Fantastische Vier in London

poppoppeldipopositiv.

TED: ideas worth spreading

TED (Technology Entertainment Design) is an annual conference with speakers from various fields, expressing novel/controversial ideas. This site offers an archive of over 100 filmed talks (adding more each week). Each talk is 18min long. Exciting stuff, I am spending several hours today listening/watching various talks. They are grouped by both fields (business, technology, arts, entertainment etc.) and themes (How the mind works, art unusual, the rise of collaboration etc.)

Paralysis through Explosion of Choice

Nice (and quite humorous) talk here by sociology professor Barry Schwartz about the flipside of the long-tail-maximizing-freedom-of-choice paradigm. His point is that traditionally it was possible to chose from a very limited number of options for a given situation, whereas today in affluent societies the choice is becoming almost unlimited. E.g. to chose from 5 different kinds of salad dressing is simple, but to chose from 500 is hard. And even when a choice is made, the nagging thought of the opportunity costs of all those other choices (wouldn't dressing X or Y have been even better) decreases the level of happiness / satisfaction one experiences.

Translated to user interface design I think this makes a good point of limiting the choices the user has to make at any given point in the navigation to a few items, that of course need to be relevant to that user at that point. Personalization is key to that, but also working with concepts / assumptions of what most likely it is that the user wants / is looking for in a given context.

haha

A Lifestyle-Blog ... not sure I understand what that means, but I like the postings, e.g. this video from a 60ies US games show with a performance by John Cage.

On Blogging And its Nihilistic Properties

Interesting article / essay about blogs and bloggers from a media-theoretical perspective. The basic premise of the article is that blogs are written into nothingness, as there are ca. 100 million of them and most of them have little to no readers. Well, that certainly rings true for this blog. The author Geert Lovink sees nihilism not in its early 20th century or 70/80ies Punk movement no-future crystallization, where it represented a pessimistic belief in the meaninglessness of life, but rather as a descriptive term that reflects the shallowness of the current epoch. I am not convinced this is an accurate term to summarize the times we live in.

Also, I am not sure I agree with the notion that blogs are a statement against the mass-media broadcast message, a distrust of that message. Certainly not true for the broad number of bloggers, neither consciously nor subconsciously ... I find it much more likely that the vast majority of bloggers do NOT blog to be citizen journalists, to provide truth in a context of lies, to be critical of established views. Lovink dismisses the notion that blogging is half online-diary, half self-PR management, but I would hypothesize that these exactly are indeed to dominant motivators in the bloggosphere. Along with a desire to keep track of daily discoveries made while oscillating through the cloud.

Personally, I know that my posts will remain more or less unread. Yet I enjoy the act of writing, of ordering my thoughts and to be able to retain at least some of the topics / sites / etc. that I find curious at a given time. My memory tends to quickly make room for new information, ie. bury acquired input and make it hard to recall. Recognition works fine, but recall can be a bitch - but in the brief time I have blogged (which was and is very much of an experiment) I find that re-reading previous posts helps me to substantiate the respective bits of information in my long-term memory which surely can't hurt.