The Geek Movement

Our submission to UC Santa Barbara’s Bluesky Innovations Competition, which was themed around Social Computing in 2020 took 1st place!  Our project envisions a world where mobile technologies have followed their current trajectory, further blurring the lines between online and offline spaces.  Taking a page out of Corey Doctrow’s book we consider the possible implications that this trend will have on our ability to manage our privacy against our desire for digitally augmented socialization.  Below is the award winning essay and the creative visualization that we designed to supplament it.
SENSe

By Karen and Joshua Tanenbaum
The imagined social technology of SENSe (Socialization, Exploration, Negotiation, and Security) is a natural extension of two current trends in social networking: social presence and privacy concerns. It is evident that the growth in popularity of services like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and Google Talk and the parallel increase in mobile device usage are symptomatic of larger changes in the nature of social spaces, private spaces, and human interconnectedness. Already, we have seen how social networking supports the emergence of a form of ambient social presence. People now think nothing of signaling their receptiveness to phone calls by toggling a status indicator in Skype, while Twitter and Facebook allow users to periodically broadcast short status updates to their entire social circle. These updates and status indicators foster an “always‐on” sense of one’s social geography: what people are doing right now, minor incidents that occurred throughout their day, how they are feeling and what they are planning. Our new networked world supports the dramatic and the mundane in seamless concert. When disasters occur, these services support efficient real‐time coordination of rescue and relief efforts; when history is made,people around the world receive it in a thousand tiny haiku. If you see that a colleague is having lunch down the block you might join them for a bite to eat; if you see a friend is sad or angry about something you might call to offer comfort. The combination of distributed social broadcasting and pervasive mobile devices is a potent one that has already changed how we communicate in dramatic ways.

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