Applications Presentation Redux

In my previous post More About the Courses I’m Taking, I talked briefly about the class Applications, one of the mandatory first-year classes. Every week, we have a guest speaker who has worked in new media and often defined their own job, and the following week, 2 groups of 4–5 students have to do a presentation to respond to that speaker’s talk. We never know beforehand who the speaker will be, so you really have only one week to pull your presentation together. And it’s never a straight-up, traditional presentation; they usually wind up being some sort of interactive performance art piece.

This past Tuesday, it was my group’s turn to present, which means we were responding to the speaker from the previous Tuesday, Linda Stone. Although many of our classmates didn’t like her (more because of her personality and attitude than her ideas), I felt that she’s one of the best speakers we’d had so far, because her talk was very focused. Many of our speakers take us through these winding journeys of their lives in new media, and Linda could’ve talked about her work at Apple and Microsoft, but she didn’t. Instead, she focused on the ideas of breathing, posture, and the relationship between technology and our bodies, as well as the concepts of “continuous partial attention”, “e-mail apnea”, and “post-productivity computing”, which (she claims) she coined the terms for.

To quickly summarize her talk, basically, Linda has been doing a lot of research into how technology has been affecting our bodies, which in turn affects our emotional state, sense of well-being, and actual productivity. Some of her ideas are pretty mainstream by now — that bending over in front of your computer leads to bad posture and back problems, and that the emphasis on productivity since the computer revolution in the ’90s has led to increased burnout among employees — but she’s also taken it further and framed and connected ideas in a way that I hadn’t considered before. Her idea of “e-mail apnea”, for example, states that studies have proven that when people hear the ‘ding’ or see the window flash that indicates that they’ve received a new e-mail, they actually stop breathing, and irregular or insufficient breathing leads to increased sensations of anxiety, stress, and unhappiness. She also talked about empathy (a topic dear to my heart, as I’ve often wondered why people in our generation seem to lack it) and how that’s affected; our bad posture and lack of breathing lead to feelings of discomfort and unhappiness that make it harder and harder for us to open ourselves up to others.

It is in response to the development of these bad habits that Linda is advocating for “post-productivity computing” as the model for the next generation of technological devices. Your first instinct might be that this is a bad thing (that was my reaction) but it isn’t. Another term she uses for essentially the same concept is “conscious computing”. The idea is that, rather than focusing on maximizing productivity, the next generation of computing should focus more on living better with human beings and human bodies. This new technology should be ambient, non-invasive, and non-dictatorial, taking cues from users’ physical and emotional states and encouraging users to be more aware of these states so that they can make decisions about, for example, whether it’s a good idea to take a break for half an hour (rather than the technology making that decision for you). I definitely agree with this approach and was especially comforted when she said, “Some people think that the development of these bad habits mean that computers are evil. It’s not about good and evil. It’s about fostering a better relationship between technology and humans.” That just about sums up my own philosophy about computing and devices.

So after hearing Linda Stone talk about these concepts, it was our job to come up with a response to be presented in class for about 25 minutes the following week. Besides myself, the group consisted of Natalie, Johnny, Mimi, and Zach. We had our first meeting directly after the lecture (over dinner and beers at Kenka), and subsequently met for at least 2–3 hours every day over the course of the next week.

We almost immediately agreed that we wanted to focus especially on Linda’s ideas of getting our classmates in sync with themselves and with each other, and we wanted to do this through a series of primarily physical activities. We also decided that it would be neat if we could accomplish this without ever giving our fellow students direct verbal or written instructions, or forcing them to do anything they didn’t want to do. This meant that our presentation would involve little or no technology, which might seem weird in a new media program and a class that’s all about working with technology, but we began to see ourselves as metaphors for the ambient, non-invasive, non-dictatorial kind of technology that Linda was advocating.

Our ideas did evolve quite a bit over the course of the week, and there was some disagreement when Zach and I felt strongly about getting people into smaller groups and getting them out of their seats, and the others felt that an activity with the whole group would be more impressive and cut down on potential logistical problems. We resolved this when we decided on the core of our presentation to be what we called “physical telephone”: essentially, a game of telephone done with physical movements and activities rather than spoken words/phrases. This would allow for a greater degree of intimacy between the people sitting next to each other, while still keeping everyone in one large group.

We also went back to one of our early ideas, which was to get everyone out-of-sync and feeling uncomfortable before attempting to bring them in-sync. We decided to do this by making an audio montage of different cell phone and alarm clock sounds — sounds we all recognize and that over time have subconsciously come to cause us discomfort and anxiety. We all recorded sounds and ringtones from our cell phones, and Mimi took charge of putting them all together. The final piece is about 13 minutes long and even for me, having heard it multiple times and knowing the structure of it, it’s incredibly hard to listen to the full thing in one sitting.

The plan was to start the audio piece as students were coming in. The montage ends on a triad during which those of us “in the know” would start to hum, in the hopes of getting everyone to realize what we’re doing and hum along with us, thereby getting the whole room in sync. After that, Johnny, who was sitting in the first seat in the front row, would initiate the physical telephone by passing a hollowed egg to the person beside him, hoping that they would catch on and pass it to the next person, and that that would prime them for the rest of the activities to come. I was sitting in the very last seat in the back and would also initiate some movements going in the opposite direction, as soon as I got the egg and hopefully everyone would have caught on to what was going on. After doing several waves of these physical telephone movements, we would all start to rub our hands together until the whole room caught on and imitated us, after which the five of us would get up on stage and lead them in a camp activity called Making it Rain, and we would end on that. And we hoped to accomplish all of this without any direct verbal or written instructions.

