Living in the Immersion Age Now

After my initial post about the Immersion Age, Steve left me this little comment:

…I’m not convinced [that there is a difference between an Immersion Age and Information Age], mostly because if you read about the early Internet it was always supposed to be fully participatory – see When Wizards Stay up Late. To me participation and immersion are just continuations of the trends, this is all still part of the Information Age … we’re only at the beginning….

Information Age: We lived like a solo alpha male/female of primitive times, looking across the field for signs of interest and of importance (ie a fresh kill, a water spring, a bush full of berries). There was a rush to claim that knowledge as our own for our own survival, and did not linger long enough to gather further information (who killed the animal, why is there water here). We returned to these sites with frequency, but there may have been long periods of waiting between these gathering sessions, or we may have moved on to discover new sites of interest, new thresholds of information to use. If we bumped into another person, we shared some of our knowledge and took some of theirs, but these interactions were short.

Immersion Age: We are still a solo being, but we have collected together in multiple tribes, with connections between the tribes being apparent to others, or only to ourselves. Instead of “spot to spot,” we’re more likely to enter one of the tribes’ homes to search out for our information first. When we sit amongst the tribe groups, the information being exchanged between people is endless- and it’s everywhere: written on walls, garbage left on the floor, a piece of leather passed onto us. We receive information both when we request it and when we don’t, and all of it is likely to be valuable in one way or another. Our way of survival is as a settled tribe, an agrarian way of life. When we want something, we look around our tribe or go out into the field to the row of food and get what we need. Things are more available now than ever before.

There are a lot of companies and websites recognizing this shift in the way people are behaving on the internet. During the Information Age, for example, people had floating websites that were rarely connected to some kind of ring/network, then they had an email account on a different webpage/server, and their own collection of bookmarks. To get to their email, they had to surf away from their current site or open up another program. To chat with someone, they had to open up ICQ or MSN.

But in the Immersion Age, all of these applications are being combined into centralized suites, or will be soon. Let’s take two well known examples, and one who is less known, that are leading the way in this new age.

Google

Once upon a time, they were a search engine and that’s about it. They’re still thought of as only a search engine for many people, but their services are expanding rapidly. Google doesn’t want to be just a portal to other websites through its search engine; it wants you to use Google for search, for finding maps, for searching the news and news groups. Less than two years ago, they added Gmail so you could do your email from Google, but not only that, you could search from your email account to the internet, have instant messaging conversations with others on the Google network, and read syndicated newsfeeds of blogs. Close at hand is their Blogger application, soon they’ll integrate the online word processor, Writely. It’s probably only a matter of time before they buy a site like Pandora or Last.fm so you can listen to music while doing your email, chatting, and reading blogs all from the comfort of one site, one tribe.

Myspace

Myspace operates differently than Google, but no two tribes are perfectly alike anyways. Myspace has grown because of people working within the environment they’ve built to write their blogs, send messages to other members, listen to music from bands they’ve discovered through a search or friends, build up their networks of friends, explore other networks of friends, look through classifieds, watch music videos, and so on. People spend time on Myspace to explore and see what’s out there. They could do that through doing a web search, but they’re more likely to enjoy themselves if they start with someone they’re familiar with and see where it takes them. With a strong userbase of over 50 million, Myspace can expand in a lot of directions, just like Google, but Myspace keeps people within the Myspace Network, unlike Google where the opportunities to exist through a casual link are all to available. The only thing Myspace lacks is really a way to transfer money to people, handling business exchanges without a third party (credit card, bank, PayPal) entering into the equation.

Goowy

Goowy has started out like Google, by offering the basic service of email to its users. But since that intial stage, they have a way to organize Contacts, a Calendar application, and a virtual desktop from which you can keep to-do lists, read blog feeds, look at photos from Flickr.com, watch live updates of the weather, amongst others. They have a collection of games you can play within their site, and will soon be adding on public file storage and another instant messaging application that will work with AIM, MSN, Yahoo, etc. Like Google, Goowy works to keep you within their framework as much as possible, but unlike Google and like Myspace, one of their strengths is also moving forward with the entertainment value of their site. Google offers only their chat platform without a user going to a different site; Myspace has a strong media presence, and has a weak instant messaging platform right now. Goowy will be integrating the chat platform with their existing environment full of games and minis (widgets) for photos and other fun forms of information. With most of their minis, you enter the information once, and it will continue to update everytime you log on, or spend time on the site until you tell it not to. There is no constant searching for the same information over and over again. And like Google, they’re making a lot of this accessible on the desktop. You can move seamlessly from Goowy on the desktop to Goowy on the web.

