How soon until we see one of these? The ”artifact from the future” shown above is my visualization of a bluetooth headset with an embedded cameraphone-style camera, able to send the video to one’s handheld for recording and display. Given that fairly decent cameras can be put into the very small, low-power space of a phone, it stands to reason that—very soon, if not today—clever designers could successfully build one into a headset.
The vision of the ”Lifelogging," Participatory Panopticon future assumes that the network-enabled personal cameras be used to capture images and video of one’s life in a serendipitous fashion, and not require the few seconds of fumbling with a camera or phone to get it ready to shoot a picture. Current test versions of such technologies use medallion cameras (such as Microsoft’s SenseCam or ExisTech’s WearCam), offering all of the style of a wearing a big piece of weird technology around your neck, and all of the social appeal of an accessory that absolutely demands that people look at your chest. The canonical non-goofy medium for future always-enabled cameras would be camera-enabled eyeglasses, offering both a view of the world equivalent to what one already sees, and a potential avenue for display.
But this medium isn’t perfect, either. The necessary technologies remain some ways away, but more importantly, the social role of eyeglasses is changing. The increasing popularity of laser eye surgery is steadily reducing the number of people in the hyperdeveloped world who have to wear corrective lenses, and for those people who choose to continue to wear eyeglasses, the frames have become something of a fashion item. It’s not unusual to find people who have a variety of eyeglasses to match different outfits and situations. In short, the idea of eyeglasses-based cameras seems to run counter to current trends.
Conversely, the use of bluetooth headsets for mobile phones seems to be on an upswing. They’re still far too ungainly to be considered fashion items, but it’s getting to be difficult to find a public setting in which there aren’t people appearing to suffer from the early stages of Borganism. The calls for laws banninga the use of handheld phones while driving will only accelerate this trend.
Headset-mounted cameras for Lifelogging and the Participatory Panopticon would have many of the advantages of the eyeglasses versions, but would require simpler technology to produce. The processing and recording of images would still take place in the phone, minimizing the power demands of the headset cam. A device like this would be an ideal partner for a Nokia N800 tablet or one of the myriad iPhone-copy touch phones on the market.
So, who makes the first bluetooth headcam? Nokia? Apple? One of you?
SimPolitics
The hard-right Swiss People’s Party—the SVP—is not known for its subtlety. I took the picture to the right, a campaign billboard for the SVP, when in Zurich last month; to be fair, while I ran across several of the billboards during my stay, this was the only one that wasn’t hit with anti-racist graffiti. Nonetheless, cartoon ovine discrimination isn’t the only way that this political movement gets its message out: it now uses video games.
Ian Bogost, over at Water Cooler Games, notes the SVP’s ”Zottel-Game” website. Zottel the goat is the SVP’s symbol, and at this website, the player can use Zottel to carry out a variety of political goals, from blocking immigration to shooting EU tax collectors (symbolized by EU hats) to attacking Green party activists. All of this happens in a cartoonish style, of course, and the immigrants are once again symbolized by black sheep. There are four separate games, all done in Flash.
Bogost provides this context:
To understand the games, though, you have to first know something about the party itself. It was once a centrist agricultural party, but took on right-wing populist interests in the last twenty years. Since 2003, the party has been very strong in the Swiss National Council. Their right-wing policies have included attempts to ban the construction of minarets, drawing accusations that it wanted to rid the country of Muslims, and the deportation of criminal foreigners, which some compared to Nazi deportation policies.
(For more context on the SVP, see this long (English-language) piece at the German newsmagazine Spiegel)
The SVP is not a marginal, fringe party; it’s actually the largest single party in the Swiss parliament, holding about a quarter of the overall seats. Its use of online videogames as a way of spreading its message underscores how games have become an increasingly mainstream medium for political communication, linking blunt symbolism and simplistic rhetoric. While I wouldn’t expect an identical set of games to do as well in the U.S. (mostly because the racial aspects would be hard to dismiss), I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see some kind of online games offered up by candidate or party websites in the 2008 elections.
Sadly, it’s likely that such political games would be as mindless as the SVP games (regardless of partisan angles). Despite the significance of the very real challenges facing the U.S. and the planet, modern political discourse doesn’t seem to lend itself to deep discussions and multivariate analysis, and Flash-based applications are rarely well-suited for complex gameplay. I would love to see candidates and parties offering up versions of SimCity or Civilization embedded with their perspectives on how the world works, giving players a chance to “live” in those worlds as they consider their votes—or, perhaps, to offer up games of how the world would be if their opponents won.
Imagine such a world. Rather than candidates and parties describing the worlds that they’ll make in broad, unprovable language, they’ll have to show how such a world would work. They’ll need to hire teams of programmers, of course; I’d imagine that coders able to design both good simulation systems and enjoyable interfaces would come at quite the premium. Transparency would be critical, since it would be too easy to cheat and bias the model to only produce beneficial outcomes. With that transparency, however, comes another channel of argument. Debates would take place in the form of alternative source code, with savvy partisans pointing out errors and omissions in opposing models. “Many eyes make all partisan distortions of the simulation shallow” would be the rallying cry.
Instead, we get goats kicking out black sheep and hippies.
Is too much to ask for a little nuance and intelligence in our politics?
Dale Carrico Ph.D. was a fellow of the IEET from 2004 to 2008 and is a lecturer in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California at Berkeley.
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