Windows and Mirrors 7-9

Often times in class our friend Bamidele will joke about “SkyNet” and make other references to the Terminator movies, but reading about Terminal Time made me think, “Maybe Bamidele is right?” An audience powered personalized documentary with artificial intelligence. Whats next? A personalized documentary that reads your mind to determine the right history for you. Sounds an awful lot like science fiction. Then I think about today’s practical technology that uses artificial intelligence and user preferences, in particular, StumbleUpon.com. Based on previous behavior searching the web, StumbleUpon takes you to another website that you might be interested in. Pandora has similar technology where you enter an artist name, song title or music genre and it generates a playlist based on your taste. New Media is taking our society to great heights in interactivity. This could mean media can get more and more personalized to the point where each individual becomes it’s own media market. As stated in the book, “The discipline of human-computer interaction was a great leap forward in thinking about context.”

A constant theme throughout Window and Mirrors is transparency. I believe there will always be a need for transparency in media. But, the direction new media is taking society is towards reflection and interaction with media. The two schools of thought must live in harmony considering all the possibilities technology has provided communication. The human mind has a predisposed attraction to stories. Story telling is one of the earliest forms of communication. We like suspending disbelief and fully immersing ourselves in a book, movie or TV show as if we were really there. Even other forms of communication like Facebook and Skype take you into a world were the interaction fools us into thinking we’re all in the same room. Yet, more and more the medium is defining the message forcing users to notice and reflect.