The on-demand console gaming service, OnLive recently released pictures and videos demoing its product and peripheries through Facebook in an attempt to create some hype surrounding its upcoming release into public beta mode. The projected release of this cloud gaming service has brought much attention in the press with headlines such as “Is It Game Over for Consoles?” in The Independent.The attention grabbing headline refers to the potential threat OnLive offers to the current gaming industry by removing the iconic, chunky hardware boxes from gaming.
OnLive aims to cut the need for hardware by using the upper limit of internet bandwidth to stream any game to a display of the users choosing. This would fundamentally alter the marketing war between games consoles that has existed for years, it will essentially cut the need to upgrade hardware in order to play new, more advanced games. Instead of buying new, OnLive will merely upgrade their servers, making gaming far cheaper for gamers; and accessible only to those with fast enough internet access. The above video seems to endorse this as the graphically heavy and admired PC game Crisis is streamed to the iPhone. With constant internet access being a key factor OnLive also allows users to view exactly what games their friends are playing, opening enormous possibilities for multiplayer games. Laptop and smart-phone access for cloud gaming is apparent in their built-in access to the internet, TVs will also be able to have OnLive access as they release a ‘microconsole’ flatter and smaller than a standard console controller, connecting the large display to a modem and streaming the game information to the TV.
Yet on the day OnLive officially announced themselves in 2009, Sony happened to register the name ‘PS Cloud’.While the gaming industry does not yet appear to be quaking in its boots, technology trends of the last decade indicate that if the service is ‘good enough’ it will succeed. The console heavy gaming sector is only just waking up to what the music industry has had to deal with for the last decade in digital distribution becoming the dominant method. While technology experts have negatively stated that they fear the ‘decade of the gadget is over’ the positive upspin on this is that an integration of information will be taking place within these gadgets as differentiated services and internet access/speed becomes a more central component.
Youth behaviour will define further which of these services are fully adopted as they defined the last decade with the adoption of cheap, accessible ‘good enough technologies’ to become the dominant consumer electronics of the last decade. While vinyl is in the midst of a cult revivial amongst young people, there is no denying that MP3 players and laptops have long over taken record and CD players as the main mode of listening to music. While the sound quality of these newer technologies is inferior, the accessibility and cheapness has clearly won over many young people. This will be the same with books, as a New York Times writer recently noted in that his daughter called his Amazon Kindle ‘daddy’s book’ instead of an electronic reader .Tech Tribe 2009 clearly shows that young people have fully adopted this ‘good enough technology’ which has suddenly come to outline consumer electronics for the last decade in online films through laptops, digital photos, eReaders and Skype. If OnLive is cheap, accessible and good enough, young people will almost certainly adopt it, evidencing how youth are possibly the driving demographic sector in how consumer electronics develop.
For a more detailed overview of how OnLive will work after it’s full release later in the year, watch the detailed presentation below. Parts 2, 3, 4 and 5 are also available on Youtube.
We’ve previously explored how Facebook is affecting relationships of young people . Our Headbox community member Rusha (23) described her relationship with her contacts on Facebook and how she didn’t know as many of them as she did in her day-to-day physical life saying that she had “never spoken to a third of them at all”. She outlined the passive nature of friends on Facebook, suggesting quite a negative impact upon social relations. She goes on to say that social networking encourages a way “to connect to people in a way that could only be described as passive”. Yet the word ‘passive’ could easily be substituted for more positively connotated words such as ‘ambient’ or ‘continuous’. There have been many news reports stressing the negative impact that social networking may have upon physical social relations (another example here). Yet there is a recent bout of news that suggests that social networking is actually impacting somewhat positively upon social relationships as people become both aware of the limits of social networking as well as how to maximize their social networks online. 2009 has provided enough of a shake up, largely through the mainstream notoriety of Twitter, to begin conceptualizing social networks differently to how they were at the beginning of the year.
A recent study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project has examined the effects of social networking and cell phone use over the last 20 years. According to the study, although the participant’s social circles were self-reported to smaller than 20 years ago, this was not due to internet usage. In fact, people who regularly use digital technologies are far more social than the average American, having wider more diverse networks and are more likely to visit parks, cafes or volunteer for local organizations according to the study. This suggests, that in some ways a greater interaction with the internet and social networking sites, presents a greater interaction with community around their users, be it through a niche or a geographical interest. Many studies have hypothesized that the average person is feeling more socially isolated because of the rise of the internet. Pew confirmed previous findings that close networks had dropped by 2 or 3 friends, yet it also reported that only 6% of Americans fell into this previously attributed isolated category of citizen, with no significant change over the last 20 years. The study suggests that people are becoming more aware of exactly how to use social networks and are unperturbed by how the media might suggest that they take them too literally. The recent suggestion that young people are now ‘finally flocking’ to Twitter suggests that they are realizing the power of the social network merely for what it is, rather than an indicator for how many deep and connecting friendships one has.