What all three have in common is their ability to keep you using their sites until you’ve exhausted your time with them. This is different from Hotmail where your time spent there was dictated by when you were finished writing/reading/sorting emails. Theoretically, you could continue that loop forever, but for most there would be some form of finiteness to it. This is made obvious when you think about the initial time you sign onto a service like Hotmail versus Google/Myspace/Goowy.

With Hotmail, you’ll have an empty mailbox and empty list of contacts until you start sending email, share your address with others, set up your calendar, and so forth. Once you email X amount of people, enter X amount of people’s addresses into the contact list, you’re still left with an empty mailbox until they write you back. Your work is pretty much done after the basic set-up, so you leave to do other work while waiting. When you sign onto Myspace, you have an empty mailbox, profile, friendslist, etc. But after doing the basic set-up (which can be as basic or advanced as you want to make it), you can start browsing the 50 million other profiles, listen to their music and download the files, look through the classifieds, etc. You could do that forever and still not get through all the profiles as more are added every minute, and eventually, you’ll have to deal with messages and instant messaging from friends.

In the Immersive Age, you can live within these environments 24/7 and not get bored, whereas with the Information Age, you can quickly become bored of visiting the same sites. The Immersive Age grants you an endless supply of not just information, but with a large quantity of people to connect with (who are themselves an even larger bank of information, but a nonstatic bank).

And, of course, this is only referring to the way we use the Internet right now- all of this can be applied to the real world, as well- but that is for a future post.

Technorati : google, goowy, immersive, immersiveage, myspace

Immersive Age versus Information Age

I believe that the world has taken a great shift away from the way it behaved even five years ago. I’m calling it the Immersive Age and here is the story of why:

Last summer, a trend started to appear with myself and my interactions with a lot of people of my generation (18-30). There seems to be a pattern of people going to school and coming out without a clear sense of direction for their lives. We finish a University degree and a few years later are wondering why we can’t find work in that field and/or why our interest in that field has diminished greatly. The most common words describing their situations are “lost” and “confused.” This generation isn’t satisfied doing a trade (generally) and wants to accomplish more- on a larger scale. We no longer want to touch just our local community now; we want the world.

But there’s a problem. Taking a hold of the world is no easy thing, and we feel saddened by our realities of living in small cities in the middle of nowhere (it wouldn’t surprise me at all if these feelings were echoed in Europe, Asia, etc). We want to help, but don’t have the means to at the beginning. It’s a struggle to get to the top of anything for us, and we can’t find any help anywhere. We turn on the television to watch the news and just see more pain in the world. It inspires us to help those countries and cities more, but it doesn’t really tell us how to do it.

Much is written of the MTV generation having short attention spans, echoed by the increase of cases of ADHD (I’m skeptical that this is the case). But I’ve only read literature on possible solutions to this “problem.” No one seems to discuss the reasons why we may be like this. The obvious reasons are how we’re growing up with the internet and cable television, so we have lots of options for our attention and can get bored easily. This is just the bottom of the cake, though.

Our generation has not only grown up with a hundred cable channels and the internet. Experiencing these forms of media are no longer restricted to “the boxes.” We don’t need a television to watch tv, we don’t need a desktop computer to logon to the internet, or a radio to listen to the radio. Everything has exploded out of those restrictive spaces and has taken over most of the civilized world. There is no escape from all of this now. It’s everywhere you can imagine and expanding at such a pace, that it’s going to be overtaking the human skin in this century no doubt.

This way of living is different from what was called the Information Age. Ten years ago, maybe even five, if we wanted to find something out (say a sports score) we pretty much only had a few basic options: turn on the tv to ESPN, tune into the news on the radio at the top of the hour, log onto the internet (if we were lucky) by sitting down at our computers, phoning a friend (from home, school, work), or talk with someone in person. Otherwise, you have to wait until later that day for SportsCentre, the news, buy a newspaper the next day, etc. There was no instant access like we know of it today.

