Walking around most cities in the US – it is common now to see most people you pass staring down texting, tweeting or just gawking at their smart phones. Sometimes you may even notice this while stopped at an intersection when looking around at the cars around you only to find the drivers all smiling into their laps.
As google glasses and more advanced technologies, smart phones and tablets begin to take hold, I think it’s safe to assume that our views on connections and relationships will just keep adapting to convenience.
Rather than looking in someone’s eye, noticing mannerisms and subtleties, we now are beyond the distance of phone communication as texting, emailing, tweeting and the like have become the norm for a new generation. Online dating allows for choosing someone not simply by his or her photo, but by how they chose to answer certain questions. Facebook itself has done an awesome job of condensing your ‘likes’, your ‘interests’ and your ‘about’ you so that maintaining a certain image online is now as easy and important (if not more) than how you act in public as far as your reputation is concerned. After all, you get to choose which aspects of what you do in public appear in your social media sphere.
Nate Bolt, Ryan Schude and Lauren Randolph came together at our home-base at The Forge earlier this year In order to prove that devices not only make us ‘alone together’ but more importantly, this technology can and should be used to create more in person connections. This experiment was called Jumboltron and it is merely the first in a lasting flash mob project that calls on iPad owners to get together to create interesting photos by using the iPads as a sort of Jumbotron now dubbed, after Nate Bolt, to be Jumboltrons.
Checkout the video below for more on the last event, and if you’re interested in being involved in the next ones, sign up at www.jumboltron.com