Principle 2.5: Design with technology to transcend technology

Thinking about Ocarina’s globe feature, and the lack of information you get about the people you can hear playing Ocarina, reminded me of common discourse surrounding social media and its development over time. In the early days of social media, it was boasted as a tool for connection, getting back in touch with old friends and meeting new people with shared interests. Nowadays though, it’s common to blame social media and targeted algorithms for increased polarization and loneliness in society. I’ve heard different people voice different theories on why this might be. Some revolve around anonymization, the idea that more people are mean to each other online because they won’t face consequences for it. Often this aspect comes along with the idea that the “form” of social media stokes outrage and radicalization. That these sites have been designed to create anger, self-loathing, gossip, etc. to keep you engaged. This trajectory from optimism about this new technology to distaste may be due, at least in part, to changes made to the platform to increase economic interests. Though it also made me think whether or not it is in the lack of a full connection, to some extent, which keeps the Ocarina globe feature from being subject to similar ugliness. Is it perhaps, easier to give someone the benefit of the doubt or view them positively when we don’t know all that much about them? Are there ways that we could facilitate increased connection through design without such negative consequences?

Later on in the chapter, the development of music technology over time is discussed, as is the idea that, with the development of new music technology, we are collectively making less music. It seems that, with these developments, music has gone from a necessarily collective experience to a primarily solidary one. It was brought up in lecture, the idea of music being able to bring us together. Whether that be individually, through feeling understood by a song, or in the performance or experience of music as a collective. I think that this remains very much true, though in a very different capacity than when music needed to be experienced in a collective space. Today it seems like the music you listen to is a reflection of the kind of person you are. And given the vast scope of the industry, even in a room full of passionate music listeners, you may all have very different musical reference points, which seems to make it much more difficult to even talk about music collectively. Though it is true that one of the ways that technology has been able to succeed is in bringing individuals together is in connecting those with more niche interests.