Technology evolves; stories remain

Illustration drawn on iPad by Jorge Colombo

"There was one other big lesson he learned from his Hollywood adventure: People remember stories more than products. "The technology we've been laboring on over the past 20 years becomes part of the sedimentary layer," he told me once. "But when Snow White was re-released [on DVD, in 2001], we were one of the 28 million families that went out and bought a copy of it. This was a film that is 60 years old, and my son was watching it and loving it. I don't think anybody's going to be beating on a Macintosh 60 years from now.""
From "The Lost Steve Jobs Tapes" by Brent Schlender

US losing information war to alternative media

Mediating the same events from multiple angles is always good news, and great if that's happening. The US has been leading the entrepreneurship race and therefore commanding the development and globalization of digital media for decades, a process from which platforms like YouTube were born. But paradoxically, media like these have been allowing the creation of multiple discourses, a situation that worries Hillary Clinton very much, as this video shows:

Technology is nature

This TV commercial for the new Audi A6 Avant works as a metaphor to uncover the type of environment most of us humans live in, which is a technological one. Most of the world's population live in cities, a very complex technological development. We live our lives longing for what we think 'nature' is: the trees, the mountains, the rivers... but the truth is that our natural setting is nowadays a technological construction, a city. Nature as we like to think of it is just something you see in travel agency posters.

Prepare for change

Digital Life: Today & Tomorrow from Neo Labels on Vimeo.

This infographic about 15 facts about the internet in 2015 made me think about the forecasting of change and how it has become a cultural convention we live by. I wonder, why does everything have to change? Technologically speaking, why the future has to be different?

Gadgets have their own features and programmes, and these are languages. Interactive media changes in relation to how the user uses it, so the language changes all the time and we have to adapt to it. Communication gets broken all the time. Some people adapt and some give up in the process. For example, some good friends I used to communicate via Facebook with have stopped using it because they didn't want to invest time in learning the new rules and our connection broke up. I ended up communicating with those who didn't give up and adapt.

All these constant changes, are they needed? Maybe it's just because information technology has hit the consumer market so then media is treated as a commercial product at the mercy of the laws of competition, and that promotes constant innovation. But at what cost? Changes on the flavour of a soda doesn't affect us much, but changes in the tools and languages we use to communicate online jeopardizes the construction of our identity and our social relations.