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I Live in the Future & Here's How It Works: Why Your World, Work, and Brain Are Being Creatively Disrupted

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I Live in the Future & Here’s How It Works: Why Your World, Work, and Brain Are Being Creatively Disrupted

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But that’s the problem: It’s only a collection of what editors think is appropriate. And it doesn’t swirl in my preferences. My likes and dislikes; it’s just not designed for me. More important, by the time those carefully chosen words on paper arrive at my house, printed permanently on the page and selected for a vast audience of readers, a lot of the content isn’t current.

At Google they call this “dogfooding.” That is, if you make dog food and the dogs won’t eat it, you might have a bit of a problem. The people who built Gmail have to use it for their e-mail service, and if something doesn’t work, they have to fix it. Collectively, if Google engineers don’t like a service’s feature, they are supposed to change it accordingly—whether it’s Google Search, Google Mobile, or any other Google product. Along the same lines, if I wasn’t reading the print newspaper, there was a reason.

Just like me, the generation coming of age in this digital society doesn’t see or perceive much difference in types of media. Video? Words? Music? Computer code? It doesn’t matter. The actual tools used are irrelevant. It’s the end result—the storylines, the messages—that matters. This generation thinks in pictures, words, and still and moving images and is comfortable mixing them all in the same space.

Everything will become content that can be customized, combined, sliced, diced, pureed, and endlessly redistributed.

If they don’t read a whole book in two days or stay with a television show, it isn’t because they can’t concentrate. It’s because we haven’t adapted the storytelling to fit their changing interests. They are consumnivores—collectively rummaging, consuming, distributing, and regurgitating content in byte-size, snack-size, and full-meal packages.

But consumnivores come to news from a different perspective: New technology has put each of them squarely on his or her own map, and now they want news that is highly personalized, relevant, and meaningful specifically to them. They are keenly aware that they and their friends no longer watch the same television shows at the same time and no longer will read the same newspapers or devour books in the same way. We are demanding that the stories of tomorrow be tailored to an audience of one—me—requiring a new approach.

Great storytelling, incisive reporting, and thoughtful editing will still prevail—but they will need to be presented to you and me in a different form to go beyond mere information.

“The right price, quality, niche, and immediacy,” Alptraum reiterated; “that’s what people will pay for.”

But there’s one other thing I discovered the next-generation consumer will pay for online: better experiences, which often grow out of better storytelling.

There are many reasons people steal content, as I’ll discuss later. But one of the major problems of the Web is the lack of humanization. People are oblivious to the fact that a human being is on the other side of the digital information they are consuming.

Thus the telephone, by bringing music and ministers into every house, will empty the concert halls and the churches.… –“The Telephone,” New York Times, March 22, 1876

perhaps not strangely at all, people were thoroughly satisfied—which would lead one to believe that what readers really craved was not so much the contents of books, magazines, and papers as the assurance that they were not missing anything.”

Not missing anything? Ultimately, the digests played on this unavoidable tension between the new and the old: If you don’t get on board—big time—you will be out of the loop or left behind. Linda Stone, a prominent technologist who spent nearly two decades as an executive at Apple and Microsoft, sees the same worry today. When you compulsively check e-mail, or run to the mailbox, or open up Facebook, she says, you aren’t simply being obsessive or trying to avoid work. You’ve succumbed to something much deeper. Stone calls this “continuous partial attention”: a need to know what’s coming next, an “effort not to miss anything.”14

For the first time, society as a whole has engaged in real-time conversations using text, merging writing with speech. That has created something of a new language.

Because of these relationships, those somewhat unknown online friends may be as influential—or more so—as a running buddy or a next-door neighbor. You and I are just as likely to accept their recommendations for restaurants and plumbers. They may influence the books you read, the movies you see, or the news you click to. Because you know they have common interests, you may trust them even if you don’t know them well enough to describe their hair color or favorite sports teams. As a result, these new communities and their members have a powerful and growing impact on what businesses their “friends” frequent, what they do, and how they spend their money. In the future, their power is going to grow in expected and unexpected ways.

But it wasn’t until I read Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism by Benedict Anderson, a Cornell University emeritus professor of government, that I gained a real understanding of what was happening online with our social networks.3

As technology continues to expand and strengthen personal, professional, and social connections across space and time, the ties you feel to your online communities—to people like Sam H.—will grow as well.

And although we don’t think about it consciously, every story we engage with has some sort of community aspect to it.

The newspaper is a community built partially on political interests and opinion but also around the collection of stories, their event date, and the location of the establishment that produces them.

They wanted to know the news, they wanted to share it, and they wanted to react with their own tributes and remembrances.4

In the digital, always-on, real-time, creating, consuming society we live in today, we are constantly weaving in and out of small and large, obvious and imagined communities.

