If our future friends are our objects, how would we communicate with them?
In his lecture from SXSW Douglas Rushkoff discusses how the population at large is always one step behind the evolution of mediums:
- “We got text, we got a 22 letter alphabet, and what kind of society resulted from that? A bunch of Israelites who go to the town square and hear the rabbi read the Torah to them. So we get the technology to read, and what ability do we get? The ability of the generation before. We get the printing press, does everyone become a writer? No, we get a civilization of readers and an elite of writers. Now we get the computer, do we get a nation of programmers? No, we get a nation of bloggers … My issue is that at each stage, when we get a new medium, civilization seems to be one step behind.” – Douglas Rushkoff
Now Rushkoff suggest that in order to keep up with this pattern in evolution, our next step is to learn to program
. But what/why will we need to program in this “next iteration”?
(video via Boing Boing)
Trying to figure this one out, I have grasped a part of the ideas that Rushkoff presents and found from my archives the article I’ve written for the Age of Conversation 3 – soon to be released, where I suggest that in the future our friends are our objects. (Heavily inspired by the minds of Matt Jones, Kevin Slavin, Timo Arnall and Rafi Haladjian)
.
Rushkoff’s point, as I understand it, is that we in a world where we are able to talk and communicate with our surrounding environment – saturated with objects, need to be able to program our environments so as not to let anyone else program them for us – and by that relinquishing our identity – programming would not only be useful, but a given.
As a teaser I’ve added a snippet from my article to Age of conversation below:
- “A conversation is more than just the exchange of vocabulary language between two or more people. Rather a conversation is a rich exchange of ideas through several languages expressed synchronously and consciously, subconsciously or unconsciously between identities.
What we define as the social web today is not the future of the conversation
The advantages of penile injection therapy include broadstatistics, the number of men with moderate and complete little blue pill.
. The future of the conversation is everywhere, as digital is everywhere and marketing is everywhere
. And our future friends are identities, which might as well be people as objects
. “
