It's all repeats nowadays - online mindfulness

[Reposting this one from last year in lieu of having the time to write anything new at the moment. Normal service will be resumed in a couple of weeks after IBC...]

One of the things I've been increasingly puzzling about recently is the disconnect between our online lives and our real ones; the personas if you like that we present to people in the real world and the ones that we forge for ourselves online.

There's a tradition of this, of course. Back in the early days of the internet, it was possible to have an enormous amount of fun in the Usenet groups you frequented by pretending to be a 16 year old schoolgirl from Helsinki. Certainly fun when troll-baiting. But with the rise of social media and its interconnecting webs of likes and dislikes, follows and retweets, our online personalities are designed to be much more faithful extensions of ourselves. The problem is, we don't treat them that way.

Maybe it's because our online relationships are mediated via the keyboard, and even with the rich complexities of language - and the less subtle interventions of emoticons - we are always a step removed. But it seems that this is particularly the case when it comes to mindfulness. A quick quip, a sarcastic comment...it is all too easy for us to participate in conversations that we perhaps wouldn't chose to in real life. I've lost count of the times I've been within a button press of tweeting something or commenting on something on Facebook and then pulled back and run through the usual quick Buddhist mantra: is it kind? Is it necessary?

Often it's not, and at least online there is a delete button (depending on how Facebook is running its privacy policy that week). But, again in Buddhist parlance, right thinking and right speech should also lead to right typing and our online relationships - ephemeral sometimes though they may be - are poorer when this isn't so.

Allons-y-up

Despite having spent several years now writing about sports broadcasting's most prestigious events, I have never managed to write much about my personal favourite, Le Tour de France.

So, in the spirit of slight randomness, here's a picture of some sheep and a link to an article about Sony’s 4K World Cup Workflow instead which I wrote for the good people at Red Shark.

And with that, it's back to the IBC grindstone...

Slenderman and creepypasta

An interesting piece from The Verge that lifts the lid on the collision of memes and teenagers and the possible creation of a moral panic (let's see if the Daily Mail jumps on this one).

I dunno, we just had to make do with mashing up D&D and The Diceman in my day...

'Slenderman' is the new 'devil made me do it'

70 years on

Can think of few better illustrations of the difference that seven decades have made to Europe than this series of then and now pictures that the Huffington Post created…

More here: D-Day Landing Sites Then And Now: 11 Striking Images That Bring The Past And Present Together

Life - quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Technician, we want you to build a component...

A really interesting article from the Grauniad which details the activities of a firm in London that's using smartphone apps to track every waking moment of their employee's lives. Is it voluntary? No, not exactly (which raises some rather vexing human rights issues) but what's more it's seen as simply an extension of the quantified self movement where everything we do is analysed, measured and shared.

Me, I think I may pass. Have enjoyed checking my times on a couple of cycling apps, but this is all starting to get both too narcissistic and too creepy; another instance where we don't have to rely on governments collecting data on us as we're all too happy to volunteer it ourselves.

Bread and circuses? Seems all you need is an app that says 'well done'.

These companies are tracking the fitness of their employees

As English prog band Twelfth Night chanted on their excellent 'We are Sane' track back in the very early 1980s:

"Technician we want you to build a component
For each of our workers to be with them always
At all time watch closely so we can keep track of
Their actions their interests their morals their time out...
...The maintenance of power can be so fulfilling
Just as long as all the slaves are willing"

Quite.

Work: Through a Google Glass...Darkly

Pic: xkcd

In 1996, noted science fiction author David Brin wrote a non-fiction piece for Wired called The Transparent Society in which he peered ahead into the new future and the lives of two cities; one where surveillance cameras on every street corner were the absolute norm, another where their use was tightly regulated. Neither seemed particularly palatable.

"A few voices out there...have begun pointing out the obvious: that those cameras on every street corner are coming, as surely as the new millennium. Nothing will stop them," he wrote.

He wasn't wrong.

Fast forward to 4th July 2013 and PR consultant and filmmaker Chris Barrett is walking along the Jersey Shore Boardwalk when he sees a fight break out and a subsequent arrest. Nothing atypical for the time and the place that's for certain, but Barrett was one of the first wearers of Google Glass as part of its Explorer program, and that scene was edited and uploaded onto YouTube a day later, where so far it has been watched 982,000 times and counting.