The most terrifying part was that there was no way for us to test it. There’s 122 people in the class, and there were only 5 of us, so anytime we practiced, we realized we weren’t necessarily going to be representative of the class as a whole. Part of the fun is also having them come in not knowing what’s going to happen, so we didn’t want to test it out on any of our classmates. We did collaborate with the other group presenting on the same day and practiced it with them, and let them know what we were planning to do so that if worst came to worst, we did have some audience members who were in on it and who could help move things along if the physical telephone chain broke. Still, we had no idea what to expect, and I got very little sleep the night before our presentation, worrying that they wouldn’t get it and everything would fail.

The audio piece was, for the most part, a success. Because I was sitting in the last row of students, I could see everyone and gauge their reactions. In the beginning, some of them were laughing and looking at each other, which was not quite what we’d expected because we’d intended for it to be somewhat introspective and to make you highly uncomfortable. But the piece gradually increases in intensity, and by the end of it, many students were sitting with their ears covered or rubbing their temples, clearly affected by the cacophony. Throughout the piece, we also had one of our laptops running Skype and randomly calling people in the class, hoping they’d forgotten to turn their phones on silent and that their ringtones would join in with the pre-recorded sounds. It was successful but also led to somewhat unintended results; I witnessed many classmates taking out their phones and holding them in their hands, expecting them to be an essential component of our presentation. That wasn’t exactly what we’d hoped for.

We were reasonably successful at getting our classmates to hum along with us, but the physical telephone failed almost from the very start. We had thought that passing along a physical object would be a quick and clear way to prime the class and prepare them for the other activities, but people would take the egg and turn it and look at it, and often not until the person beside them nudged them did they realize they needed to pass it on. After a good two minutes, it had barely made it past the first row. Natalie, who was up on stage, signalled to me to try to start something from the back, so I did a pinky-promise movement with the girl sitting beside me, and whispered to her to pass it on, but that failed by the time it got to the next row. Finally Natalie came down and nudged a student to pass it on, at which point my pinky-promise evolved into a fist-bump, which evolved into people punching each other in the shoulder, and then halfway down the row that turned into hugs. It was nice that it evolved into something positive, but the problem with the hugs was that they were highly disruptive; instead of people paying attention to the others sitting on either side of them, they were busy watching the hugging. When I tried to start another wave of movements from the back, it failed 3 or 4 students on because they just weren’t paying attention to their own row. Eventually, a few students did catch on and initiated their own movements from near the middle, but that alienated the students sitting toward the beginning and end of the chain, because those movements never reached them and the movements Johnny and I started didn’t catch on. So, they unintentionally became spectators.

Eventually Natalie realized the telephone was failing and started rubbing her hands, which was the cue for the rest of us to get up on stage and do the “making it rain” portion. Thankfully, that was a success. I’d been worried about it because we wanted to do it in canon, and in order to do this we had to make it clear to the audience that they needed to follow one of the five of us (the one standing closest to them) because we weren’t all going to be doing the same things at the same time. It did take them a minute to catch on, but eventually the majority of them got it, and it produced an amazing sound.

Our presentation ended with, I think, most of us feeling kind of disappointed because the telephone had failed. So, we were very surprised when Red Burns absolutely loved it and was very enthusiastic about our idea and execution. She didn’t seem to have noticed the failure in the middle, or thought that in spite of that our idea had still shone through clearly, because she was impressed. It was a little harder to gauge our classmates’ reactions. I was in the elevator with a few of them during the break, and they wouldn’t look directly at me. I thought, “Oh no! That bad??” But other people did say they enjoyed it, so, I don’t know! Mixed success, I guess.

I think the primary reason for our failure was that we hadn’t accounted for the effect of having the entire class sitting so close together. The class is held in an auditorium with 300 or so seats, so normally everyone spreads out or sits in small clusters spread throughout the room. In order to allow for the telephone game to take place, we forced everyone to sit together in just six rows of 20 seats each (by marking off with tape the rows where they couldn’t sit). This had been a purely logistical move, and we never considered how it would affect the energy levels in the audience. Students were much more affected by each other, not just the people on either side of them but those a couple of rows down, and easily distracted by any sounds and movements in the room. If anybody so much as scratched their head, ten heads would turn and look, and in response to that movement, a lot more heads would turn. This made it impossible to get everyone in sync the way we were hoping to.

Ultimately, though, I don’t think any of us felt truly bad about it. We went out for beers after class, and the mood was pretty upbeat and joyful. We were able to laugh about the failed attempt at physical telephone, and I guess Red’s compliments did lead to a sense of accomplishment. Ultimately, it seems like even though an individual component failed, the message still came across, and that was the important thing. We created an experience for our classmates that brought them a little closer, and we communicated our collective response to Linda Stone without ever saying a word. Mission accomplished!