Phantom 3D objects floating in the air, visible only through the portal of your phone? An urban game played with same? Mobile ad boutique The Hyper Factory seems to have got there first. Their recent ad campaign for Nike used image recognition of printed targets (on posters, in magazines, on the ground of a football field, etc.) to superimpose hovering shoes over the real world.
This is, without a doubt, creative. But looking at it strictly as a creative work, it is severely hamstrung by the fact that the objective is to sell shoes. My guess is that it will be games that push the aesthetic and technical boundaries of this technology. We’re going to see strange reality-fantasy hybrids that will make World of Warcraft and Second Life look old, boring, and flat. Then again, it might also make LARPing socially acceptable, and do we really want that?
And after the technology is ubiquitous and cheap, we’re going to use it to put deep labels on our environment in real time — this is already starting with a sort of Wikipedia for objects. If you’re one of those people who feel sorta blind without your smartphone, just wait until it’s built into your sunglasses.
Gathering and delivering the news is the easy part, the part that the journalism industry already knows how to do. Getting the audience to care about the news is the hard part. This seems obvious if you define the mission of journalism as “an informed public,” but I fear that many journalism organizations aren’t thinking about what happens to the news after publication.
It’s long been understood that sports and celebrity gossip are far more popular among readers than actual news. In the paper era, everyone got serious factual reporting delivered to them anyway: the act of reading a physical newspaper forces you to see the headlines, no matter what your interests are. The web isn’t like this, and paper news consumption is low and falling among young readers, which means that the classic package of whether-you-knew-you-cared-or-not news is on the way out as a delivery format.
The following passage from Alex Jones’ Losing The News nails the problem:
News on the web is almost entirely chosen by the viewer. You have to seek it out, which means that you can easily miss important stories or avoid troubling ones. Print newspapers had offered a smorgasbord, but you had to cast your eye over a range of information that included some hard news. And both television and radio news game no choices other than to change the channel or station. On the Web, you get the news you want, and what Americans seem to want, when it comes to news, is a lot of Britney Spears and much less of the Iraq war. (p. 180)
Does this matter? The theory is that democracy will not function if people aren’t informed about the basic political, economic, and scientific happenings of the world. The dissolution of paper delivery, this line of reasoning goes, means the end of an informed citizenry.
I just think it means that journalism and journalists now have a new responsibility: they have to figure out how to get people to care. Inspiring curiosity is part of the job description.
So how do we make people more interested in knowing about the news? This is more than a question of format, or graphic design or packaging. This is not about snappier video editing and edgier prose. That sort of thing might be helpful in the short run, but these kinds of changes come from a fundamentally broadcast mentality. This is not the mindset of the creators of Google, Twitter, and Facebook. If news publishers seriously believe that they’re important players the public information game, then why is it the technology companies who have delivered all of the communication revolutions of the last decade?
Here are some innovative examples of public engagement that might offer clues:
Mere publishing is no longer enough.