Today, we can still do all of the above, but we can also check on our cellphones, PDAs connected to the internet, laptops/tablet PCs connected to a WiFi connection or any ethernet connection, we can use our cellphones to call people instantly or IM/text message them. We have better portable sattelite radios to tune into sports specific shows anywhere on the planet, or tune into them in our vehicles if we’ve upgraded them. There’s probably other options that I’m missing, but hopefully my point gets across. Access to information isn’t a chore to find an access point (desktop computer, tv, radio), it’s everywhere we look.

In the Immersive Age, information is always there for us, and the amount of information is behaving like a volcano. It blows up daily with new events, new speeches, new drama with reality tv, blogs, hundreds of tv stations, etc. That lava cools off almost instantly in some cases, then another layer is tossed onto it a moment later, an hour later, a day later, etc. The problem for my generation is not that we’re sitting on some island in the middle of a vast ocean surrounded by all this information; it’s that we’re standing beside the volcano while it heaves lava at us. The more we dodge, the more comes at us.

Human beings have evolved to recognize the important information instantly so we avoid death, disease, etc. and aim for survival. But when has a human being had to sift through such mountains of information to collect the important stuff? Unless we were a President, King, military leader, probably never. That’s the challenge my generation faces. Not only do we have to recognize everything being thrown at us, ingest everything that is important, but we also have to decide how to respond all while more stuff is being thrown at us.

The techniques of channel surfing, instant messaging, and browsing the web quickly are all tools that the youth have adopted quickly to battle this new world. It’s our only escape while still having some connection to other humans or information without completely tuning everything out and settling for reading, writing, or listening to music.

Returning to the intial problem I mentioned, my generation is faced with the challenge of knowing that the entire world is right there for us to touch, but we can only touch it virtually and not physically. We feel the pain but can’t heal it, and we’re sent reminders of the sad things happening frequently. We wade through all sorts of mixed messages, and try to gather our thoughts, but keep getting interrupted. We seem to thrive in those interruptions, though, and go down that path to only find ourselves more confused and lost than when we entered it.

Such is life in the Immersive Age. We can escape, but it only sets us further back and out of touch with the world. And if there’s one thing about my generation, we don’t like being out of touch with anything. We must be in the know and can’t survive long without some sort of contact and new information being exchanged.

And this Immersive Age is just beginning, and will grow much stronger in the next ten or twenty years until the new age of living occurs.

Technorati : generations, immersive, immersiveage, information, life, technology

The Online Future

I recently read Squash’s article discussing the future of the Internet being based upon an online/offline way of living (full article here). The key example is the Google acquisition of Writely, the online word processor, but a better known example is Google’s Picasa software. Picasa is a photo organizer, and a lot of people are speculating that Google will release a web application that sync’s up with the Picasa photos on your desktop and publishes them on the Internet for all to see. This online/offline speculation is ignoring a few key points, however.

1) User Base

When Yahoo purchased flickr.com, this news article cites flickr’s user base at 775,000. That’s small peanuts compared to Hotmail’s over 100 million users or MySpace.com’s 50-some million users. Is that a failure of marketing, the application, or general interest in stuff like this? I would say it’s the general interest level in these applications. People just don’t need to use services like this, nor have the time to figure things out. Yes, it’s relatively simple to use, but people generally don’t need access to their photo albums on the fly. We carry the essential pictures we do want to share with people casually (family, friends, pets) without requiring access to our entire album. A service like flickr is only useful to the select few who are blogging and a slightly larger group that has the time to browse pictures endlessly.

2) Control Freaks

Admit it, you’re a control freak. We all are. It’s why we have firewalls, want our own computers at home, have so many individual blogs and email address rather than group ones. It’s been an uphill climb for services like Hotmail, MySpace, Yahoo, Google to gain users. But the one thing they all have in common is the majority of users on those sites are using it for non-essentials. Email is just text. Anything really meaningful sent by email, odds are you’ve copied it to your computer or printed it off as a backup. It takes a lot of trust for most people to upload their personal pictures onto the Internet without some concern over who sees them, who can steal them, and how they can be used against them.

