Cultures of the mind in the 21st century

Theories of the future of media focus on the replacement of one media by another or the relation between old and new media. These theories mainly come from marketing, content providers' business models, the legal profession, and technical solution providers. Missing from these voices is a nuanced appreciation of future user scenarios. This theme redresses that omission by looking at the ways people understand their own use of media content, how those understandings may be recast in new technology and how in turn, new technologies might allow users to recast their practices, and even create new ones.

For example, to study the future of books we first seek to understand the purpose of reading and writing and how that purpose varies across different reading materials, different times, and different means. Sometimes books are an emblem of who we are, and the newspaper tucked under our arm tells people much about our values. At other times reading and writing may be a solitary and reflective experience. Building electronic devices to read we should not necessarily attempt to merge these behaviours, but might choose instead to honour their separate intent. We might also design reading devices that allow new forms of symbolic display such as over the network or which enable solitary activity even though networked provision is required to run the application in question.

Some Key Research Questions 

• Is the continuum between consuming content, publicly favouring content, annotating content, combining existing content into new forms, creating content, and authoring content really a continuum? How do people move between these modes?
• How does professionally authored content change when written for the connected audience of networked readers, listeners, and viewers?
• The medium content appears in, from the iPod to the symphony hall, from the leather-bound book to the phone eReader, affects how people approach and consume the content held within. Would new content containers built with such sympathies in mind look and behave differently?
• Social network and online community researchers fret about the problem of participation - how can consumers be persuaded to contribute? But passive consumption is not passive and the presence of an audience is crucial to content authors. What technologies can we provide that may be aptly shaped towards expression and towards reflection, towards the public and towards the personal?
• Digital and networked content is often seen as a replacement of older forms. But the computational and display power of computing devices can also be used to aid our enjoyment of content. But how; and how are such enhancements enjoyed? Moreover, how do existing media forms change in intent or in use as a result?
• The consumption economics of digital technologies like laptops have always been turned around enabling a multitude of services and experiences to be provided. Only in this way have consumers found them cost effective-justified. But the current crop of reading devices afford only a limited set of experiences. Will these be enough to justify their cost? Are there certain types of reading that are ‘worth more’ than others and which might be design for? Could wholly new, high-value reading activities be created that could make reading technology indispensible?

Example Research Projects  

• Book Visualization
• The Gathering Engine
• VPlay
• if:book Collaboration
• Bookmarking the Bloggosphere: an exploration of whether high-value can be delivered by the creation of new, networked real-time reading content. 

(N.B. past projects might include Grab & Share, Snap & Grab, TellTable, zCast, GlancePhone, Hidden Histories, Nick's eBook work, Participate, and Dion.)