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Other ideas in the series: Neurosecurity | Digital forgetting | Hyperopia | Transparency mania
The most common ding against our gadgets is that they're distracting. They come between us and the "real world", dragging our attention to the wrong place at the wrong time. But as London-based designer Matt Jones points out, that might not be the whole story. "Our personal technologies (particularly smart phones) light up our surroundings in different ways," he says. They let us refocus the world around us. He calls this "bionic noticing". An example might be the way carrying around a camera phone, and feeling a regular need to upload interesting stuff to a service like Flickr, makes you pay more attention to your surroundings.
Five minutes in a queue becomes an opportunity to notice the inconspicuous intriguing textures and greebles of your environment, and, bagging and tagging them, to share those moments of noticing with your friends and win some mild, informal kudos.
And you can use your GPS-enabled device to delve beyond those immediate noticings. How did the area get its name? Try the NearestWiki app. Who else has been here and what did they notice?
Open Flickr Mobile. That's the essence of this bionic enhancement - you supply the attention and the web provides a powerful, extended sense of context." It gives us a heightened sense of awareness," says Jones. "And the ability to peel layers of place or time like onion-skins to see a place differently, a connection to the systems that link places that as individuals we can't usually see."This noticing-and-tagging habit has also been turned into a game (noticin.gs). It uses clever algorithms and fairly arbitrary rules to award players points for capturing and tagging interesting bits of the world with their camera - like a digital version of those i-Spy books of the 50s and 60s.
It's possible that the current tide of augmented- reality applications is the next frontier for bionic noticing. The way your device can overlay visual tags on the real world (like the Métro Paris app) should make it a noticer's dream, but it might also put a screen between you and the world, rather than nudging you to look harder. So perhaps the most intriguing new bionic noticing application is a musical iPhone app called RjDj. It takes sound from the outside world (via the iPhone's mic), applies all sorts of musical textures and filters and plays you the transformed sound, live, through your headphones. This manipulation has the ironic effect of getting you to listen to the sounds around you. So that, rather than isolating yourself in the musical cocoon of your regular playlist, you suddenly notice the skittering rhythms of passing bicycles. You even find yourself tapping on railings to unearth the one with just the right note. And perhaps that's what's best about the idea of bionic noticing - we can play with our gadgets while engaging properly with the world. Who could argue with that?
Microbiography Russell M Davies is a regular Wired columnist who previously worked in advertising, launching Microsoft Office and Explorer. He organises the London Interesting conferences and blogs at russelldavies.com.
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
