Monthly Archives: August 2011

By Troed Sångberg
22nd August 2011. 08:27

It’s about our rate of innovation

In just two days Media Evolution The Conference begins in Malmö, Sweden. This blog post is about one of the themes of the conference that strikes me close to heart as a futurist – Man & Machine.

I’m writing this on a train, on my way to meet both colleagues, acquaintances and people I’ve so far only heard of but never met. For myself and most people this is something we look forward to. We love to meet, talk, exchange thoughts and ideas.

The same drive, true since the human race was spread out in pockets on the Sahara savannah (which wasn’t a desert back then), is one of the reasons us humans love to go to conferences, to pick up the phone, to read blog entries like this one. We’re simply the chatty animal.

I’ve dabbled in mapping the rate of human innovation to two other variables, the latency between our minds and the bandwidth with which we are able to transmit information. 8000 years ago, on that savannah, there was a local group of people we knew in detail, and every so often we got together with other groups of the same size to exchange goods and stories.

The first major society came about in the Nile valley, since catastrophic climate change dried out the lush savannah and the closest major body of water was the mighty Nile river. This made it possible for even more humans to exchange even more information, thus ideas, and we got amongst other things the written language.

Written language means we could now store information over time. It became possible to tell people, not to Google it, but to go read the walls in the temples.

Cutting the rest of the list somewhat short:

[...] Library of Alexandria, the printing press, the telegraph, newspapers, photography, telephone, TV, modems, Internet, mobile phones, mobile Internet devices [...]

… brings us to today. Most people reading this blog probably carries a mobile, with which they feel constantly in the know. No information is more than a few clicks away, and that has changed a lot of the activities that only a few years ago were very different. When I grew up, out in the countryside, I sometimes called a friend in the slightly smaller town six miles away to say I was coming over before jumping on my bike. When I arrived there could’ve been a change of plans, his family were suddenly not at home and I couldn’t call them. They couldn’t call me. It was a black hole of unused time (although I got a lot of exercise).

That doesn’t happen today, and we’re on our way to change our reality in an equally disruptive way again. We still, even with our most modern mobile devices, experience information through a “keyhole”. If I want to read the text someone just sent me, I felt the buzz in my pocket, I need to first pull out my mobile – read it – and when I’m done I’m going to put down the mobile again.

There’s a waste of attention span here. When something happens that interests me (of which I’m in control, depending on where I am and what I’m doing) that should be visible to me without me having to perform an expensive task switch or navigate about my plethora of devices.

The interaction part of our digital experience is going to [have to] move up into our active attention sphere – in front of our eyes, with completely new ways of interface navigation possibilities.

Granted, I only started wearing glasses a few months ago, but even the slightly better vision they give me – or for many just the ability to dim strong sunlight – is enough for us to put them on our noses. If we in addition get the opportunity to experience a much fuller reality, where we can gain additional knowledge about the world around us as well as being able to interact with other minds with even lower latency and higher bandwidth, we will.

Augmented Reality visors will continue the path of merging man and machine, technological human-to-human communication devices, raising the possible speed of human innovation once again.

See you at the conference! In addition to everywhere else I’m naturally going to be at the “Our relationship with technology” discussion table