There are two halves to any experience: the feeling you get when the experience happens to you, and the feeling of being the one who provides that experience. Mostly, we tend to focus on one or the other individually, because you tend to be either the entertainer or the entertained, not both at the same time. However, there are some examples where they overlap, and I think the new kinds of experiences we can craft using computers and the internet make this an area of particular importance.
Most comedy, especially mainstream comedy, tends to be a received experience; you hear a joke and, if it's funny, you enjoy it. But there are other kinds of comedy, like the kind of amateur joking around you do with your friends, where the experience is participatory. Later on, you try to explain the jokes to someone else and, as the words come out of your mouth, you realise how painfully unfunny they are. "You just had to be there, I guess". Or, more accurately, the jokes were only fun to participate in, not to experience passively.
In music, there is a similar effect with jamming. Unless you're some kind of Jimi Hendrix or Miles Davis-level expert, your instrumental noodling is unlikely to be that good to listen to. At the very least, being able to prepare basically guarantees better arranged, better performed music. But jamming is so much fun to participate in that it doesn't really matter how it sounds to anyone else.
The internet has led to a lot of interesting new participatory experiences. For example, the rage comic and image macro phenomena are driven mostly by participation. The simple format and rules for contributing make the barrier to participate very low by comparison to other kinds of content. While it is possible to just consume passively, the best part of the experience is being in on it and making your own.
Interestingly, I don't think anyone has put serious effort into designing participatory experiences yet. The previous examples grew organically out of existing online spaces; they weren't directed the same way you might direct a movie or TV show. Certain avant-garde theatre shows or performance art exhibitions might use participation as part of the experience, but that's relatively rare. It would be really interesting to see something that could provide a fairly repeatable participatory experience in the same way that improvised comedy or music can.
One other thing that I think is worth considering: the success of internet memes as actual memes is really due to how good the participatory experience is. However, there's no reason that is limited to internet memes. If you're trying to spread your ideas, it would be missing the point to make them as entertaining or enjoyable to consume as possible; rather, you want to make them the most enjoyable to participate in.
I've always found something quite soothing about being transported. Buses, trains, aeroplanes, other people's cars... there's something about them that just gives me a surprising sense of calm. I suppose the prototype for this is the long journey in the back of the family car. You don't know how you're getting there, you don't know how long it's going to take, but the one thing that is certain is that you're going somewhere, and everything is under control.
Sometimes it's easy to get agitated by all the things you could or should be doing. If you have important goals or frames of reference that you measure yourself against, you can get quite caught up in whether you're making progress, whether your decisions are the best ones and so on. There's a sense of responsibility that comes along with the desire for progress.
But on a train there's really only one kind of progress: along the track. Everything else has to wait. Transit time, like shower time, has the distinguished qualities of being both compulsory and responsibility-free. Nobody writes emails in the shower, and nobody's making substantial moves towards their life goals on the bus. However, unlike the shower, time spent in transit is actually taking you somewhere. The steady movement of the train along its track is, in its own way, carrying you towards your goals. You just have to relax and go with it.
I feel that this idea of transit, of making progess without responsibility, is powerful and underestimated. Why else are we so ready to hand ourselves over to systems, people and organisations; to be employees, fans, followers of some movement? What could be better than handing the weight of your agency to someone else, to let them drive for a while while you nap on the back seat? Nothing, as long as they're going the same way you are.
A year ago, I wrote Mood Organ, where I suggested that you could make a version of Philip K. Dick's mood-control device using music. I have an interesting project idea that could work as a kind of Mood Organ, or at least might do something interesting in the emotion-music space. I call the idea Satiematic.
The way it works is you take all of Satie's Gymnopédies, cut them up into individual bars, and tag each of them with an emotion and a list of acceptable transitions to other bars. When you start the Satiematic it would randomly walk along these transitions between bars, but you could also set a target emotion and that would make it tend to transition towards states with that emotion and away from others. Essentially it would compose a version of the music that has more of the emotion you want.
Another dimension for mood, and a good reason for using Satie, is that there are lots of interpretations of the Gymnopédies with very different emotional characters. For example, compare Daniel Varsano's version with the faster rendition by Ciccolini, or Reinbert De Leew's hauntingly slow performance. So I think you could also have some flexibility for mood-setting in the tempo and velocity of the notes themselves.
Whether this would be done by mixing and matching existing recordings or synthesising the music is a bit of an effort-quality tradeoff; recordings would be way easier and sound better, but synthesis would mean you could make a continuous model mapping levels of emotions to note characteristics.
