We Are Now Living Completely In The Immersive Age
4 Mar
Information Age – living in a world with access to data.
Immersion Age – living within a world of data.
We are two weeks shy of the five year anniversary of one of the original posts for this blog on a different domain (The Online Future). I was rather blown away when I first realized this, so I’ll repeat it again: five years ago. Apart from the longevity of me writing online (over six years on more personal blogs), this post has always stood out for me because of how right I was with some of these ideas.
Here is how I finished off that post (and excuse my mention of MySpace since Facebook was not open to me at the time):
The way of the future is to take the online experience and to expand it, make it grow into a living entity. I’ll explain this further in another post, but as a teaser, imagine a tool that allowed you to talk with people on MySpace directly through the Internet, anonymously (dialing profile to profile), like a cellphone, with the capability to download the music from band’s profiles and send text messages.
I introduced the idea of the Immersive Age in that post, but went into more detail with three more posts (here, here, and here). Here is how I described it (again, five years ago):
In the Immersive Age, you can live within these environments 24/7 and not get bored, whereas with the Information Age, you can quickly become bored of visiting the same sites. The Immersive Age grants you an endless supply of not just information, but with a large quantity of people to connect with (who are themselves an even larger bank of information, but a nonstatic bank).
At the time I wrote this, smart phones did not exist (I did, however, embarrassingly, mention PDAs connecting to the internet). What I first thought was a dream, has now taken a hold of our society in the past few years. Immersing ourselves within this data is a 24/7 life now with all the various notifications coming in on our iPhones or Androids, iPads, through our Twitter and Facebook streams, and that dinosaur of information, email. The ability to connect with people through Facebook via phone is nearly possible with various apps on smart phones combining contact lists with phone lists, without the need for a dedicated tool.
When I wrote my post yesterday about the changes in the Google search algorithm, I caught myself thinking about how much has changed in those five years, and how there is an even larger battle for our active participation in these sites. Every week, there seems to be a new site popping up that has social features, in hopes of keeping us immersed in that world of information. Five years ago, sites like that were a big deal. Now, it’s fairly standard to see a new write-up from TechCrunch about the latest social site every other day.
The one area I did not predict a lot of change was in search. At the time, Google was it, or quickly becoming it. I was thinking sites like MySpace helped people connect with other people, there was no need to discover which products to buy or movies to see. But now, social search is a much more important aspect of these sites. More so than actually connecting with people.
For example, with Facebook or Twitter, there is no way to search for people within your city who liked the book, Linchpin, or are between the ages of 25-30 and single, etc. Social search is based upon knowing someone’s email or full name on Facebook, or by keywords on Twitter. Location is not a big player, as of yet, for helping to connect with people. Services like Facebook Places and Foursquare are helping us make that more of a reality though.
The best sites of the Immersion Age have built up their features and structures to keep our attention completely. Theoretically, you could stay on Twitter or Facebook and stay connected to all the information you ever need on a daily basis. Both sites have internal email systems, a way to quickly reference someone in a message, the ability to search for current events, see active trends in your own stream, and with Facebook, live chat and listen to music without leaving the site. Facebook has even gone further with the ability to blog via Notes, and added in some functionality to work as a group on documents.
When I first wrote about the Immersion Age, there were two thoughts that crossed my mind:
First, I thought it would be exciting for people to have full access to the information they required, when they wanted it – which is indeed the case for many people.
Second, I thought it would be dangerous and/or depressing – and it has come to that point where people need to take a digital sabbatical.
Here is the key paragraph I wrote:
In the Immersive Age, information is always there for us, and the amount of information is behaving like a volcano. It blows up daily with new events, new speeches, new drama with reality tv, blogs, hundreds of tv stations, etc. That lava cools off almost instantly in some cases, then another layer is tossed onto it a moment later, an hour later, a day later, etc. The problem for my generation is not that we’re sitting on some island in the middle of a vast ocean surrounded by all this information; it’s that we’re standing beside the volcano while it heaves lava at us. The more we dodge, the more comes at us.
This is the one part that I wish I was slightly wrong about, but above all, it is the point I am most right about. As long as you have a laptop, iPad, a smart phone, television, etc. within your grasps, the urge to “just check” has become an addiction. Worse, has been the inability to escape these volcanos of information, as I called it before. When you disconnect from your networks, there is a growing fear within you that you are missing out on something important. Without that instant connection, you can not participate at a level that is required these days to maintain relationships online with the people you associate with.
Such is life in the Immersive Age. We can escape, but it only sets us further back and out of touch with the world. And if there’s one thing about my generation, we don’t like being out of touch with anything. We must be in the know and can’t survive long without some sort of contact and new information being exchanged.
As I sit here writing some of these reflections, I wonder what the next five years will bring to the Immersive Age, whether it will be the end, or whether it will be growing stronger still. I do know one thing for sure, though: I don’t think I’ll be nearly as wrong about this topic as I was when I wrote the following about Yahoo purchasing Flickr:
When Yahoo purchased flickr.com, this news article cites flickr’s user base at 775,000. That’s small peanuts compared to Hotmail’s over 100 million users or MySpace.com’s 50-some million users. Is that a failure of marketing, the application, or general interest in stuff like this? I would say it’s the general interest level in these applications. People just don’t need to use services like this, nor have the time to figure things out. Yes, it’s relatively simple to use, but people generally don’t need access to their photo albums on the fly. We carry the essential pictures we do want to share with people casually (family, friends, pets) without requiring access to our entire album. A service like flickr is only useful to the select few who are blogging and a slightly larger group that has the time to browse pictures endlessly.
Post Script
After I had written this and scheduled it, TechCrunch has an interesting article up about The Next Big Thing after social networking. Worth a glance: The Age of Relevance
