My friend Elissa turned me on to an article by William Deresiewicz titled The End of Solitude that addresses the culture of celebrity and connectivity as symptoms of an impulse for becoming known. Much of the article offers an overview of the historical concept of Self and what we get out of it.
Something I liked about the article was that it gave context to a technical social mashup idea I’ve been exploring, which is the increased use of near field communication (NFC) to increase one’s visibility in a meaningful way. More specifically, people will use RFID tag readers in a mobile device like the iPhone to alert the world of their participation in entertainment experiences.
In The End of Solitude, Deresiewicz suggests the culture of celebrity is connected to the video camera, which I connect to broadcast television. Regretfully, in the year when we could least afford it, reality TV gave rise to pointless distractions like the Balloon Boy and the White House Party Crashers. But the article also describes the culture of connectivity as a product of the evolving use of computers and mobile communications in society. As something of an evangelist for new media and a critique of old media, it is somewhat humbling for me to read Deresiewicz’s grouping of celebrity with connectivity in the contemporary self:
“Celebrity and connectivity are both ways of becoming known. It wants to be visible. If not to the millions, on Survivor or Oprah, then to the hundreds, on Twitter or Facebook. This is the quality that validates us, this is how we become real to ourselves — by being seen by others. The great contemporary terror is anonymity.”
The value of different participatory entertainment activities runs the gamut. A film at your local movie theater requires you to only buy a ticket before the film is sold out and ensure you show up at the scheduled time. Getting yourself twenty feet from the stage at The Dead on July 4th at Rothbury Music Festival in Michigan requires a significantly greater level of planning. But the relative interest in the social grid in any given activity is less important than the simple declaration to the post modern self that you “did it.” People want to shout from the top of their literal or figurative mountains, “I am about to (or have just) ____ at _____.”
Given that a lot of people love to share their experiences, many are simply limited by the inconvenience. I’ve given some detail to my sense that there is a big splash still yet to be made by Apple’s touch platform. And that the Touch lineup of the iPod Touch, the iPhone and the iSlate we will see a revolution in mobile computing. They will allow us to enjoy the impulses of the modern self which are to take part in connectivity and some element of celebrity.
A topic that hasn’t been explored enough is the effect of including an RFID reader in a breakthrough device like the iPhone. There is reason to believe that an RFID reader will be incorporated in the near future. I believe that the inclusion of such hardware will open up opportunities to more quickly identify and disseminate interesting information about the entertainment spaces we’re inhabiting.
To illustrate a point, when I was writing the above paragraph I searched twitter for “Sherlock Holmes” which premiered this past weekend. The third tweet from the top was from a student I’ve never heard of or met named Nicholas King. From his Twitter bio, we know Nicholas is a student at Eastern Michigan and studies business. Quite simply, Nicholas tweeted:
A quick search reveals that Trillium is a cinemas in Grand Blanc, Michigan and Nick was keeping his followers up to date with a text message from his phone. While a text message accomplishes the goal of updating his thirty or so followers, it falls down for a few reasons:
- Part of being fully connected is also having your information quickly sorted and grouped with similar data. Twitter provides a reverse method for grouping information through its search.twitter.com functionality. Users are capable of directly grouping their tweets with hashtags. Both of those methods suffer the potential for data entry error. I wouldn’t have known about Nick’s experience achievement if he had spelled it “Shelock Holmes.”
- Manually updating your followers with the activity you’re participating in requires extended effort. If you’re walking in the door of an RJD2 show you might have a drink in one hand and a gaggle of pals pulling you forward with the other. It isn’t always possible or at least socially acceptable to whip out your phone and type out an update.
The concept is this. Sherlock Holmes is being distributed to theaters by Warner Bros Pictures. In addition to sending out reels of film, Warner Bros would also send a small stand up display that is to be placed near the entrance to the theatre showing the movie. If Nick carried an iPhone with an RFID reader, he would need only to wave his phone at the entrance and it would automatically pick up his preferences for sharing his location and the movie title he’s seeing via Twitter or Facebook. More interesting things would be to automatically enter you in a contest for people who attended an Sherlock Holmes on opening weekend.
Another illustration to the benefits of adding an RFID reader to the iPhone in the realm of participatory entertainment is in live music or very large public entertainment events. For instance, scanning the RFID tag in your section at a football game will identify the mobile capability to an application that could cue everyone to hold up their phones at a given time, display a particular set of images on the screen and turn the entire stadium into a megatron. At a music festival like Rothbury, it might allow people to collect virtual zoo keys which turn an already amazing Sherwood Forest into something that is digitally enchanted.
The total extent to what could be done with connected devices incorporating RFID tags in combination with the impulse to reinforce personal visibility is impossible to see right now. What is clear is that culture, technology and the increasing value of participatory entertainment rapidly is converging with all-in-one devices like the iPhone and iSlate.
Update 12/30/09: A few additional things: 1. There is a strong sense that RFID will be most valuable for payment and wireless financial transactions. The basis of my interest in RFID has been from seeing the NFC-enabled registers at places like McDonalds and Regal Cinemas. When I first started seeing them, I would ask how often they took payment using the NFC at POS and I’d get blank stares from the employees. MasterCard’s PayPass and American Express’s ExpressPay have been around for a while but have mostly only survived market tests as far as I can tell.
To look at how NFC/RFID payments and entertainment overlap, I love what it could do to damage the secondary ticket market. I’ve long felt that secondary ticketing and scalping does more harm than good on the average would-be live entertainment participant. Locking tickets to phones is a great way to help track and possibly reduce scalping while still allowing some flexibility in transferability.
There are some articles about how an RFID, NFC enabled phone are useful outside of entertainment which are worth linking to. Here’s one that simply gooses the idea. Here’s a second article that talks explicitly in terms of marketing opportunities.
I would go beyond simply RFID to include wireless sensors, which can allow for a more robust user experience without the reliability issues of passive RFID. In terms of integration with mobile phones, it won’t be WiFi or Bluetooth that enables the participatory entertainment you mention, but a very low latency, low power technology like DASH7 – http://www.dash7.org.
We are using RFID technology in outdoor recreational sports (RFID fishing) and entertainment (RFID dining). We are able to connect consumer products to personal videos and photos. RFID technology provides the link to memories from the past. Social networks and cell phones allow us to share our experiences. RFID and the iPhone will make the process easier.
Hello Pat and Bulamonto,
Thanks for your comments. Pat, I’m interested in the idea of wireless senors and how they might be incorporated into giving a more detailed meta information about of a place.
Bulamonto, I had a look at your site and the Nokia 6212. Looks like interesting stuff.
South Korea is already using RFID chips in cellphones. There is a spot on many atm’s that allow you to wave your cell phone to quickly access your bank account and transfer funds to your phone. Then you can also use that currency stored on your phone at the check out at Lotte Mart and E-Mart (2 big box retail chains in South Korea)as well as theatre chains and inside some taxi cabs.