The definition of a trend is the general direction in which something is developing or changing.

You may be familiar with the latest trends in fashion, music, or urban language and slang, but if we take a closer look at what’s been trending in digital development within the last century, we find a phenomenon that’s quite astonishing. Not only does technology change at exponential rates (such as The doubling of computer processing speed every 18 months, known as Moore’s Law), but it also influences many other changes that affect our lives beyond the digital world.

Studying trends requires a mixture of analyzing the past, considering present developments, and foreseeing the future. It often helps to do so by using different types of charts and graphs, in which side by side comparisons can be made in a visual format.

For example, this prediction made for the future of mobile advertising in What You Are Doing Online: “Meeker sees mobile advertising growing another $22 billion in the United States because the time consumers spend on mobile devices — 25 percent — is more than double the share of ad dollars the platform receives. However, a major concern is the 420 million smartphone users who utilize ad-blocking technology.”

Though studying technological trends is not always accurate, and not all predictions may come to fruition, we can get a pretty good idea of the general direction in which things will flow.

“We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” – Roy Amara

Technological changes can be like looking at the hour hand of a clock. If you keep staring at it you would feel that it always remains stationary. If you go away and come back after some time, you will see that it has actually moved a lot.

 In What You Are Doing Online, Matt McFarland points out that some technological trends are no longer accelerating (like smartphone innovative design and sales) – most developments have already seen their peaks. So that leaves us with one impending question…

Mediated Communication-

Is not a space, it Is a set of tools people use to connect, each with meanings that depend on the others and which can only be understood as deeply embedded in and influenced by the daily realities of embodied life.

Basically this is the use of any technological device to communicate. This can be through email, phone call, or video messaging. In the article Baym tries to explain that mediated communication isn’t that different from face-to-face interaction. Yes there may be a loss of some or all sensory signals but it has the ability to be just as effective as face-to-face communication. One danger people use to dispel mediated communication is that people can easily falsify their identity on devices. For better words, people can catfish others with technological devices. Baym argues that yes there are people who make or use pseudo-identities but this is not the norm, it is usually a rare occurrence.

I’m not sure how rare of a case it is with series such as Catfishing appearing on T.V. The premise of the show is to find the real identity of a person online. Most of the cases on the show turns out to be catfishes or false identities.

This parody is making fun of the new phenomenon. The two people meet online and talks to each other on the phone but have never met. They finally meet and the woman learns that it is a real person except that he lied about his eyes. Meaning he falsified some information about himself. In 2012 CNN released an article stating that 1 in 4 people falsify information on their Facebook to protect their identities. That was ten percent more than the year prior to that. These stats show that people do lie using technological devices but not to the extreme of creating a whole new identity.

For my blog post, I decided to focus on the term “Mediated Communication”. This term can be found in this week’s reading, entitled, “Conclusion: The Myth of Cyberspace” and written by Nancy K. Baym. Mediated communication can be defined as a method of communicating with others that is not direct or face-to-face. This can encompass many different types of communication, such as using pen and paper to write a letter to someone, or using more recent advances in technology such as email or text messaging.

 

 

 

The media I chose to illustrate the concept of mediated communication and how people use it is a commercial for Windows Live Messenger, an instant messaging platform developed by Microsoft. This commercial is meant to be humorous, and it is; but it also has a point. In encouraging people to use Windows Live Messenger, it shows how messy and complicated mediated communication can be if not done with the proper methods and tools, especially in a workplace setting. With all of the different responsibilities and obligations people have during the workday, it is impossible to communicate face to face about everything one might need from a coworker, making mediated communication necessary and essential for office workers. The commercial shows what can happen if mediated communication is done in in an inefficient way, though they do this to comedic effect by portraying the office’s method as throwing messages in bottles around the office. This inherently ridiculous method of communicating can be contrasted with more efficient forms of mediated communication, which, in the context of this commercial, is Windows Messenger Live. Technology has afforded us ways to use mediated communication that are faster and more effective than ever, and mediated communication forms like email and instant messaging program Slack are now the norm in most workplaces, homes, and everywhere else people wish to communicate easily.

 

 

Augmented Reality: An enhanced version of reality created by the use of technology to overlay digital information on an image of something being viewed through a device (Merriam-Webster).

When I was growing up, I would always see holograms in science fiction movies and think, “Is it really possible to see something in front of me that isn’t really there?”. While we still can’t necessarily see holograms of people, augmented reality technology allows us to view images that aren’t really there, but seem real. This ranges from art to sports scores, and videos. One huge example of augmented reality is Google Glass.

 

Google Glass, in simple terms, is like a smart phone for the eyes. As you can see, it has apps that allow you to do many things like view the weather, read a shopping list while at the store, and more. This video provides a basic, more in depth explanation of Google Glass.

This video, in essence, re-affirms the purpose, and possibilities of Google Glass (and augmented reality in general). When wearing the glasses, apps seem to magically appear in front of the person in the real world. It is different from virtual reality in this sense because virtual reality takes one to another world. This also applies to other brands and companies which make similar forms of augmented reality. According to experts, augmented reality even has the capability to be expanded further. In the reading from this week, “Digital Life in 2025”, experts theorized that by 2025, “Augmented reality and wearable devices will be implemented to monitor and give quick feedback on daily life, especially tied to personal health”. To me, this shows that the possibilities with augmented reality are endless.