Twitter has become the great example of the realistic social networking next step in that there is nothing beyond the 140 characters that can be shared. It is the bare bones of the information and possibly a link to a new site, in some ways confirming Pew’s findings that although people still prefer to connect in a face-to-face fashion, there is a growing realization that social networking is effective for exactly what it suggests rather than igniting a more close and meaningful friendship connection with others. Not necessarily knowing your contacts very well on Twitter allows a certain openness that is crucial to, perhaps, Twitter’s greatest reward, serendipitous discovery – the adjustment of this feature caused an uproar on the microblogging site earlier in the year. With more young people using intentional misspellings with leetspeak or lolspeak even as far as using exclamation marks with a few number 1s purposefully inserted when ending the group (!!!!11), indicating an excitedness that is usually conveyed with such haphazard typing mistakes, it could be suggested that there is possibly an increasing awareness of the internet’s impact upon society as digital becomes a less separate reality for young people. It is perhaps no coincidence then that the New Oxford American Dictionary has named ‘Unfriend’ as its word of 2009.
Christine Lindberg, Senior Lexicographer for the Oxford US dictionary program states that as a 2009 Word of the Year, Unfriend “has both currency and potential longevity”. The OAD word of the year even sparked a debate as to whether it was actually Unfriend or Defriend is the word that should be used.
The popularity of the concept perhaps further indicates John Fischer comments that it’s an “example of how things like social networks are changing our relationships. You used to have to deal with all the messy real-world parts of ending a friendship and now you can just click a button and delete someone.” This changing relationship has even manifested itself within mobile phones as the Samsung Jet features an incoming fake call function to alleviate annoying conversation.
This shift is further evidence that young people who are growing up with social networking and digital are beginning to see them less as separate realities from the physical and are integrating real life privacy concerns into their personal social media strategy. We’ve already shown through Tech Tribe 2009 that in the last 12 months well over half (63%) of 19-25 year olds have upped their privacy settings. Social media strategy has become such a popular concept with the quitting of Twitter by Miley Cyrus, Lilly Allen and Stephen Fry (the latter temporarily) that it has satirized with the term suicide, particularly in the case of Ed Droste, founder of the band Grizzly Bear . The satirist even ran his own cyber suicide story http://www.carlesisdead.com/ with a more satirical hipster character, Mikebro, replacing him for the 10 top albums of the decade post and on the Hipster Runoff twitter account. This hipster-based satire of social media strategy is an example of how conscious young people are becoming of it and also how the digital world is becoming less distinct from the physical.
This lack of distinction is ever more apparent in industries that directly involve laying digital information onto the physical world such as geotagging and augmented reality, the latter being a market, which may be worth $732million by 2014 and is already interacting with children’s action figures. While young people have generally begun to suss privacy settings for social networks. There are privacy warnings to be heeded as these new technologies become mainstream. Now that Twitter has enabled location information to be noted to tweets, and digital information can be added to pictures via augmented reality apps there are concerns that releasing such a combination of information such as visual cues and location could invite unwanted attention. This discourse is however part of a larger ‘transparency versus personalization’ debate that has always run since people started beginning putting up personal information on the internet, as Kevin Kelly notes that “if you want total personalization, you have to be totally transparent”.
Most people won’t take their personal social media strategy this far however, and will be utilizing different social networks for different purposes as they become more aware of how integrated they become into society. Linkedin is used for professional collaboration, Facebook for personal friends while Twitter is used both to connect with friends and collaborate serendipitously. There will always be those who opt out categorically such as 25 year gold physics graduate Tomek Kott whose wife started a mini-crusade to get him to join in creating the Facebook group “Tomek Kott Must Joint Facebook”. It seems as though these examples are becoming more anomalies worth noting however as more and more of the world become socially networked.
