, Puzzles Researchers [pdf], that may relate to some topics in the book, Generation Me by Jean Twenge. The article is addressing baby-boomers but Twenge points out developments in social and existential patterns between the generations that could lead to large-scale problems. Increased suicide is an unfortunate one. With rapid cultural changes happening from the ground up, no one is looking at the long-term effects. Can designers effectively do this? Designers work as artists, engineers, sociologists, psychologists, scientists, critics, etc. doing none at an expert level. But since none of the experts in those fields consider the other fields, designers span the stage and hopefully make the right connections.