The Assassin’s Gate: America in Iraq;

To Prensky, there are two camps of Internet users: digital immigrants and digital natives. The natives were born into a world where virtual interaction was commonplace; the immigrants, born before the Internet spread, have had to adapt to its ways.

Over the last five years I’ve noticed two things that distinguish digital natives from digital immigrants. First, digital natives unabashedly create and share content—any type of content. They aren’t satisfied merely having information and aren’t at all slowed by doing the creating themselves.

Moreover, digital natives do not distinguish between mainstream stories in the mainstream media such as newspapers and television and those created by their peers. Natives also differ from immigrants in the way they deal with the unbelievable amount of content available to them online.

Because creating anchors helps people feel part of a community while helping them navigate the digital never-never land. Anchors may seem like just another term for a social network, but they are more than that. The first social networks were not designed to help solve the problems of information overload or to narrow down content; they were meant to be essentially glorified lists of acquaintances—old friends, new friends, friends of friends, and people who used to be friends. Social networks were designed to share status updates, pictures, and eventually news articles. Unintentionally, they have become our online safe havens, our anchoring communities.

when I find an interesting article from the hundreds I see, I send it to my community in a reciprocal gesture. I don’t get paid for it and neither do they, but we help one another navigate the mind-boggling amount of information available on the Web.

Past research has shown that we tend to align ourselves with like-minded individuals: We sort by income level, age, neighborhood, or similar political or other interests. But on the Web, we see drastically more opinions and viewpoints than we do in traditional media such as television and newsprint.

I trust in these complete and often anonymous strangers when I read Amazon.com reviews before I buy a book or when I look at online restaurant reviews before choosing whether to try a new place. True, I don’t know who these reviewers are or whether they know what kinds of food or books I like. The restaurant might have deceitfully written some of these reviews—or a competitor might have penned them. But overall, I have developed enough trust in these online reviewers to use their postings in making some general decisions.

Online, building individual name recognition and trust may be more important than simply affiliating with a trusted institution. For instance, I admire the content in the New York Times, but when I go online, I look specifically for media coverage from the columnist David Carr or for simple recipes from the Times recipe writer Mark Bittman. I seek out his blog posts rather than his individual newspaper articles, and there I can see his television appearances as well as his columns and read additional tips and suggestions from his readers. After following them for a while, I know that I trust and value their advice.

Down the road, I think we are likely to see more reporters and reviewers be known and trusted largely because they have built their own brands, not because of the organization they may (or may not) work for.

The sites that will provide all this just-for-you data are assuming that you’ll be comfortable with a computer knowing a lot about you, just as we’ve grown comfortable with ATM machines and banking online. In the early days of computerized banking, many people were extremely nervous about trusting a machine with their deposits and withdrawals. A friend recently remembered that her grandmother sat her down when she was a child and explained that “boys and ATM machines just couldn’t be trusted.” Yet today we use ATMs at delis, on street corners, even inside bank lobbies. Today, there are nearly 400,000 of the machines able to dispense cash, and often they can do more, such as sell stamps or money orders. More often than not, convenience trumps trepidation.

When I asked Jakob Nielsen, a world-renowned design and usability expert, why people feel more comfortable with well-designed sites, he explained that a lot of the thought process is about comfort and familiarity.5 “Think about the old banks,” he said. “When you walked into the institutions, they had these huge marble statues in the middle of the floor. This was meant to evoke power and strength and confidence so you could trust the institution to look after your money.” When it comes to the Web, good design offers the same feeling of trust. Nielsen explained that little things like a logo, a phone number, or clean, well-designed fonts offer a sense of familiarity with real-world objects.

As software and computers become smarter and we start to trust them, we will slowly add them to our trust markets and anchoring communities, both for their dependability and for their credibility. We will have more choices, as we do in deciding between the ATM machine and the bank teller. And more often than not, we’re going to opt for convenience, which after all, trumps trepidation. There is, however, one caveat to all of this: privacy.

In an interview, Krause explained that the smaller groups’ goal was not just to wander but to walk to the target while staying with a group. It became a “self-organized process because nobody has knowledge of what the group is collectively about, or what the individuals all know. Everybody is just following his or her local route. So as a result, we see collective locomotion towards the target.” This theory applies whether you have 5 percent, 10 percent, or even 50 percent headed in one direction. The whole group will always reach the target if 5 percent or more knowingly or unknowingly lead the way.

Something similar can happen online with the information we share and consume. Any single individual can find something interesting and send it to the group, and if it’s stimulating and appealing, they in turn share it with their community. The cycle of mass of content seekers will gravitate toward the X on the Web. Then the pattern begins all over again. If the news is that important, it will find me. —A college student explaining his news habits in a focus group So are we really nothing more than a school of dull fish? Could anyone with an audience of 5 percent lead and change an entire online group? Couldn’t a smarmy individual go off into one online world or another, recruit a few hundred people within a network, and drive you to click on a link?

