24 Mar 2009
IA Summit 2009: You are (Mostly) Here Digital Space & The Context Problem
Andrew Hilton (on twitter) gave us an amazing presentation about how to view context in the digital space. The presentation was entertaining and conveyed a lot of good information. The following are my tweets from the session.
Vegas is setting up a program that will watch everyone while you spend money, give a WOW factor, and transcribe what you are buying.
Vegas will also find your addresses and inform everyone about what you are doing and what you are spending your money on.
Obviously this isn’t a real story, it was fake.
Facebook took great liberty about what the word ‘Friend’ means.
Showing off a piece of art that changed the art world. http://is.gd/ocJl Called The Fountain by Duchamp.
The trolley conundrum, an abstract illustration of who do you save 5 people or just one.
90% of would studied would save 5 people over just one.
Different study, would you be the cause of someones death to save 5 people, most people wouldn’t do it.
Researchers performed brain scans when they asked people these questions to see which area of the brains gets stimulated.
A lot of our behavior is coming from the Limbic system, the oldest part of our brain. Rather than the Frontal Lobe, the newest system
Frontal Lobe = Spock and the Limbic System = Kirk. I can see that.
Human morality boiled down to a fight scene between Spock and Kirk, its great because it is true :D
Something about a bottle of wine being $50 rather than $5.00 changes the way we taste or experience it. I wonder what @garyvee thinks
Context and Language are closer together than we take think.
Looking at the same ‘map’ from different point of views. Electrical lines, sewer systems, street lights, newsletter mentions, etc.
The newsletter map and the map of concentrations of jack o lanterns are almost mirror images of each other. Interesting.
A map has a lot of power over how we understand the territory.
In digital space, the Map creates the Territory.
There are now fuzzy boundaries between what is real and virtual. Try searching for leatherworking on google, what is the top result?
“The space we live in is less and less exclusively ‘physical’.” I see this everytime I see someone use a newer cell phone.
Digital space is very narrow when they constrain rich ideas in the physical world and assigns a term to them on a persons profile.
Something like a comma can change the meaning of something in the physical space, and in the digital world it changes the space
d vs @ on twitter complete changes the scope of a message you are sending someone. The context of the message is important.
Context shapes a persons identity. The way you behave changes if you are in the office or if you are in a nightclub.
Running into a coworker at a nightclub can confuse you as you try to place that persons identity.
Facebook went from a connection of people you knew at school to everyone you meet in your life, no matter the context.
Our identity is constructed by our surroundings, it is multi-layered and multi-faceted.
Context Collapse isn’t collapsing into nothing, just something new and unexplained.
Twitter was originally meant for the phone, but they decided to put it on the web. On the web people used it in unexpected way.
Tweetdeck is breaking what twitter was meant to be, a single feed.
Context effected everything; money, learning, family, entertainment, and news.
There are people that are not online, but their story is. Prime example is what happened in Darfur
My take away from this session is how important it is on the amount of work that needs to go into designing where and how information lives. Information can live in two locations on the web, and based on how it is displayed a person can be effected by it differently.
TheContextProblem View more documents from andrewhinton.