With that said, I do believe that we must be very cautious when using augmented reality. In the media presented regarding the Google Glass, one could see that it is difficult to focus on the actual real world when looking at apps with the glasses rather than the world. I’d also like to add another example that is totally different than Google Glass: Pokemon Go. As one can see in the picture above, Pokemon spawn on the phone in a picture of the real world. The danger of this is that the Pokemon could spawn in random places. I’ve never actually played Pokemon Go, but due to being distracted by trying to “Catch ’em all”, players have walked into traffic, crashed their car, etc. Thus, while I think that augmented reality is awesome, it would be prudent to be very careful and aware when using it.

 

Definition: digital life is the human-computer interactive experience. It is integrated digital world (information & service) and physical world (people and physical objects)

We are living in a digital era, where most of our activities on daily basis are involved with technology. We start the day with the sound of the alarm goes off. We travel with the help of GPS. There is even a device that counts how many steps we walk a day. There are many more activities in our daily life that technology plays a huge part in it.

This is the year 2016 and yet many accomplishments and innovations in the advanced of technology that makes our life so much different than decades ago. Starting when the first mobile phone was invented in 1973 and now we are carrying smartphones with 4G or LTE, that combines all functions of an mp3 and a camera. Technology in digital era makes our life so much easier with Google, YouTube, Wikipedia, etc., where we can find almost everything we want to know in seconds. In the past few years, many changes have been created in order to make technology better and smarter. So the question here is, what will our digital life be in the future?

Pew Research Center has an article “Digital Life in 2025”, that considered all the possibilities of how technology will affect our life in 2025 and came out with 15 theses about our digital future. There are 8 possibilities that was characterized as being hopeful, 6 as concerned and the rest are neutral. Most of the hopeful theses are about the global spread of the Internet will help the world connected, improve personal health and education, make peaceful changes and creates more opportunities. Then the concerned possibilities arise with the problems of possible violence through the Internet, abuses and abusers will ‘evolve and scale’ and problems involve privacy and security. But the choice to make our digital future better or worse totally depends on us, the users. We can choose a better future for our digital life  by making  efforts to make it better. It’s all up to us, the modern people of digital life.

So to answer the question what will our digital life be in the future, I have complete faith and confidence to say that we can create a brighter and better future by keep innovating and improving.

This week’s topic of Time was supplemented through the reading by Judy Wajcman in Pressed for Time. My critical media analysis was on Chapter two. The key term I choose was Timeless Time. This term is first introduced in the text by Manuel Castell a Spanish sociologist who’s work mainly focuses on communication and globalization. Castell describes it as “the social practice that aims at negating sequence to install ourselves in perennial simultaneity and simultaneous ubiquity”. In simpler terms and in regards to the digital world. Timeless Time are the effects of real-time communication and transactions that are instantaneous, and how that affects the way the world around us functions. Time itself is a construct that is being reconstructed mainly now through the immersion of technology in our everyday lives. In this case a linear clock view on time is being substituted for a heavily network oriented digitally driven concept of time. Further in the passage Timeless Time is grouped in with terms such as “instantaneous time, time-space compression, chronoscopic time, pointillist time, or network time” to reflect the prevalence of this phenomena, and are in most cases interchangeable.

The following video is a short clip from Portlandia, a satirical show about Portland, Oregon and modern day life in general.(0:00-1:02)

http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOOHhbLnLIY

In this clip, we see Fred Armison struggling to keep up technologically. He feels he has to respond to e-mails, Facebook chat and also keep up with the funniest memes. I choose this piece of digital media because I think it illustrates what can happen with the phenomena of Timeless Time on a more basic scale. To keep on top of things is already difficult, in this increasingly high-speed society it is even harder. There is virtually no rest time in the digital world because, every if not all of the interactions are instantaneous and therefore quicker paced than the physical world.

A term coined for the shifts in financial market, Timeless Time it is widespread today and becoming especially relevant in the digital world as technology makes it easier to communicate worldwide and at the drop of a hat. Just as the financial market had to re-evaluate how they conduct business I think we deserve an adjustment period as well, and soon we may just run on Twitter time.

 

The acceleration of the pace of life as defined by Judy, refers to cultural acceleration and the alleged need to decelerate. This refers to the speed and compression of actions and experiences in everyday life. Living in an accelerated society allows for more to be done but often still results in less leisure time.

 

The following clip is a trailer from a show on Netflix called Black Mirror, this specific episode is called Nosedive.

 

In this episode the main character Lacie loses sight of real world connections while life passes her by. Lacie’s life is controlled by ratings that determine her overall standing in society. The higher the rating the more perks you get. This accelerates her life because she’s not taking the time to appreciate it, and loses out on quality moments. Her memories and life are based on what’s aesthetically pleasing, what looks good. Lacie compromises her dignity to gain a good rating in society and sustain that social interaction at all hours of the day. The acceleration of the pace of life goes hand in hand with technological acceleration, which is the speeding up of transport, communication and production. The constant reliance on technological advancements and use of technological accelerations often override our abilities to slow down our pace of life. If we don’t disconnect and decelerate we will miss the opportunity to see life before our very own eyes.