So what did they find with this treasure trove of data? A majority of the conversation taking place on Twitter at the time was about news and information sharing. Looking through Twitter’s trending topics during this period, the researchers found that more than 85 percent of the top-level topics were headline news or something newsy in nature. They also found that no matter how many people follow a user on Twitter, anything that is retweeted by other users will reach up to 1,000 users on average.

This new way of consuming information and storytelling online doesn’t bode well for individuals or companies that create mediocre content and cookie-cutter storytelling. The new mentality says that if it’s not good or important, the group won’t share it. Furthermore, it no longer matters who created the content; if it doesn’t satisfy us, we’re not going to share or filter something up the food chain.

As with porn, whether the content is produced by a hundred-million-dollar studio or by people in their bedrooms with a webcam, good content will rise to the top, and our special communities and collective intelligence will help get it there. Our trust communities will help us filter the tsunami of data, opinion, insights, news, and reviews coming our way so that we feel neither overwhelmed nor anxious.

What’s significant in this example is that our brains are something like a muscle, which can grow stronger and more powerful with practice and work. Today, technology is building new connections as our brains interpret content and receive stimulation. There’s a constant and simplistic iterative adaptation taking place in our brains as we use our computers, mobile phones, and e-readers. Our brains are learning how to navigate these gadgets, just as they do when we learn how to read.

Instead, his research found, our brains work completely differently while reading online than while reading a printed page, making numerous decisions based on the many options, menus, photos, text, and links on each page. In fact, the first study concluded, “Internet searching appears much more stimulating than reading.”

It’s an editor’s job to reduce what a reader’s brain has to wrestle with.

The researchers found that surgeons or residents who used to be avid video game players had significantly better laparoscopic skills than did those who’d never played. On average, the serious game players were 33 percent faster and made 37 percent fewer errors than their colleagues who didn’t have prior video-game experience.

  • @quetzaltwit

All these media engage our brains with equal weight and importance. The Web offers a culmination of everything for our brains through a new form of narrative and engagement that pulls us, along with our brains, into a new era of storytelling.

Now you are the starting point. Now the digital world follows you, not the other way around.

news is what is relevant to the individual—in her case, what Facebook calls its “News Feed.” The feed “highlights what’s happening in your social circles” and produces “the latest headline generated by the activity of your friends and social groups,” the company explained when it introduced the novel service in September 2006.

The digital anarchy we’re experiencing today has torn apart markets as they have been known for hundreds of years, replacing them with something still taking shape and yet to be determined.

The birth of the Internet was the beginning, but we will feel the aftershocks and tremors for years as we move from a broad audience of readers or viewers to a very narrow audience of me and you, each a target market and each always in the center of the map.

The sales pitch of the music industry wasn’t “Here’s a good song you might like.” It was “Here are a couple of good songs you might like and ten or eleven others you probably won’t like—but we need to fill a CD so we can justify selling it to you for $15!”

They found that people sharing their views of a new movie on Twitter could foretell with 97.3 percent accuracy how well, or poorly, a movie would perform in an opening weekend at the box office.

The limits of paper won’t exist. Digital will mean “immediate” and “infinite” and “extremely personalized” for the customer at the center of the map.

I use a four-prong formula when deciding whether to purchase digital content: price, quality, timeliness, experience.

In other words, when consumers are not offered an option, they make one themselves.

In the public mind, the product you hold in your hand should cost more than the one that was downloaded—especially if it was downloaded onto an expensive e-reader or another gadget.

Understandably, content industries want to charge as much as the market will bear—but the market won’t bear as much as it used to.

iTunes displaced a large proportion of music theft because it was simple, ultrafast, consistent, and one of the few ways to get music on your iPod, which quickly became a status symbol. The standard fee that Apple charged seemed reasonable and sensible: 99 cents for a single song and $9.99 for a whole album, regardless of the band’s name or status. That’s part of the balance to be had with Me Economics.

The iPod and iTunes proved that we’ll pay if the price is right and the experience is special enough.

In reality, we don’t pay for the content; we pay for the experience.

This illustrates a key reason why selling content online has been so difficult for so many media companies: The experiences that original books, newspapers, and CDs provide haven’t translated into something as meaningful in the digital realm for that me-in-the-center customer.

They need to convince young people who have grown accustomed to getting so much for free that these new experiences are truly worth paying for. We’re selling to a new audience, and we need to talk to them differently.

People form incredibly strong bonds with their phones, so much so that even those who once swore that they would never read anything on a screen have slowly started to change some aspect of their reading habits. Even true believers in the print experience may see that a screen can provide just as strong an experience as a textured piece of paper.

