I suspect that perhaps the most obvious but effective solution, would be to continually monitor an individuals day-to-day lifestyle. By adopting various modern technological advances, one would hope that a consistent level of detail would be recored and measured. As an individual is monitored over an increasing period of time, an image/picture will begin to emerge of the individuals criteria. If for instance the individual then chose to adopt some form of technology, able to process and utilise the information gathered concerning their personal criteria. Possible benefits could be described as, reduced spent searching for the familiar/unfamiliar, and the possible discovery of something you perviously were unaware of.

By understanding/being aware of your personal criteria, you could effortlessly remain up-to-date regarding the latest developments, discoveries, and break-throughs for any number of interests that you may have. I think that this information could feature within a live-feed format, similar to those you already subscribe to on the web, but automatically constructed for you. Relevant content would be brought to you as and when it becomes available. To allow for this to work over a prolonged period of time, the technology would need to be adaptable, shaped by the growth and change of the individual.

I can see that a beneficial feature for any device/service run off your personal criteria, would be to provide the individual with some choices/close alternatives. This would help to provide reassurance/confirmation that everything is in-fact working that way that it should, allowing you to pick the best possible outcome/option for you.

Look into anti-technology slogans from the past, the fears that people used to have and maybe still do. How does this compare to more recent fears and anxieties regarding technology and the future? Is there a history of health problems in humans relating to technology, either directly or indirectly?

Are people still performing the same tasks but will new (modern) tools? How does this compare?

Are there any pro-technology protests/demonstrations? In some ways, trade-fairs for the latest technological advancement, or presentations like Apples ‘Keynote’ fulfil this idea.

A question/statement that I can imagine  someone saying is, when will it stop, how long until we are all cyborgs? What historical references highlight these kind of fears and anxieties. What fears have been realised/confirmed, and which have been shown to be unnecessary?

I have just found technophobia help classes on the web..?

Are you a Technophobe or a Technophile?

Plot a comparison, things that you can do with modern technology and with traditional methods – things you can only exclusively do with one or the other. Visually how does this look?

Map the ‘Personal Criteria’ project Critera, what will make this a good project? Can I now identify possible problems that I may encounter?

After yesterdays Pecha Kucha presentations, I got talking Barnaby Norwood about some of the ideas that I presented. We had a good chat, and found that in our spare time we each feed similar interests. Today I received an e-mail from Barnaby, with a whole lot of links to things. Something that I was incredibly pleased to discover was a link to New Scientist Online, and a short piece of writing title ‘Microsoft mind reader’.

Brain-computer interaction, which is quickly explained here:

The company says that it is hard to properly evaluate the way people interact with computers since questioning them at the time is distracting and asking questions later may not produce reliable answers. “Human beings are often poor reporters of their own actions,” the company says.

Instead, Microsoft wants to read the data straight from the user’s brain as he or she works away. They plan to do this using electroencephalograms (EEGs) to record electrical signals within the brain. The trouble is that EEG data is filled with artefacts caused, for example, by blinking or involuntary actions, and this is hard to tease apart from the cognitive data that Microsoft would like to study.

So the company has come up with a method for filtering EEG data in such a way that it separates useful cognitive information from the not-so-useful non-cognitive stuff. The company hopes that the data will better enable to them to design user interfaces that people find easy to use. Whether users will want Microsoft reading their brain waves is another matter altogether.

15 October 2007 by Justin Mullins.

Full paper is here:

http://johnnylee.net/academic/fp223-lee.pdf

Images: Two screen-grabs from www.pecha-kucha.org – the images show some of the different locations where Pecha Kucha take place.

Yesterday, as part of preparation for self-directed study, myself and fellow Level 3 Graphic Design students at UWE presented our chosen root of study/investigation in an (amended) Pecha Kucha format (10×20). I found that I enjoyed presenting my ideas, but it did flag up a few issues that I will need to address. At the moment, it is taking me too long to get across the various elements that position my area of interest. I will need to be more succinct, if I am to stimulate an interest in anyone other than myself. Primary research, what is stopping me from doing more, nothing.

Here is a link to a Pecha Kucha presentation, it is not tremendously well presented, but the subject matter is incredibly interesting.
http://www.pecha-kucha.org/presentations/14

Words to follow…

This is a screen capture from the website of online retailer, Amazon. I have ordered several products from the online store, I am not a frequent user, but I do find a place for it in my life. The first time that I decided to make a purchase, I was required to supply Amazon with some basic information about me. As I have made additional purchases, a record has been kept and then used to tailor my experience during subsequent visits. Providing that I am logged in, am I able to browse various recommendations, for products that Amazon feels that I may wish to buy. The more custom that I provide Amazon with, the more information Amazon will have to improve the quality of their recommendations. I am able to tune these recommendations myself, by indicating while I browse/shop, the products that apply to any number of my criteria sets.

This is one example of where an online service, naturally gathers but then chooses to use, information that is supplied to them form their customers.

Wikipedia: In The Hidden Persuaders, first published in 1957, Packard explores the use of consumer motivational research and other psychological techniques, including depth psychology and subliminal tactics, by advertisers to manipulate expectations and induce desire for products, particularly in the American postwar era. It also explores the manipulative techniques of promoting politicians to the electorate. The book questions the morality of using these techniques.

Exposed: How the new persuaders are hacking your mind… to control your desires.

