Create Your World
The 2008 election was monumental in part because a relatively young candidate was raising money and awareness using the Internet, his Blackberry, and Twitter.
Four years later, having survived the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, America is poised for another round of technological greatness. All the coolest, most innovative stuff requires some form of technology, from cellphones and cars to industrial manufacturing and architectural design.
Consumers and customers are increasingly an active part of corporate strategy (http://bit.ly/18jWbT) and, indeed, are becoming themselves empowered through technology to create the world around them without traditional corporate intervention.
Here are some really cool technology-driven trends that you can be a part of, all of which I am using.
Story-telling
Unless you’re a hermit, your story is interesting to someone on this earth, even if it’s a penpal a few thousand miles away or your spouse. Now, technology let’s you tell your life story through simple daily actions.
Created by Instagram.
Instagr.am does it through photos, easily and artfully enabling you to capture your day visually. OhLife.com does the same through words, sending you a daily email that you respond to with your thought(s) of the day. Path.com is the intimate Facebook, with better-integrated location, photo, and status functionality that let’s you tell your story in little visual, written, locational, and “who I’m with” bites throughout the day.
Digital Sensory Experiences
Our hearing may be the first sense to come online but our visual cortex is twice as big. SoundSpectrum (http://bit.ly/11ebZ) turns your music into visuals. I projected these visuals onto a 40-foot waterfall two summers ago to stunning effect.
Our sense of smell encases memories deep in our brain. Olly Factory (http://bit.ly/vas4iL) believes that digital experiences should smell as good as they look. I’m a $75 Kickstarter donor and encourage you to support the project, too.
Personal Creation
Full disclosure is that I have not used either of these yet but they are fascinating to me. If I had kids, this is what I’d get them.
Cricut (http://bit.ly/lUATp) is one of the first consumer-grade manufacturing tools I’ve seen. Various weights of paper is its foundation but the crafting opportunities are endless. Scissors to paper no more.
Arduino (http://bit.ly/KqkJ) is for the more technically inclined, though not much. I love this because there is a strong community of advanced and beginner users that are a testament to its gradual learning curve and infinite useful and more-fun-than-useful projects (http://bit.ly/zMvzzL).
We can do anything.
There are more ways than ever to shape our personal lives through technology that we can control. More individuality means more personal creativity and we are in the age of technetronic creativity.
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