I had a great conversation with a friend today about the way interaction technologies go through phases, eventually finding a place where they fit well with how people actually function best.<\/p>\n
It’s a sort of Darwinian process, whereby technology gradually adapts itself to arrive at what really works best for humans. For example, musical instruments that people can use more effectively to make compelling music tend to win out over ostensibly more impressive musical instruments that are less expressive in human hands.<\/p>\n
My friend raised the topic of recorded music collections. I don’t think many people believe we will ever cycle back to an interface that feels exactly like the long-playing record collection. Yet there was something about that interface, an emotionally compelling physicality, that is absent from iTunes, Pandora, Spotify and all of the cyber alternatives for sharing music.<\/p>\n
When you visited a friend who had a record collection, there was always something in their collection — perhaps that one song by an obscure band you could never hear on the radio — that you wanted to listen to. The act of sliding the record out of its sleeve, handing it to your friend, the placing of the needle in the groove, all these acts had a ritual quality which added immensely to the feeling of emotional closeness between the listeners.<\/p>\n
Now of course, you just scroll down a list on a screen and click on the name of a song. Perhaps at some point people will feel that something is missing from this abstracted way of doing things. And when they do, will new forms of physical interaction replace the rather disembodied way we currently share music?<\/p>\n
As our technologies mature, will some kind of physicality reemerge — not because we need it to, but because we want<\/i> it to? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I had a great conversation with a friend today about the way interaction technologies go through phases, eventually finding a place where they fit well with how people actually function best. It’s a sort of Darwinian process, whereby technology gradually adapts itself to arrive at what really works best for humans. For example, musical instruments … Continue reading “Reconstructed reality”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7431"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7431"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7431\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7432,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7431\/revisions\/7432"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7431"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7431"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7431"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}