When people decide to upload their pictures to flickr, they’re selective about what gets posted. I would speculate that the people who openly share all of their pictures on there have either been using the Internet for a long time and are comfortable in environments like this, or they are professionals seeking future customers for their work. Digital photography has advanced so quickly that people are only now becoming more comfortable with sharing family pics via email, sending photo CDs, and having slide shows on a laptop instead of a photo album. We’re asking a lot of people to make that leap to publishing online and learning how to use services like flickr to their benefit.

3) Adaptibility

As I hinted above, adapting new technology, and new ways in working is a struggle for the majority of people in the world. It is only the small percentage that had early experiences that have been able to delve right into everything the Net has to offer. When people are confronted with something that looks interesting, pick it up and immerse themselves in it, they’ll quickly become familiar with that object (whether real or software or an idea). Without that initial experience of curiousity and ability to spend vast amounts of time with that object, bringing it into your daily habits will take a lot longer.

Think of the process you went through when you first started exploring the Net. Chances are you fell into one of three waves of Net surfers: Dial-Up Age (BBSs, 14.4k was fast, Lynx, Mosaic, newsgroups, irc), NetBubble Age (56k, Netscape, Internet Explorer, Amazon.com, eBay.com, ICQ), Broadband Age (DSL/cable modems, WiFi, Firefox, VOiP, MSN/AIM, blogs, podcasts). The first group required a lot of patience, both with using slow modem speeds, faulty software, busy connections, frequent drops of the modem. It was a real pain, but you learned to multi-task quickly (ie chatting on irc while a webpage loaded). With the second group, the Internet seemed vast. It was like the Pilgrims coming to America- people had already discovered the New World, set up basics for you to take advantage of, and you had some Natives that either helped you or thwarted your explorations. You dropped in to the major sites, started to learn about shopping, and your personal networks were born through interactions on ICQ, newsgroups, emails, and personal webpages at GeoCities. Gateway sites like Yahoo, Excite, and Lycos opened the doors to new worlds to be discovered, like the river-pathways into the West. With Broadband came the rise of a Manifest Destiny of the Internet. If you could think of something, you could easily find it out there, no matter how legal or illegal the content. Networking exploded, the Information Age took full bloom. The tools were there for you to use if you found them, and usually led to even more creative uses of those tools.

Here is a summary of the learning experience, in my opinion:

1. You have great patience and lots of time to play and explore.
2. You have a network of helpers showing you the way, that allows you to succeed properly.
3. You have a strong curiousity about things, and when doors are opened, you look inside.

You may have more than one of these qualities, of course.

The point I’m getting at is the pace of life in our world is speeding up by the minute, so people with the patience to explore are rare. The time people have to gain information from others takes up time and, possibly, money for that knowledge, which means they are as just as rare as the above group. The third group are probably the most populous of the groups, but when our culture is striving towards perfection and efficiency, they won’t have the time required to pick up new technology. There are always exceptions to these rules, but services like Yahoo, MSN, Google have grown in part to one of these three rules coming into play.

To tie everything together, an online/offline model will not be the way of the future because people’s lives are moving too quickly to deal with a kink in their work flow. They are slow to adapt, want to hold onto control, and there isn’t a large enough network of users of most of the online services to benefit everyone. The word isn’t getting out fast enough or wide enough to draw in a larger number of crowds. There’s not a sense of urgency to all of this hype of a lot of Web 2.0 companies. Look at the success of a site like Myspace.com. It has 50+ million users, because everyone between 18-25 kept telling their friends about the site, saying, “They had to be there.” It grew in popularity because one group had the patience to explore and test out features, the next used that group to help them learn the system, then that group passed it onto a third wave to pass the message onto them (“There’s gold in them fields there!”)

The way of the future is to take the online experience and to expand it, make it grow into a living entity. I’ll explain this further in another post, but as a teaser, imagine a tool that allowed you to talk with people on MySpace directly through the Internet, anonymously (dialing profile to profile), like a cellphone, with the capability to download the music from band’s profiles and send text messages.

That’s where I’m dreaming.

Technorati : internet, myspace, offline, online, squash, web2