Week one has been a great introduction to Media 6 and I am very excited for this semester and the future-focused topics we have started discussing.
Firstly, the Schwab reading, which I wrote about in this blogpost, taught me a lot about what is going on now in technology, what could happen in the future, and how it may impact humans.
Then Astrid Scott of ABC’s Research and Development team came to our lecture and got me thinking about how the fourth industrial revolution impacts the media industry specifically.
After the lecture we broke up into groups and had a discussion about experiences to do with interactivity, simulation, immersion and virtual/augmented reality. The result was the brain map pictured above.
One idea that I have been mulling over since these events is the possibility of 24 hour personal live feeds to social media, so that people can see what you are doing at all times, and privacy will be out the window, but it will be given up voluntarily. Already people use GPS on their phones to check in where they are on facebook or instagram, snapchat videos of themselves to select friends, or upload live videos to facebook of what they are doing. The idea of a 24 hour feed came from Dave Eggers novel, The Circle, where an employee at a large tech company (like google) is used an experiment in a live feed to social media (at all hours except sleeping), and people around the world became interested in her and what she was doing. The novel explored how she changed her behaviour when the cameras were attached, and how she changed her behaviour when she realised that people were watching and commenting.
Another thing that I have been thinking about is Pokemon Go and whether it will ever occur that virtual reality will move out into the streets, so that you can walk around living like you are in gameplay. Of course you would have to get around security issues. Perhaps this could also be applied to travel, so that you walk around a city, but using virtual reality technology, it feels like you are walking around a different city, and on holiday.
I am unsure of what kind of topics we will pick in my tutorial, but at this point everything is very interesting and worth exploring.
