A Matter Of Degree

What It Feels Like To Live In The Time Just Before Hyper-Reality

                                                                                Image credit:  Futurama S2 E13

I've been thinking about the time before the radio was invented and became popular - when the only electromagnetic waves passing through our world were naturally-occurring.

From the 1890s, when radio was invented, to the 1920s, when radio stations proliferated and radios began to be common in homes, man-made electromagnetic waves started to fill the air around us.

Today they're passing through us constantly, more and more all the time as we've added television, radar, satellites, cell phones, microwaves, etc.

Not to be all Chuck McGill, but I wonder sometimes what it felt like to live in that pre-manmade-waves time.  Not only whether it might have felt physically different, but also what connectedness felt like before it was possible to turn a switch and hear human voices from all over the world. (And the experience of being out in public before we were bombarded with music and marketing in every store, restaurant, gas station, and elevator.)

We're now approaching a similar time of change - where the space around us will soon be filled with spatially-anchored virtual advertisements, signposts, characters and data.

They won't physically pass through our bodies the way electromagnetic waves do, but they're going to exist outside our control and proliferate rapidly to the point where, depending on what you're able to pick up through your devices, the world is going to seem pretty cluttered.

It's already started - there are Pokemon roaming the world, I can place virtual items from major retailers in my home, and the more adventurous brands are creating unique overlays to reality (see Disney, Pepsi, even the dear old USPS).  Sometimes you can catch a hologram in concert.  At the time of this writing, you typically need a specific app to partake in these experiences (and you have to know they're there in the first place).  But it seems likely that standards will converge until we'll be able to discover unlimited experiences through a single device.

So I'd like to consider, and appreciate, what it feels like to live in this time before, or this time not-quite-there-yet.

• When you can hold up a camera, any camera, to the world and just focus on what's there.
• When your eyeglasses or sunglasses only give you better focus or glare protection.
• When windows and windshields are simply transparent glass screens between you and the exterior.
• When the information on paper pages doesn't stand up off the page.
• When our best option for interacting with someone remotely is through a video call on a 2D screen.

Basically, before the world looks like this (a really disturbing and worthwhile 6 minutes from our friends at Google):

I invite you to consider: What else should we be savoring about our current physical reality while we still can?

 

Balance Your Media Diet, or Who Has Nine Hours For This Stuff?

Over the weekend I was looking at Pam Dyer's "65 Terrific Social Media InfoGraphics."  There's a lot of thought-provoking material here and I highly recommend checking it out. 

There was one infographic in particular that I couldn't get off my mind - it stayed with me for a few days until finally I had to try to exorcise it with this post.  It's "Balance Your Media Diet," about halfway down the page of the full post.

I'm totally behind the graphic's base concept - based on the familiar Food / Nutrition Pyramid, it's simple and spare, nicely designed, and I love the idea of having a Recommended Daily Allowance around all the different kinds of media we're consuming/producing every day (although I realize this infographic represents the reported average rather than a recommendation).  (Original below - click to enlarge.)

 
 

However - NINE HOURS PER DAY?  Who is this person?  Does he outsource a lot of tasks like housecleaning, cooking, and lawn care?  Does he have kids?  (Even half a kid?)  Does he work from home?  Or if he goes to an office every day, does he have his monitor turned away from the entrance to his cube?

I couldn't resist the urge to update this infographic for my demographic, based on what I know of my friends' and colleagues' usage of current media options as well as my own.  Below please find a version specifically tailored to Thirtysomething Working Parent in the Northeastern United States (again, click to enlarge):

 

If I'd had the time and artistic ability I would have liked to represent the individual with a female rather than a male.  Note the "lack of time" theme reinforced in that last sentence.  Note also, all the sneaking.   That would be an interesting dimension I'd like to overlay on this graphic - overt vs. covert usage, as well as willing vs. unwilling usage (I'm thinking here of the TV monitor over the gas pump that blasts the "news" while you fuel up). 

Just needed to get this out of my system - thanks for reading, and please feel free to drop a comment about your own media usage - does it reflect the original pyramid?  Mine?  Something different?

 

File downloaded from sharepoint document library replaces spaces in file name with underscores

I have been noticing for some time now, in several MOSS implementations, that spaces in filenames are replaced with underscores on file download/upload from SharePoint.  I was blaming this on SharePoint SP1, since I started to notice it around the time of that release, however this discussion on MSDN indicates Internet Explorer 7 is the reason.

To see the behavior, find any document in a SharePoint document library with spaces in the filename, or upload one.  Then download the document to your desktop - you can see that the underscores are added in the "Save As" window.

If you are working quickly and not expecting this filename change to happen, you would save the document to your desktop, make edits, and then re-upload it later.  Since you didn't actively change the filename, you would expect the document to save over the original in the document library.  This is the way SharePoint has traditionally worked.  But what you end up with is two copies of the document in the document library. 

 

Disclaimer - I'm sure we can all agree that the best practice in general is to check out / check in your document rather than downloading it to your desktop.  (The underscores are not added during checkin/checkout.)  But what if someone else has the document checked out, and you can't reach them to ask them to check it back in, and you're under pressure to make edits right away?  Or what if you thought you were just taking a copy, but the edits you make on your desktop turn out to be the preferred version?    Or what if you haven't fully tested the offline sync capabilities of MOSS 2007, and you want to be absolutely sure the document is accessible when you're offline?  These and many other real-world situations could lead to this downloaded-file scenario, which could lead to multiple copies of the same or similar documents in your SharePoint environment, which is exactly what most of us are trying to avoid. 

The MSDN thread proposes a workaround, although I will argue that the adding of underscores is not necessarily a bad thing, expecially since SharePoint can cause problems when working with filenames that include spaces.  I think it's important to be aware of this download behavior and to work toward minimizing the multiple-copies effect - emphasize checkin/checkout vs. download in end-user training sessions, for example.

Twitter as Headline News

I just had an insight about why Twitter is good.

Another friend of mine just started blogging, and as I subscribed to her blog in my blog reader, I was dismayed at the prospect of adding one more stream of information to the pile that I already don't have enough time to post comments on, or even read.  I'm glad that we all have the means to publish our journals, our photos, our videos, but my ability to keep up with it all won't scale.  I can't even find the time to read the national news most days.

But I do read headlines.  And if I could get a daily digest of my friends' and colleagues' lives and insights, on a single page, 140 characters at a whack, I would read that religiously. 

It shouldn't be an aggregate of their recently-published blog or photo titles; that wouldn't be the same thing.  I don't want to read text that describes or refers to other content.  I want exactly what Twitter asks for - "what are you doing?"   

FriendFeed gets close, and I like the image thumbnails, but all the different kinds of information in one pile slows me down - e.g. I don't want to mentally filter out everyone's del.icio.us links while I'm looking for the meatier stuff.

I never thought I'd be advocating a Max-Headroom-style blipvert in the place of real content, yet here I am.  I can't keep up with unlimited information.  Sign on to Twitter and help me out?