I think it'd be an interesting thing to try; it's already pretty clear that music can influence mood, but it'd be nice to do it in a way that can be finely tuned. Plus, it'd be neat to have an infinite Gymnopédie.
There was once a time, not so long ago, where scientists, engineers, and other intellectual types were considered social outcasts. The classic Revenge of the Nerds is, if not an accurate reflection of college life, at least an accurate reflection of the kinds of stereotypes popular in the 80s. Words like nerd and geek are notoriouslydifficult to translate into other languages, because other countries don't necessarily associate studiousness with unpopularity except as an import from English-language culture.
Blessedly, the tides have turned. There was, in a sense, a revenge of the nerds: the pervasiveness of computers, not just in industry but in everyday life, brought technology from an embarrassing hobby to a mainstream fashion accessory. Beyond that, the internet and its ability to connect large groups of geographically disparate but idologically proximate people has meant that many formerly-fringe groups can now have a big influence on culture, especially on their virtual home turf.
The final turning point has been science going from something appreciated by intellectuals as a system of discovery to something appreciated by everyone as a way to signal nerd-affiliation. Once upon a time, when you figured out the relationship between water level and volume you would yell "Eureka!" These days, it's more like you successfully plug an iPhone into a sound system and yell "Science!". Of course, saying the word science has as much to do with doing science as wearing yoga pants does with doing yoga. It's really the trappings of science, not its substance, that forms the basis for the new nerd culture.
However, the trappings of science offer no protection against quacks, frauds and fakers. Throughout history there have been no end of people willing to sell spurious theories or products that hang off the magic words of science. When someone comes to you and says that you can turn lead into gold, that fire is a substance, or that life is caused by magic life energy, they're going to come dressed as a scientist and using words from the scientist dictionary. It's only the methods of science; careful observation, experimentation and analysis; that can tell the difference between real and fake science.
So is superficial scientific culture a bad thing? In some ways, yes, but I believe that the positives outweigh the negatives. As I argued in Shallow culture, having a shallow version of deep culture can actually be a good thing it provides an accessible entry point, and makes your culture more familiar and less threatening. When people hold up science as a totem, as an object of worship or identity, they might not be appreciating genuine science, but they are at least appreciating something.
I'd much rather live in a world where people have positive stereotypes of nerdiness than negative ones, and would gladly accept the use of science as a magic word if that stops it from being a dirty word.
When you don't get something done, when you fail or make a mistake, it can be tempting to try to make up for it. You can work extra hard tomorrow for the work you didn't get done today, or do something nice to make up for being crappy to a friend. It seems like such a good idea because it gives you the chance to take back a mistake, to salvage a bad situation. There's also a component of justice; you don't just get away with doing the wrong thing, you have to pay for it in extra effort later.
But does it actually work? I recently tried to employ some atonement after falling behind on my writing. I decided that the best thing to do was just write lots of new posts to catch up. I said at the time that I thought it would be a good disincentive, but mostly what I got to show for it was more failures later on. I've tried to do similar things with my prototypes before as well, where I fall behind but tell myself I'll catch up the next day. The results were... unimpressive.
A study in 2000 showed that disincentives can have a paradoxical effect; daycare centres that started fining parents for picking up their children late actually found it led to more lateness, not less. One of the mechanisms proposed by the authors is that this replaced a relatively costly violation of a social norm with a product you can purchase (the fine). Similarly, when you have some way to atone instead of paying the high psychological cost of failure, atonement can become more attractive than success.
I found that the atonement for falling behind on writing put me in a place where further falling behind no longer seemed like a failure, but just a continuation of the atonement process. What was previously a useful signal to tell me that I'd made a mistake just faded into repetitive background noise. The feedback it could have given me was wasted. Making up for prototypes had a similar effect; instead of choosing between do-it-and-succeed or don't-do-it-and-fail, I had a disastrous third option: don't-do-it-and-don't-fail.
It's not even really clear that atonement is based on a reasonable model. In the general case, you can't expect later actions to make up for earlier ones. Moving out of the way of an oncoming train has a very finite window of effectiveness; even the most extreme movement won't help once the train has hit you. An extreme example, perhaps, but really there are quite a lot of irreversible processes, things you can't take back or make up for. I think reversible processes are comparatively rare, and mostly exist because we go out of our way to create them.
In a sense, the quest for atonement is a quest for time travel. It would be wonderful to pull out your time machine whenever you make a mistake, but not physically plausible. When you make up for something, you're not doing the same thing but later, you're doing a new and different thing. That different thing might still be useful, it may even lead to the same or similar result, but it's deceptive to think of it as replacing the original action.
