Future Tense — Participatory Applications

But so far, my whole focus in this series of arti­cles has been on tech­nol­ogy. How­ever, tech­nol­ogy itself is under­go­ing a rad­i­cal shift, and I would ven­ture to say that we are now enter­ing a new era of cybernetics.

Tim O’reilly, in his descrip­tion of Web 2.0 said that

The cen­tral prin­ci­ple behind the suc­cess of the giants born in the Web 1.0 era who have sur­vived to lead the Web 2.0 era appears to be this, that they have embraced the power of the web to har­ness col­lec­tive intelligence

This insight defines the suc­cess of Web 2.0 com­pa­nies as reliant on a new devel­op­ment in the soft­ware design world: the value of a sys­tem that increases as its users increase. The net­work effects real­ized for those types of sys­tems pro­vide a fair amount of value but what is impor­tant here is that the user becomes part of the appli­ca­tion. In O’Reilly’s exam­ple, flickr can’t work with­out users tag­ging pic­ture, Google can’t work with­out peo­ple cre­at­ing web pages, etc… These par­tic­i­pa­tory appli­ca­tions will have a large impact in the way we inter­face with sys­tems and may rep­re­sent the first break­through in terms of adding intel­li­gence to our sys­tems in a proper way.

As we all know, com­put­ers are not par­tic­u­larly smart. How­ever, they are very good at pro­cess­ing large amounts of infor­ma­tion. What has been miss­ing, up to this point is the idea of what infor­ma­tion to feed them and how to help them head in the right direc­tion. With con­cepts sur­round­ing web 2.0, these cues are no longer com­puter cues but they are human ones. No one pro­grammed del.icio.us to fig­ure out how to cre­ate a tax­on­omy of pages. How­ever, every user of the sys­tem has helped cre­ate some level of tax­on­omy in the system.

Amazon’s Mechan­i­cal Turk sys­tem took the next log­i­cal step, which was to pro­vide a soft­ware plat­form to auto­mate such inter­ac­tions. It is sim­i­lar, in nature, to the way com­put­ing work was dis­trib­uted on efforts like SETI@Home but adding the human ele­ment to it. As such, as the bound­aries between human inter­ac­tion and soft­ware sys­tems get softer, it is becom­ing increas­ingly dif­fi­cult to tell how smart (or dumb) a sys­tem really is. Peo­ple are part of the appli­ca­tion but are appli­ca­tions part of the peo­ple too? When I google some­thing I don’t know, do I enhance myself by dis­cov­er­ing the new infor­ma­tion and then stor­ing it in my brain? Where is the line?

Vir­tual Worlds

Vir­tual Worlds, like Sec­ondLife or World of War­craft rep­re­sent another log­i­cal step in this evo­lu­tion: cre­at­ing vir­tual economies out of thin air. as I write this, there are tens or even hun­dreds of thou­sands of peo­ple work­ing on cre­at­ing finan­cial value within vir­tual com­mu­ni­ties. They may be sell­ing things within games but, ever since those games started becom­ing more involved, peo­ple have been will­ing to pay real money to get vir­tual goods. See­ing such devel­op­ments, some com­pa­nies have set up worlds where actual trades are hap­pen­ing and are inte­grated with the rest of the finan­cial world.

A cou­ple of weeks ago, one of those games, Project Entropia, announced they would issue an ATM card to take vir­tual cur­ren­cies into the real world.
Edward Cas­tronova, the lead­ing researcher on that sub­ject, con­sid­ers this “a blur­ring of the dis­tinc­tion between the game econ­omy and the real one.”

As com­put­ing power con­tin­ues to increase, this blur­ring is going to become more and more scary. At the cur­rent time, videogame plat­forms like the Xbox360 or the PS3 are pre­sent­ing us with videogames that look close to real­ity. When those types of things start appear­ing in online com­mu­nity mod­els, the lines will become so hazy that it will be dif­fi­cult to tell what is the real world and what is a vir­tual one.

This is the fifth arti­cle in a 6 part series. You can read the fol­low­ing parts here:

• Part 1: Intro
• Part 2: Always on
• Part 3: IPzation
• Part 4: Sensors
• Part 5: Par­tic­i­pa­tory Applications
• Part 6: Conclusion

Related Terms

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