As a techno-utopian, I believe technology brings people together rather than disconnecting them.
Received wisdom would have us believe that technology breeds isolation: I’ve lost count of the number of hysterical Daily Mail articles that warn us that computer-games are turning kids violent. As a child I was told that sitting too close to the TV would “make you go blind”. There’s a great deal of nonsense spoken about technology, and it’s often believed because many people consider technological progress to be the root evil of society.
When I think about how technology is used in my household, the HD TV is like a digital campfire which brings the whole family together to watch films, the Wii is a short burst of fun for my husband and I when the kids are in bed, Facebook connects me to a wider circle of friends that I wouldn’t have the time to see, and my mum and I listen to Woman’s Hour together on our new Wi Fi radio.
Not only is technology physically bringing people together through new shared experiences, its creating a new way of sharing an emotional experience albeit in some cases on different platforms and different devices. The reactions and the emotions of the people with whom you are sharing the experience with is whats important.
This becomes ever more apparent with the shift towards mobile content sharing devices. As Jan Chipchase shows with this photo of two Tokyoites - on the right of the photo engaged in the same task watching the same television program on their mobile phone each using their own device, with comments passed back and forth. Whereas one screen can compromise the viewing experience, the same content can be shared and hence the same experience.
As technology evolves and content becomes ever more mobile (or ‘time shifting’), there are so many opportunities for companies to position technology less as something about individual glory and status but more as a shared emotional experience. Its these kind of positioning that will capture the female heart as well as the female pound.
According to the leading tech bloggers, HD-DVD is officially dead and Blu-Ray has emerged from the battle victorious. This seems to be a Pyhrric victory - that is a victory which has come at devastating cost to the victor.
In this case the cost is not merely the vast sums that the two warring consortia spent on promoting their formats but the fact that three years after the initial hype behind Blu-Ray and HD-DVD began I do not believe anybody cares who won. While Sony and Panasonic / Microsoft squabbled over what kind of disks we should use, movie fans seem to have flocked to legal and illegal movie download services.
Blu-Ray and HD-DVD have both lost. The real winner seems to be DivX whose file-format has emerged as the universal standard for internet movie downloads. Neither Sony’s PS3 or Microsoft’s XBox 360 support each other’s disk standard but both support DivX. Every kind of home computer can play a DivX movie and most low end DVD players can play the format direct from old-school DVD disks.
The folk-wisdom that movie fans demand some kind of physical object in return for their money seems to have been proved false by the undeniable fact that the download market is booming. The idea of going to a shop to buy a disk seems like an irrelevant, obsolete idea from a different century.
From research we know that engineers and designers tend to use themselves as the ideal for which they create new technologies. That means that we often end up with technology that is designed by engineers and with engineers in mind. While a small proportion of technically-versed men (and women) might find this technology easy to use, most people probably won’t. My research on gender and technology has shown that women prefer to use technology that is intuitive to use and does not require you to study the manual for hours. In fact, many men would prefer this as well.
Creating technology that is more intuitive to use is an important step in making technology more accessible to all. While the graphical user interface and the mouse as input device was popularised in the 1990s, not much has changed since then. Until recently. Apple’s new iPhone and iPod touch use a multi-touch technology to make the technology more intuitive to navigate. And what could be more intuitive than using your fingers. Last week I attended a presentation by Steve Ballmer, Microsofts’ CEO. He presented a new piece of technology which included a multi-touch screen similar to the one of the iPhone. The Microsoft Surface is a table PC that is operated by touch alone. It syncs with other devices such as mobile phone and digital cameras through simply putting them on the surface. These new touch technologies make it more intuitive to operate technology. In fact they provide tools to integrate technology much more into everyday life. Then technology is no longer designed for engineers by engineers but by engineers for people.
http://www.microsoft.com/surface/
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070530-what-lurks-below-microsofts-surface-a-qa-with-microsoft.html
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/iphone-review.ars
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/The-iPod-meets-the-iPhone-a-review-of-the-iPod-touch.ars
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