February 28th, 2010
Deducing the inner-workings of a system through observing how it reacts to various stimulus is an important skill for success in the digital age. Developing this skill allows one to create a deeper mastery of the tools one works with. It allows one to understand the capabilities, limits, and possible evolutions of the tool. In my job as a product manager, this skill is especially important. I may not be able to read the code underlying the platforms I manage, but I must be extremely knowledgeable about their logical composition.
Black Box elegantly draws out this skill of reverse engineering. I played the Black Box board game as a kid, but have recently reengaged with it through the BlackBox Maniak iPhone game, developed by Alex Minard, the developer of Net Maniak. It’s another a example of a game that I recommend playing regularly for sharpening strategic modes of thought.
Black Box is a game of "hide and seek" which simulates shooting lasers into a black box to deduce the locations of balls hidden inside.
Posted in Games, Thinking | No Comments »
February 27th, 2010
In Howard Rheingold’s series on thinking tools, Jerry Michalski demos his Personal Brain.
Posted in Networks, Thinking | No Comments »
February 23rd, 2010
One might argue that innovating is the act of connecting things together. If that’s the case, netwalk, elegantly embodied as Net Maniak for the iPhone, is a game for innovators. I believe that playing Net Maniak regularly builds the core of one’s analytic capacity; the game mirrors thought in its most abstract sense.
"In this game, you are a network administrator, and someone has scrambled your network. Your job is to rotate all the pieces so that every computer is connected to the server by pipes and there are no lose ends in your network."
Posted in Games, Networks | 1 Comment »
February 22nd, 2010
One of the chief effects of the web is how it overcomes audience atomization (see Jay Rosen’s article on this subject). E.g., without the web, people sit in their houses and watch a TV program without being able to readily converse with the other people watching from their respective homes.
A movie theater is a bit different; while the audience is atomized to the extent that people don’t normally talk to strangers before, after, or during the movie, the shared physical reactions of laughing, screaming, etc. is deeply felt and is one of the primary pleasures of public movie viewing. I think it would be interesting to experiment with further de-atomizing the audience in a movie theater, allowing people to connect more directly to others in the the audience.
This leads to two variants of a “Choose your own adventure”-style movie:
- The audience, at various points during a film, is given the opportunity to vote on how characters react to given situations. E.g., “Should the protagonist jump off the airplane? yes or no.” The collective vote of the audience determines how the movie continues. Perhaps people would be inspired to see a movie multiple times, in different cultural centers, to experience different strands of a film. It would be a new lens through which to experience a town or neighborhood.
- Same as above, but in this variant, with each choice the viewer makes, they leave their seat and go to a smaller viewing room with others who made their same choice. When the movie is over, they are surrounded by a relatively small group of people who made the same choices throughout the film. Or maybe they end up alone.
The Web overcomes audience atomization in that it allows users to connect directly with otherwise strangers. However, the people the web connects, for the most part, remain physically isolated from each other. If we were to bring some of the Web’s de-atomizing qualities to movie theaters, it will allow people, through the medium of film, to connect to real people in real space.
Posted in Movies | No Comments »
February 22nd, 2010
I imagine this happens to a lot of people: You spend a lot of effort building a place for yourself on the Web. Then you get distracted with other things for a while and neglect your personal space. Perhaps you get wrapped up in a service like Twitter and then start thinking of your Twitter account as your home on the Web. Before long, you no longer identify with your own web site, and consequently you stop sharing it with others and linking to it from your other web profiles. Your own web home is left to deteriorate like an old building, and your various web identities are dangling, unconnected to a grounded core. When you inevitably start to feel limited by the temporary, 3rd party web homes you’ve inhabited, you have no place that’s your own to come home to where you can relax and be yourself. Instead, your creativity is stifled and your web presence is only a hollow reflection of your true self. You might stay in this web-homeless state for months or years.
I, myself, had fallen into this condition, which is why I feel whole again to have finally invested the effort to reconceptualize my home on the web, emptystare.com.
When creating a home on the Web, now, one has to think about the role that it plays in relationship to one’s other web identities. Should I pull in all my twitter activity? Should I summarize my job title, even though that information is all in my LinkedIn profile? Should I create my own gallery of my maze drawings, even though they can be found on DeviantArt? Should I add my favorite web sites to the right rail, even though they are already captured as my delicious bookmarks?
Perhaps I’m being overly rigid, but I’d like to answer these questions according to a single set of principles. For example, it would feel annoyingly inconsistent to pull in my tweets into my web home, without pulling in by delicious bookmarks. The approach I’ve decided to take is this: I will make my web home (a) a place for long-form thoughts, and (b) a central hub for all my web identities. You will find connections to my various web profiles, but you won’t find here content that I’ve already piped through other channels. An aggregate view of my web life stream lives on my soup.io page (the place that I was using as my web home while emptystare.com was deteriorating). My long-form ideas are closest to my heart, so I want them to live, uncluttered here. Furthermore, the best place for you to interact with my social media updates is most likely within their native environments.
I’m not sure how this approach will work out as this web home becomes more lived in, but the most important thing is that I once again have a place where I can define and invest in my own identity architecture.
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
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