SensoryMetrics

< < a Facebook conversation with friend Paul Renaud...>>

Mitch is wondering where real life begins… and surreal life begins?

Paul:

Isn’t that the underlying subtext of the movie Spiral?

“Mason is never-the-less neurotic and reclusive, living a life of anonymity, working from a drab cubicle in a florescent-lit phone bank, repeating the same meaningless conversation with faceless strangers ad nauseam. ” what are you saying?? LOL

That’s because he cannot tell the difference between reality and virtual people in his life. “How do you tell the difference?” he asks his best friend at the end of the movie.
Is it because of the virtual social interactions he has every day on the phone at work? Or because his father murdered his mother? Is the movie telling us that one can be as de-sensitizing as the other??

I’ve always believed that everyone has the POTENTIAL for sinking into deep psychosis and neurosis – we develop skills in the real world to prevent this from happening. But – what if mental deterioration is faster in the virtual world? How do the two reconcile? Maybe dinosaurs had Facebook and that’s what got them!

Well I suppose mental deterioration could be faster in a virtual world since it presents only some facets of or, more accurately, representations of, the real world.
One might assume that the greater bandwidth of experience presented by the real world exercises our minds more completely and that exercise prevents our brains (which is a muscle that needs exercise) from atrophying.
Could that be the same reason why there are so many copycat situations that parallel TV and other forms of popular virtual culture? For example the rash of teen pregnancies after the move Juno was released.
So as constructors of this virtualism do we have an ethical obligation not to create too engaging a UX?

It’s possible that a high-bandwidth experience can lead one into disassociation. All the classic symptoms of this pathology can almost be considered features of an engaging UX: Depersonalization and derealization – feeling detached from the real world and immersed into a surreal one where actions have no real consequences…
So what do we need for ethical design? Second Life has been good at recreating a structured society that keep one’s actions in check (unfortunately this also makes it rather boring)
BTW – Google launched Lively yesterday… users can create their own personalized asylums and interact with their avatar friends…

http://www.lively.com/html/landing.html

I think this is a real issue for some users of high-bandwidth experiences. We probably should promote the development of ethical criteria in our industry.
This occurs in the non-virtual world too. For example Harley-Davidson customers who tatto the logo on their bodies and “live by it”, etc. Not everyone loses perspective, but some are prone to go over the edge.

If consequences make the experience boring, then perhaps role models need to be built into the experience.

On the subject of creating experience-based brands, check out:

http://knowledge.emory.edu/article.cfm?articleid=1153

I love the “sensing and responding” quote.

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