Institute For The Future

Vodafone Receiver's "Technology in the Home"

"Vodafone's Receiver is a good magazine that often pulls together interesting and disparate voices talking about similar themes around computing and communications. Issue #18 takes a look at technology in the home. Some of the articles are thin, but two pieces stand out. José van Dijck of the University of Amsterdam's Media Studies department introduces the concept of "homecasting" to explain the bursty production of new media inside the home and the use of YouTube as its global transmission conduit.

Rather than fashioning channels to attract specific audiences, homecasters enable groups of voluntary, active users to form their own target groups - users with like-minded tastes and lifestyles - a commercial asset whose value has not escaped the attention of advertising agencies.

 

The other piece worth looking at is John Seely Brown's piece on "keeping it simple":

Well-designed media provide peripheral clues that subtly direct users along particular interpretive paths by invoking social and cultural understandings. Context and content work efficiently together as an ensemble, sharing the burden of communication. If the relationship between the two is honored, their interaction can make potentially complex practices of communication, interpretation, and response much easier. This is the essence of keeping things simple.