You may not be familiar with the term sousveillence, which considering how ugly it is is not much of a surprise, but it is a useful term. It unpacks surveillance — from the French sur, meaning "from above”; and veiller, "to watch” — and substitutes the prefix sous, "from below”. The cameras, in other words, are everywhere…

There has of course been much angst about the development of citizen journalism over the years, but none of that seems to have stopped its continuing use as the voracious maws of the 24 hour news channels gobble up content. Indeed, any trade show you cared to attend over the past years has likely featured new tools for ingesting and processing video sent in from viewers’ camera phones along with the prerequisite software for regurgitating Tweets and other socially-generated material on screen.

Google Glass though feels like a tipping point into something else entirely. A five megapixel camera is capable of recording 720p video and, as Barrett observed to website VenutreBeat, “I think if I had a bigger camera there, the kid would probably have punched me. But I was able to capture the action with Glass and I didn’t have to hold up a cell phone and press record.”

Google Glass hits the mass market in the spring according to the company’s own estimates and there are already news outlets prepping for it. CNN has an entire citizen journalist service, iReport, ready to go for it, which already features an assignment desk for mobile phone users, and there are any number of start-ups looking to aggregate cloud-sourced video of events automatically into a single video narrative with no editorial input whatsoever. Check out the likes of Ushahidi, which allows thousands of people to report on an event and place their reports on an interactive map.

In the spirit of Brin’s essay it’s almost pointless asking whether this is a good thing or not: to coin a phrase, ‘the avalanche has started, it is too late for the pebbles to vote’. What may hold Glass back from actual news organisation deployment just now is an under-specced mic for broadcast work, plus the fact that without the physical presence of even a cameraman reporters find themselves jostled, separated from their interviewee and generally swallowed up in oblivious crowds.

As far as the public and potential citizen journalists are concerned though, little holds them back apart from the law. And while it is moving fast — the UK’s Department of Transport is already implanting a ban on Glass-wearing while driving, for instance —whether it is moving fast enough to catch up is another matter entirely. There may well be another explosion of citizen journalist-sourced content on its way.

TWTIBCTW - That Was the IBC That Was

So, what was that all about then?

Well, for a start it was more of an IBC that confirmed things we all already knew, rather than one of the shows that turns things on its head. Both on the showfloor and in the Conference it sprung very few surprises but it did at least console those that have backed a mix of 4K/IPTV/companion screens as the future of broadcast that they’re largely on the right track.

The show floor was packed with new 4K products and upgrades of existing kit at all stages in the production chain, happily which also seemed to be pitched at a much lower price point than could have been predicted a year ago. It is finally starting to worm its way into all the niche areas that will help build a complete workflow too, such as the ultra slo-mo units and video servers that will drive sport  production workflows in the format. And in the conference that manufacturing effort translated into the will to establish HEVC-encoded 4K services into the home as soon as is technically feasible.

When will that be? HBS’ Francis Hellier confirmed that next year’s World Cup final, and possibly other matches too, will be captured in the format, while there are also plans to capture events from the Sochi Olympics at the start of the year. TX of all this is more of an issue, with both projects talking about cinema and cinema-style events rather than any pipeline that ends in domestic homes. For that, the consensus seemed to be we will have to wait until the Rio 2016 Olympics....which considering that HD adoption turned out to be a 15 year project, seems almost indecently rapid.

Arguably the companion screen plans for next year’s tournament are more exciting, and will offer a huge degree of app-based personal interactivity, from choosing camera angles to cueing up replays, accessing ultra slo-mo and more. This whole area is steadily getting more sophisticated and essential to event television plans; something probably reflected in IBC’s launching of a new event, IBC Content Everywhere, that replaces the old Connected World and will become peripatetic after debuting at next year’s show.

Preoccupations at the Conference were: Big Data and how broadcasters can mine it to maximise revenue and start targeting ads at specific customers or demographics – or indeed change the mix of adverts in realtime depending on who’s watching (a much easier task now that companion screens offer a data return path); Spectrum and the diminishing amount thereof; and the perils and opportunities that the currently booming market of India represents – leavened somewhat by the fact that average wages are so low and that broadband on the subcontinent is defined as any connection over 256k. Money and time will be required.

Picks from the showfloor? It was a quiet year to be honest, but ARRI’s documentary-style Amira camcorder was probably the talk of the show, Avid had a new scalable modular control surface on display for its audio line, and BBC R&D’s IP Studio demonstration in the Future Zone was interesting enough on the surface, but then got really intriguing once you dug under its surface and grappled with its new concept of treating content as dedicated elements termed ‘grains’ (white papers are available online and well worth a quick search via Google).