This is the introduction to Wired UK’s 14 page special report on the new hidden persuaders:

As marketers, retailers and governments map your desires in ever-greater detail, your purchasing decisions, your lifestyle choices, even your political preferences are influenced in ways you barely perceive. From the behavioural targeting that seeks to track your online life to the brain scans intended to trigger your purchasing decisions, the modern persuader’s toolkit claims scientific validity as never before.

Now a new generation of pervasive technologies is about to take influence to the next level. By merging real-time databases of your TV and web viewing, your past purchasing decisions, even your physical movements and facial expressions, the persuaders are hoping to understand and mould your personal preferences to an unprecedented degree.

Neuroscience, too, is being used to study how to manipulate customer demand. Lucid Systems, a marketing-research company visited for this special wired investigation, promises its clients “the unspoken truth” about people’s innermost thoughts: “Objective scientific data to help you discover not just what people say, but what they… feel about advertising and marketing messages, brands and products – even before they are aware they are doing so.”

These are the new hidden persuaders – corporations and public authorities intent on using technology to understand and alter your intentions below your level of consciousness. The use of science in the quest for consumers’ “buy” button is, of course, nothing new: 52 years ago, journalist Vance Packard prompted an outcry with his bestselling book The Hidden Persuaders, which warned that “many of us are being influenced and manipulated” by the new “motivational research” industry. Its operatives, Packard wrote, use “insights gleaned from psychiatry and the social sciences” to manipulate “inner thoughts, fears and dreams”, typically “beneath our level of awareness”. Such manipulation, he concluded, was immoral, as it removed people’s “right to decide… what they want to do and who they want to be”.

Since then, corporate marketers have tried everything from psychographic memory triggers to galvanic skin-response meters to try to discover how we feel about their products. Dewar’s Scotch used group hypnosis to explore early memories of the drink; DaimlerChrysler turned to brainimaging studies to determine which car designs most excited target customers. Such “neuromarketing” research has been gaining ground since the BrightHouse Institute for Thought Sciences, working out of the neuroscience wing of Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia, was launched in 2002 to give corporations “unprecedented insight into their consumers’ minds”. Although the scientific claims made for neuromarketing are often spurious, corporations from DreamWorks to Ford have since used magnetic resonance imaging scanners and electroencephalography to peer inside consumers’ brains.

But for marketers seeking certainty, your personal data trail offers a tool of unprecedented power. The current debate about “behavioural targeting” – individually directed adverts based on a web user’s browsing history, controversially served by data-crunchers such as Phorm or Google – will be remembered as quaintly innocent when consumers wake up to the power of the next-generation tracking technologies. How naked will your personal preferences be to advertisers when your entire digital-TV remote-control clickstream is merged with your web-browsing history, your storecard and email data, records of all your movements via face-recognition cameras and radio frequency identification tags, and maps of your mobile phone’s signals? Even if you are determined to resist such data-led manipulation of your deepest desires, how do you know that this vast pool of information will not leak out or be used against your own interests, perhaps by a health insurer or a future employer?

As our special investigation reveals over the next 12 pages, these are no abstract fears that can be dismissed as paranoia. The tracking technologies have arrived and are already being tested in real situations – even if the respective databases have not yet all been combined in real time. Sense Networks, a San Francisco company covered in our report, is already tracking mobile-phone users via global positioning satellites, phone masts that catch their signals, or local Wi-Fi networks that detect their presence. The company tracks consumers as dots moving across a map and then analyses each user’s behaviour to place him or her in a designated “tribe” – “young and edgy” night owls, or “barflies” who stay loyal to their local bar. Such firms generally claim to anonymise data, but consumers have to take such pledges on trust.

The speed at which such technologies are being rolled out tends to overtake the law’s ability to police them. So this is the moment for citizens to debate and demand privacy assurances, legal safeguards and transparency. Who will have access to such vast data trails, and for how long? How secure is information within each system? Could the state demand access to such databases – or could they be sold to commercial third parties? Never forget that data collected for one anodyne purpose may well be used for far more pernicious ones.
Vance Packard knew the risks. Five decades on, we may dismiss as overwrought his fears about the psychological manipulators. But Packard did understand the dangers of allowing privacy to be left to an unaccountable class of persuaders excitedly exploring their magical new tool-kit.

“Many of the people-manipulating activities of persuaders raise profoundly disturbing questions about the kind of society they are seeking to build,” he wrote. They have, he said, the power to do good or evil “on a scale never before possible… It is this right to privacy in our minds – privacy to be either rational or irrational – that I believe we must strive to protect.”

Related Links:
– The new hidden persuaders
- Data that define your retail options
- How the TV watches you
- When advertising gets in your face
- Mining your mobile phone logs
- Your unconscious mind has already voted
- Now marketing gets sniffy
- Neuromarketing is a go
- Eye-tracking adverts
- Your secret shopping personality

A few days ago, I came across a free download of an application called Personal Brain. I had been searching for free Mind-mapping software at the time, and was pleasantly surprised when I made my discovery. Personal Brain could be thought of as a Interactive Mind-mapping tool, with the capability of managing an infinite number of links, which include links to websites, files/documents.

Link:
www.thebrain.com

A possible line of inquiry: I have begun to explore criteria along a particular theme, for example vehicles and their owners. The three images that I have chosen to include here, provide a possible insight into the owner and his or her criteria. By examining the various articles on display, questions be formed and assumptions made (nothing more I suspect). Perhaps a better approach would be to single out a particular make and model of vehicle, and record exclusively the differing personalities of each.