Evolving Attention Spans

In light of our fragmented attention spans, I've started to wonder about another implication for the development of media. Namely, I'm wondering if our attention span will continue to fragment for a period, but then turn around back to something akin to "deep reading" with further developments in our media technology.

Given the development of the app and the "death of the web," our relationship with media will change dramatically. Our interaction with media will move rapidly in the next 5 years to Ipads

and other similar devices. The media we use on them will change radically in the next 10 years. There is every reason to assume the next 10-15 years will see another great change in behavior, and no reason to assume the current trajectory will last.

Perhaps the only thing missing is the new media which enables deep, engaged thought. The Ipads and Kindles are designed in such a way that deep interaction should be enabled, as opposed to our mobile devices and computers, which encourage distractions. Once media production has adjusted itself to the new technology, it may be that people find themselves deeply engaged in new forms of deep media that engages us in ways similar to long Victorian novels again.

I would argue that many TV shows are already falling into this category, as we remain engaged in new seasons of "Mad Men" or "Lost." Likewise with cable news, which actually follows stories over the course of years, and will often pick up threads from decades ago. We don't assume following news stories to be deep reading, and it's arguable to what degree it actually is, but millions of people do follow stories over long periods of time. One can easily state that video games are a deeply immersive experience that engages the player in a deep state, with the capacity to become more and more complex in its narrative structures and character developments.

Will we be reading novels and books on our Ipads with the deep reading experience many of us grew up with? Some probably will - especially as new books begin to engage us in more interactive ways, and even as we spend less time in front of computers and more time with our new devices. I think it's important to look for new forms of media that will enable deep reading experiences, and to put what pressure we can on software developers to encourage deep, immersive experiences over shorter, distracting experiences.

Group Narrative: Democratic vs. Entrepreneurial Group Story Telling

I've been considering how interactive narratives can become increasingly social and group driven. There is a history of this, and indeed the entire prehistory of narrative can be considered a group effort to build a story. But how can we create a technology that enables groups to participate in the unfolding of a story?

There's an example from Czech film history which I can't cite exactly right now where an audience would sit in a movie theater and vote on the process of the story. Of course, this means the story has to be constructed in a branching structure, and one that probably loops back around a good deal due to the shear economics of film making. I might call this democratic group narrative building.

Democratic group narrative building does not always require a branching structure the way it would when applied to traditional films. Plenty of games online use democratic structures in their imitation of real life social situations. The ways in which this constitutes a narrative or could lead to further developments of narrative is a rich debate to be had, but I'll let it go for now.

However, I'll argue that Democratic group narrative building is probably most effective when the narrative is one that attempts to engage the audience (or players) as members of a group making social decisions. It may not always lead to the most interesting story endings, as we all know that interesting story endings are frequently the ones that leave the group surprised.

I'll introduce the idea of the entrepreneurial model, which probably better imitates the ancient methods of constructing a story. In this, the entire group is given access to the story's structure, and has the ability to toy around with it. However, like a group of open-source programmers, the best structures emerge from that group and become accepted by the group and it gets added to the overall structure.

Another example of this is a group of children playing with blocks, all working on some sort group structure out of the blocks. Every child is capable of working on different parts of the structure, but it is one child with a great idea who does it on their own that may make the structure particularly interesting and let it go off in another direction altogether.

It's hard to say exactly how to harness entrepreneurial group story telling in a new way. However, by pursuing this model, there could be really interesting results with bold new stories and ways of telling and sharing stories.

Max Richter

I've been listening to music by Max Richter. He's a composer with some beautiful and haunting music. Below is music right off his website. Description from the webpage:

Max's ringtone album. Fragmentary and partial by nature, 24 postcards is a varied collection of evocative miniatures. The longest track is just under three minutes, whilst the majority clock in at around just sixty seconds, a series of sketches on the nature of time and memory, stitched together to form a series of jump-cuts and foldbacks. As though extracting the absolute essence, simple, plaintive piano and string melodies butt up against passages of rich, borderzone ambience - radio static / voices leaking through dense, shifting drones.

24 Postcards In Full Colour by max richter

Untro

Another semester of grad school is right around the corner. It'll be a semester of animation and video production for me. Hopefully there will be further opportunities for projection design this semester and I have a few things coming up along those lines that may prove successful.

The things to watch for will be further work toward defining my grad school goals, along with a widening of technical knowledge about video and animation. I'm excited to be working in the LIU motion capture lab with Adam Noah. Additionally I'll be looking for a chance to audit some Computer Science courses.