Sped
January to April 2011, Faculty: Anne Burdick
Project Synopsis: When news becomes really realtime, where and how will it be read? News is one of the sources of information and in the information age, we may gather it through our sixth sense. The project that explores the situation in future where our body will perhaps become a substrate through which we will read and gather information.
As the world converges to be global, it also becomes imperative for us to be updated almost immediately. Agencies of news for sometime have borne the burden of maintaining a constant flow of information of world affairs. However, in current context its tangible forms impedes in expediting the information flow so, we transitioned to virtual agencies that substantiated the capability to diffuse information in an unprecedented manner. This phenomenal ability to experience worldwide status-quo was applauded with a title 'Realtime News'. Through the initial stages of the project I reflected on the characteristics of the realtime news, where upon I studied the impact of twitter culture in our contemporary society.
The most striking sources was Mark Suster's twitter 101
Twitter as a News Source (RSS) - by MARK SUSTER on JULY 15, 2009
"There are a few reasons. The first is aggregation. I read from a wide variety of news sources. For current events I read the NY Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times and the Economist. For tech news I read TechCrunch, VentureBeat, Alley Insider, GigaOm and others. For venture capital / private equity news I read PE Hub, Venturesource, WS Journal venture blog and others. And then I read many personal VC blogs including Fred Wilson, Brad Feld and Bill Gurley."
"It would be a pain for me to constantly remember to visit all of these sites on a regular basis – especially since there are probably another 15 that I read regularly and didn't list."
I have a twitter account but I am not even close to seldom user, I am more of a once in a blue moon user. This fact that twitter could be a news aggregator was news to me. So I started receiving news through twitter as well. Now did I read it all? The answer was given to me by Mark Suster himself.
"I'm not constantly reading Twitter – I tend to read it in the morning before I go to work, a bit at work in the day to see what's going on and then more heavily in the evening when I have more free time. So if too many stories came through when I wasn't watching – no big deal. "
This time around I read H.G Wells, The queer story of Brownlow's Newspaper - it is a story about receiving newspaper from the future. Curiously enough there were two things common
1. Brownlow read in the detail a news pertaining to lumbering situation and infact too a news clip of this article, quite similarly Mark does not read all.
2. Both read it during the free time. Morning and evening.
So now the question is why is realtime so important? Is it really realtime?
Another striking thing that caught my attention was "Using Twitter for news goes one step further. It is also a "push" news source and by definition it is only the headline (since you can only use 140 characters)." So I compared the two newspaper headlines and twitter characters.
News headlines uses nothing more that 20 to 40 characters to convey a message. So twitter is not a headline but a new mode of reading news. This where is struck me is that perhaps in the information age what we really want is factual information and not detailed article. If and when we are really interested in New in detail we can access it.
Tweets are facts that are accessible anywhere anytime.
"But Twitter is both “real time” and is “distributed” so that I can read it on most any device / any time I want. So I use Twitter as my real time RSS reader."
With this I started exploring how in future will we read News Facts Anywhere Anytime.
At the same time, thoughts around pervasive technology and present-day explorations on various types of embedded technology was churning in my mind. Quite obviously when I started imagining how will news be read in the future, wearable technology and human embedded systems was the first idea that shot my head. And, Sped emerges from these questions -
When does news/information becomes realtime?
How will experiencing news in realtime on a human substrate change our perception?
Below are few sketches that lead to the final Idea.
