I’m not a Luddite by any means (and I certainly don’t think of myself as the cranky old man who doesn’t “get it”). Still, I’m amazed by not only the rate of technology adoption, but also - and somewhat more impressively - how deeply ingrained technology has become imbedded into younger markets’ lifestyle.
Case in point: this morning I found myself watching MTV for some reason. (I haven’t really been a fan of MTV since the early ’90s, but just go with me on this.) Confirming my “unhip” status, I’d never heard of the show that was on called Video Clash. While the videos were annoying - except for “Mr. Brightside” by The Killers, which I rather enjoyed - I was intrigued by the concept of a video show where viewers could vote on which of two videos gets played next, either via a web browser or by texting their vote in via mobile phone. I amused myself by imagining what kind of server and network infrastructure I’d design to support an application that tabulates and reports on votes from multiple protocol gateways, how “real-time” the vote percentages on screen were and what the tolerance for error was, and as one vote was narrowly decided after a come-from-behind win and another bounced from 51%-49% to 49%-51% and back again, what MTV might do to the numbers (including complete fabrication) to make each contest seem like a close race. After all, reality TV is “edited for hightened drama” or whatever the standard disclaimer is these days, so why not a video voting contest? TV shows where producers claim text messaging can determine the outcome are already old hat in Europe, so is this a small piece of what interactive TV is going to be like? Is interactivity what will get people to stop TiVoing and start sitting through the commercials again?
I was in the midst of contemplating these questions when it happened - a commercial came on that told you where to send a text message if you wanted to get the Hamster Dance as a ringtone for your mobile. Yes, that Hamster Dance.
I’m tied to a computer all day, so I haven’t really had a need to learn how to send text messages from my mobile. So the first thing that struck me about this were the instructions “text ABCXYZ to get this ringtone!” I’m sure it would only take me a few minutes and a couple tries to figure it out, but the fact that a 30-second TV commercial is giving me technology instructions I don’t immediately know how to follow is a bit disconcerting to me. This was quickly superceded by the abject horror I felt when I realized that there were a sufficient amount of kids of MTV-watching age who knew what the Hamster Dance was (and wanted it as their ringtone enough to pay for it) to justify airing a commercial on MTV.
Taking a step back, I put this commercial in the context of the show I was watching, and I thought about what it meant that people were online or using their mobile phones to vote for the next video. This show airs at 7am Eastern time - that’s 6am where I’m at. Yet there were people already watching TV and enhancing their experience with Internet connectivity. What does it say about the younger market that they can laugh at me for just flipping on the TV but not having the wireless laptop or phone nearby to play along with the show… at 6am!
In a world where overly-cutesy 5+-year-old Internet memes become rigtones for mobile phones which are used to select content on major cable channels before most people want to be awake, technology and technnology/Internet culture are becoming even more a part of our 24x7x365 lives. While I have a hard time getting my head around the idea that my mobile phone might one day be my Internet access appliance of choice, it’s hard to reconcile my bizzare early-morning MTV experience with anything but optimism about the long-term market prospects for technology - especially Internet-capable consumer electronics. Ubiquitous computing - it’s come out of the MIT media lab and into the MTV multimedia lifestyle.