Stuff We Got Right About the Future - Why You're All Living Star Trek Every Day

March 04, 2009

You know the experience. You're watching a new film about the future and there's a spaceship or a giant floating television screen or a teleportation device or universal communicator. When taken together, these components become the heart of science fiction. But what thing have actually come true? What kind of technologies have actually become part of our futures? In the next five posts, I'll be examining the things we got right about the future. Because in my opinion, the future is already here -- it's just not as blatant as the movies would make it seem. Welcome to Five Things We Got Right About the Future - a look at where we were, and where we are now. 

Lets look at the concept of the interface. Okay -- so we have some lame interfaces. Often, we deal with parking meters, which are lame -- and complicated Microwave oven's from the early 90's. We have remote controls, we have new software, and crappy Web 2.0 websites. The quality of the interface directly affects how we experience that image. If we have a terrible experience, we're less likely to go back to that place. We learn to avoid bad experieces.

But what about experiences we can't avoid? We also have cars and highways. When we get into a vehicle, we enter a controlled environment that is very similar to a moving living room. We have heat and air conditioning, and the world around us moves so quickly that it looks like the windows are just displaying the scenery around us as if we were watching television. And television is another interface which allows our brains to quickly travel while our bodies stay in one place. Our vision stiches together the moving image and our brains -- so we can technically travel around the world almost instantaneously, minus the time it takes to produce the TV show we're watching. Amplify that speed when we think of YouTube and livesteeaming. 

Lets talk about the Internet more. We're able to control our experience much more there. We have more channels, highways, and heating and cooling systems. We can ignore or save information. We can share it or hide it or amplify it. We try to map it, but we don't yet know what it looks like. We're on the verge of a giant new world, and we can't even touch this world. The entire time, we're distanced from it by the computer monitor. But when you stop to look at it, the computer monitor looks a lot like that dashboard from the Captain's Desk on Star Trek. Especially when you have multiple monitors and a business chair.

So what does this mean? Well, the computer monitor is our dashboard to explore new world -- new Internet sites that we've never been to before. And we have the captain's chair, signaling that we are in control of our own experience - our own spaceship. This is the world of the information society, where our computer is the spaceship that is carrying us to our destination. Our ability to jump light years after light years is depends on how good our spaceship and our Internet connection is."Warp Speed Ahead!" means a really fast Internet connection.

There are lots of unseen creatures and planets out there too, like spyware and pop-up windows, but we can avoid them if we are good enough captains of our own enterprise. Our space ships are our interfaces. We're rocketing through space even through we are sitting completely still. Our ability to visit new worlds is limited by our Flash plugins or involvement with SecondLife or Twitter.

Some people have really fast spaceships -- they can go warp speed. But some still have spaceships that run at 14.4 K. Now we have really little spaceships that allow us to escape from the world *while* we're trapped in other spaceships, like the vehicle spaceship, or the train spaceship. Having an iPhone, Nokia or Blackberry with Internet access is like a meta spaceship. A fractal spaceship. A spaceship within a spaceship!

Stuff:

Amber Case writes here. You can follow her on Twitter @caseorganic. 

Presenting at Ignite Boulder

December 18, 2008

Ignite is a night of presentations on a variety of topics, with a twist. Each presentation has 20 slides, that automatically advance after 15 seconds. It is a worldwide movement, and Boulder is hosting their second December 17th at 6pm.

This week, I'm visiting my parents in Denver, Colorado. However, I wanted to check out the Tech scene. Although I missed the Denver Tweetup, I was really excited to see that Ignite Boulder was going to happen on December 18th.

I was also told by @billder of Portland that I should totally meet @zsazsa.

I also was told that Jeremy Tanner @Penguin and Andrew Hyde @AndrewHyde (Community Director for Techstars.org, founder of Startup Weekend) were amazing people, and I remembered meeting Andrew Hyde at Chris Pirillo's Gnomedex (an awesome conference on social media) in September. It turned out that both of them had a big hand in organizing Ignite Boulder.

At some point, I received a message from Jeremy saying that a speaker had canceled and that there was a spot open for speaking. He also said that there was probably a way that I could get a ride to Denver from Boulder.

Photo credit: gblakeman (@gblakeman) (blog)

Thankfully, I had the speech on Cyborg Anthropology that I gave during Ignite Portland. I sent my slides into Jeremy and Andrew and was put on the speaker roster. Awesome!

I arrived at the Tattered Cover Bookstore (Denver's version of Powell's epic bookstore), to meet Kit Seeborg @zsazsa , and from there we went to Boulder. Along the way, we talked about event planning and Webvisions, a Portland conference she co-organizes every year. We also realized that her son made the music we used for the live stream at CyborgCamp.

We had a pre-Ignite Tweetup, and I got to meet some incredible people. Then we headed to UC Boulder, and there was ample time for networking beforehand. I can't explain how many friendly and intelligent people were there. The entire community was kind and welcoming, and the presentations were hilarious.

When it came time to give my speech, I got a little nervous, but I got through it okay -- and everyone seemed to enjoy it a lot. They shook my hand afterwards, which made me feel a lot better. There's something about speaking that distances one from how the audience is experiencing it. For instance, I didn't realize people were laughing when they were.

However, the Twitter feed afterwards and the chat log from the live stream (which had so many wonderful members of the Portland community there) was awesome! Thank goodness for live feedback. 

Want to see how Twitter reviewed the conference? Check out the Tweet stream for igniteboulder.

Thanks so much to everyone who organized the event, and to everyone who attended, both remotely and in person. It's amazing to be able how many similarities there are between the Portland and Boulder tech communities. So many positive and interactive people. I'm so thankful for this opportunity!