postcards from lewisham

My favourite app at the moment is Postman. It's like a much simpler version of things like Dopplr and Yellow Arrow. You choose a picture you've taken or take your location from Google Maps, fit it to a template of your choice, write your message and send it. OK, the user interface isn't as nice as it could be, and a couple of other postcard apps have better designed templates. But you can't beat Postman for sharing options. Like GPS Mapcard, I'm definitely liking those apps that give you a sense of the whole place/location thing without expecting you to make the same sort of commitment. You get the location-based storytelling and active remembering without having to do much legwork. It's like a very easy game to play. Which feels important, for some reason.

active remembering and global goodwill

This (via Contagious) is a thing of international loveliness to me. The Disposable Memory Project is a global photography experiment along these lines: The relationships between the images and the micro-histories that accompany them are really interesting. If you find one, pick it up and send them your pics. Or, if you don't, you can also be a part of it by dropping your own disposable camera.

let's get digital/physical

One of the interesting things about the trend for physical things becoming digital and vice versa is how different everything is. It's all part of the same culture, but it's becoming more and more divergent as new tools get created. I've written a bit about what I call active remembering, which has a lot to do with what someone cleverer than me has called the data shadow. There's a loop there, which is about creating and recording something, passing it and consuming the information later. And maybe tagging or commenting, layering up a bit of individual and social history. That's quite interesting. And lots of things seem to work like that. But one of the things I like about augmented reality stuff is the constant feedback loop that goes from digital thing to life thing back to digital thing. It reacts to you reacts to it.
levelHead v1.0, 3 cube speed-run (spoiler!) from Julian Oliver on Vimeo. Found this augmented reality game, levelHead, via a tweet from @mikearauz via @BBHLabs. For probably obvious shape and function reasons, it reminds me of Siftables, another great example of a constant digital-life-digital loop. Maybe it's to do with the fact that these are games, and they talk back to you. Whereas active remembering seems more of a social activity. I think it'd be brilliant if someone mashed up an active remembering tool with an AR or Siftables-type game. Somewhere people connect and say something interesting about who they are to themselves and each other. But that could also somehow take the multiplayer principle out of the screen and onto people's tables. A socially networked augmented reality game. I don't know how that would work.

psychogeographical

Tash's lovely post about spaces in children's books got me thinking about a few things. It seemed to chime nicely with the fact that the entire world seems to have recently divided itself into pro and anti-Twitter camps. On the one hand embracing it and on the other pulling it down as a load of self-regarding old nonsense. Which of course some of it is. But really most of it is a brilliant thing. As long as you're using it for the right reasons. Which is not a way of saying there should be a protocol about these things. But recently I've seen a deluge of tweets about how to generate as many followers as possible and been followed by people who profess to have that interest. Which seems to totally, totally miss the point. I'm not sure what the value of artificially stimulating a community of interest. But maybe that's just me. Also, while some people may find it weird to follow others who you haven't even met, to me that's one of the most liberating things about it. You can glean interesting ideas, insights and that kind of thing. It's a headspace reporting tool as much as a here-I-am-now-and-this-is-what-I'm-doing one. Like Matt Jones says better than I can, there's a certain kind of ideal fuzziness involved. A sort of imaginative space about your physical space and your activity within it. And this brought me back to distributed personality and my half-baked attempt to tackle the overlap between social networking and active remembering. That got me on to the apps I've put on my phone like Toy Camera and RJDJ, and how much of an interpretive act is hardcoded into active remembering tools like these. Which brought me back round to Tash's post. Because it seemed like creating these interpreted and modified bits of content and putting them together into a meaningful, narrativised whole was completely to do with the imaginative act of reinforcing the little zone of "you". Assemble the creatively visualised data you have and these places and traces made permanently visible are a big part of who you happen to be in a sequence of moments, closely or disparately connected. They trace who you are becoming by how you capture stuff that would have otherwise disappeared. Full of details as intricate and complex as the houses belonging to the Onceler or the Moomins. Just maybe less realised in such a concentrated space. Not sure exactly what it means. But it felt interesting enough to write something about. So then. Yeah. (Oh, by the way, I pulled the pic off of Matt's Flickr stream. Lovely, eh?)

too many things are interesting

It's been one of those weeks at work. You know, the kind where time evaporates long before you've had any kind of chance to make a dent in your to-do list. So sometimes the only thing to do is to crank the volume up when you can. And I think because I'm seeing the posters for the Notorious film everywhere, this has been on my iPod a lot. Best to skip through the intro bit though. Of course, it's at times like these you see loads of things to be excited by. Tons of stuff related to active remembering. Like things about data and automated nostalgia (thanks for the introduction, Russell). The natural selection of interesting. And other stuff. I won't even start on the films I want to see and the novels I want to read (or re-read).

a little more about active remembering

(Apology and advance warning: approach this post, written whilst feeling tired and worthy, with caution.) Had an argument about the T-Mobile ad with someone in the week. Well, not really an argument, more of a disagreement in conversation. This argument's been going back and forth for a couple of weeks. Some people love it, others don't. It's done its job, of course, because everyone's talking about it. And I can see why people love it. There's a big part of me that wants to as well. I love the spontaneous dancing you get in musicals, for example. But it just feels a bit contrived and, ironically, disconnected for me. So I was going to post something about it, to try to explain why it left me feeling so cold. But then I read two lovely things about connectedness by Asi and Ted. And they made me remember something about active remembering which I'd started to develop. The thing they have in common with each other and the T-Mobile ad is how technologies are enabling people to express themselves in new relations to each other and to brands (and the best brands to people, obviously). We're springing up all sorts of content around our friendships, loves, families and even the vaguest of acquaintances. Pushing what feel like more meaningful emotional buttons. So I found myself thinking how social media and the technologies that support them are a kind of active remembering tool. You might be posting to your Facebook, Twitter, blog or something else to actively remember yourself to a friend. A kind of "remember what we have" message. Or to actively remember an experience you shared, putting your memories in a communal place. And I know that's all kind of obvious. But anyway. It made me feel quite wow. Active remembering is a way of expressing your identity in different contexts and spaces again and again. Some of them may be individual, and some of them may be social. And it made me think, what a powerful thing for brands to harness. And then again, if you're trying to shout about it before you've really, meaningfully, invested in enabling it, you're probably doing it the wrong way around. (Pic courtesy of this person.)

noticing and reminding and remembering

So having got my new iPhone I'm reminded of some recent blogging about things like bionic noticing. I can really see what they mean...I've gone a bit app mad, getting all those ones you hear about and trying out a few that just sounded cool. And then getting some more after my creative director showed me some of the bonkers utilities like spirit levels and compasses and stuff like that. One of the things about the whole noticing thing for me that could be drawn out a bit more (for me at least) is that it's as much a tool for reminding as anything else. As a recording and data visualisation device, I think it's as much about how you use it after the fact as when you're on your way from A to B. It's also therefore a great way to be actively remembering. Like I was making tea after dinner and I came across my Penguin Classics Frankenstein mug, which is my favourite mug ever, because it's one of my favourite books ever. And just because it felt important to me at the time, and as my phone was in my pocket I took a picture and posted it to my new Tumblr. Using Tumblrette, naturally. I know, it's a tiny thing, but I've noticed and actively remembered it now. So now I'll be using the mug more often now. And maybe I'll even read the book again soon. Hey, maybe there's also something in this metonymic chain of products (from book to mug to phone to web or vice versa) thing too?