Yet while it is noted that a huge majority of young people have joined social networks and are beginning to perceive them for precisely what they are, the assumption that young people are becoming intuitive with technology and are therefore, what some call Digital Natives, can be challenged as was the case at a lecture last week at the London School of Economics. Professor Sonia Livingstone noted that digital intuitiveness is not a staple characteristic of young people growing up today, instead noting Ofcom’s recent study showing that there is no real consensus for 12-15 year old internet users about exactly how search engines work with 37% suggesting relevance was the key factor, while 32% believed truthfulness to be the factor that ranks results. These results suggest that there is no clear way to define young people beyond the fact that they are young people. While the large majority is becoming aware of personal social media strategy there will always be those who are unaware, yet things like this are teachable in school, unlike the older methods for consuming media like TV. Dr Rebekah Willet suggested at the digital native lecture that for children social networks were more of an instrument of sub-conscious expression rather a conscious platform of it’s own. This is supported by the fact that recent psychological research has suggested that Facebook profiles capture their users true personalities, rather than exaggerated ones. It is perhaps necessary to view a combination of the two views as social networks become as immediate realities for young people as their daily face-to-face interactions – the conversations are both unconscious and conscious of those viewing them online.
With Animals Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavillion being labeled as a potential album of the year in Januraryand their profile raising and following this up with gigs in high profile London venues such as the O2 Academy Brixton it is not surprising that their small home city of the Baltimore is becoming more recognized as a hotbed of musical creativity and moving beyond it’s association with so real it hurts drama The Wire. In the UK, Baltimore primarily has an association with the institutional setting of The Wire and not much else. Yet in the US, Baltimore has garnered national attention with it’s artists bringing forth a new wave of colourful psychedelic pop. Furthermore it seems like ‘blogs worth blogging about’ are already sighting Baltimore-based bands as a potential record of the year 2010 material just as Animal Collective were sighted as such early in 2009.
The fact that news of Dan Deacon’s cancelled US tour popped up on the NME website suggests an increasing awareness of the Baltimore-based artist in the UK. Deacon’s playful live shows have been getting more recognition to the point where he played a well publicized concert in London in June this year. His live shows often take place in the midst of the crowd and involve dance circles, human tunnels, over-the-top countdowns and other playful interactions with the crowd. This colourful aesthetic pervades the scene that’s emerging from Baltimore, and is in direct contradiction to the stereotypically bleak images of Baltimore that is in the consciousness of the British public.
Is the UK vision of Baltimore about to change??
These stereotypes are however being blown away by Deacon and Wham City, an art and music collective made up of Deacon’s dearest friends and most frequent collaborators. This attempt to spread joy and technicolour manifests itself quite prominently at shows as Deacon often hands out the lyrics sheet to his “national anthem” for Wham City and encourages mass singalongs:
There is a mountain of snow
Up past the big glen
We have a castle enclosed
There is a fountain
Out of the fountain flows gold
Into a huge hand
That hand’s a held by a bear
Who has a sick band
Of goats and cats and pigs and bats
With brooms and bats and wings and rats
And great big dogs like kings and queens
And everyone plays drums and sings
Of big sharks, sharp swords
Beast knees, bees lords
Sweet cakes, mace lakes
Oh mamamamamamama
Although Wham City represents only the tip of the iceberg in Baltimore’s tangled scenes collective creativity, they are at forefront of this smorgasboard of pop culture, 15 members of which went on tour with Deacon as a whole in the US this summer forming a playful orchestra. Wham City even has it’s own festival, Whartscape which has been putting on regularly since 2006 during Balitmore’s Artscape art festival. The anti-festival turned oddball indie magnet covers four nights, two full days, and four venues, is backed by a list of sponsors, and brings in headliners whose individual payment guarantees could probably cover a month’s rent for everyone involved in organizing the fest combined.
This powerful and expanding artistic influence in the city of Baltimore occurred organically around 2004 as the Maryland Institute Colleage of Art started giving classes again. This in combination with large and cheap warehouse spaces in Baltimore, which has created the perfect environment for young people to have the space and time to create, such as Wham City’s below interpretation of Beauty and the Beast which came from finding cassette tapes of the soundtrack.
There is an argument to suggest that a gentrification cycle occurs because of these artistic movements towards cheap spaces that eventually develop an aesthetic of cool, which then drives up the prices of the properties and brings in more wealth forcing the artists to move elsewhere for cheaper rent. Although this is yet to happen with Baltimore, it can be suggested it has already taken place in Brooklyn, New York and Shoreditch in East London. In this way it might be suggested that the creative desires of young people might bring a greater sense of safety and affluence to the community that they creating within. This places a large amount of responsibility in the hands of those young people as to how their community will be shaped.