One reason we feel so connected to our phones is that we have them with us all the time. Our mobile phones are constantly just a reach away, connecting us to the fabric of the Internet. But more important, the deep connection with these devices comes from the association and bond they provide to the people we love, care about, and interact with on a daily basis. This device, a small chunk of metal and glass the size of a pack of cards, has become an extension of our relationships. Although the phones have not replaced the relationships, we can feel such an incredible bond with our mobiles that they can become a surrogate for those relationships.

The researchers believe the mobile phone becomes a “transitional object,” a psychological term originally applied to toddlers’ teddy bears and blankets.10 Transitional objects create familiarity and comfort and also help develop connections and bonds. The authors also see the mobile phone as a strange object that crosses the line between a commercialized product and a childhood connection. It thereby becomes an important bond between parents and children.

Given the extraordinary developments in what phones can do, it’s possible that over the next five years the mobile phone will become the single most important device in our lives. These phones, our constant companions, connect us to any morsel of information and, most important, connect us to people. In turn the mobile phone becomes an extension of relationships. Although the mobile phone does not replace our bonds with people, it extends and perpetuates them. Paper, radio, television, and even the standard telephone all allowed conversation and communication, but our mobile devices are highly personalized and instantaneous.

Rather than decide between a newspaper and radio, consumers chose to do both at the same time. Or rather than decide between surfing multiple websites on my laptop, watching a TV show, texting with a friend, and playing a video game, I’ll just do them all simultaneously. The coming generations will figure out even more consumption combinations and collectively will most likely become even more adept at juggling different types of media.

According to a study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, the time young people spent with media was holding steady with previous surveys at six and a half hours a day.12 But by IM-ing or listening to music while they watched TV or worked on the computer, the young people were fitting eight and half hours of media exposure into that period. (The study referenced in the article was released in 2005; these numbers have continued to grow rapidly since then!)

The beauty of the next ten years, as more and more content types begin to move permanently onto screens of all shapes and sizes, will be the ability to pick the experience that’s right for you—to engage in the type of stimulation that fits your hyperpersonalized preferences. If you want to consume a more prosaic type of storytelling, that should be your option. If for you, as for me, that wouldn’t be stimulating enough to your brain, an immersive supplementary experience should be available to you. And if the content creators don’t tell the story in this new immersive way, you may well be able to create a substitute yourself.

The future is already here—it is just unevenly distributed. —William Gibson

We’re seeing a society in which our lives are augmented by our ever-smaller and more powerful mobile devices and our online preferences accompany us wherever we go—even into the real world. The next challenge is to convert these technological abilities into profitable businesses that serve the consumnivore’s growing appetite. Of course, that’s much more easily imagined than accomplished.

Why? Bracken says the study found that the headphones used with an iPod effectively closed out the rest of the world, helping viewers focus more intently. Further, the subjects holding an iPod felt a greater sense of control over the storytelling and watching experience because they literally held the experience in their hands. Holding a device in your hands allows you to move the device to fit your viewing preferences; a large TV mounted on a wall requires you to move to accommodate it. In other words, screen size, sound, and comfort weren’t the defining factors in the experience for these digital experts. Surprisingly, control over the process and experience, the ability to tune out distractions, and an immersive experience turned out to be hugely important.

Asking twenty students to read the same textbook at the same time is like expecting that group of students to be able to run a mile at the exact same speed or to have an equal ability to paint a still life. Our brains are simply not built that way. Using screens and digital teaching will allow kids to engage at their own pace in a collaborative fashion that paper just can’t provide.

Several technologists, myself included, believe that the mobile phone probably will outpace desktop computing in the next five years as the central entrance point to the Web. But the mobile phone doesn’t signal the demise of the desktop computer or the large television screen sitting in your living room. Instead, these Web-enabled devices will start to talk to one another and interact in ways that might seem like science fiction today.

All this is a cautionary tale for the future. The Web and technology need to leave a place for people to make mistakes. They need to allow for youth to make mistakes. While holding people accountable for genuine wrongdoing, they also need to have some room for anonymity and for forgetting so that young people—and even some older ones—have room to grow and change.

The consumers who aren’t coming back are scurrying like ants in every direction possible, and you’re probably wondering where they’re going. They’re searching. Searching for new forms of storytelling that we haven’t offered yet. The bottom of the ravine, the new medium, affords a new narrative—just like in the early days of television, when the producers didn’t know what to do with cameras and motion and started filming radio shows. The business of storytelling is doing the same thing with the Internet. We’re taking our existing content and simply aggregating it to the Web; we’re filming radio shows.

As we move to the next iteration of storytelling, as a great flattening is taking place between consumer and creator, the medium will no longer be the message. The medium will be pervasive. The message will be amateur, professional, and infinite. And it will all exist as a mutual collection of bytes, snacks, and meals.

As distribution channels become extinct and irrelevant and the ubiquity of new devices gives way to truly amalgamated communications, the new commodities will be length, aggregation, immediacy, and niche.

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