Once upon a time, the Infonaut tried to imagine what the space between all the ones and zeroes was about. Was there any truth to fuzzy logic, a possibility that binary theory allows for some wiggle room? Is there a space between “on” and “off”? The problem proved to be unhealthily dizzying and the puzzle was shelved. Until this month’s New Yorker arrived. Malcolm Gladwell’s piece on Epagogix, “the Formula,” reads vaguely like a Bruce Sterling short story, except apparently it’s non fiction. In an effort to successfully predict the box office outcome of studio fodder, a group of entertainment attorneys, headed up by Dick Copaken, have tapped the deep depths of risk assessment modeling to create the unthinkable - a formulaic, scientific model for predicting a script’s potential as a blockbuster. Factoring in bizarre, yet apparently salient details such as wardrobe, opening scene visuals and semantics, “the formula” is apparently hitting the mark with a suprising level of accuracy. Part marketing, part digital voodoo, and part outright absurdity, the company seems to be making its mark by running scripts through a neural network with a high degree of success. Does this help create better content? Decidedly not. It simply predicts, through the collective history of millions of statistics, the probability that one script is a better bet than another. Deal or no deal?

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We like to watch. We like to share. This is the theory behind the YouTube phenomenon; that the DNA of our YouTube fascination has its roots in the rabid fans of America’s Funniest Home Videos. In this virtually enabled schadenfreude gallery, I suppose we’re all enjoying the pain of karaoke, laughing at how naive lonelygirl15 is (or wait…maybe she’s not) or maybe just wishing we had the guts to record and broadcast ourselves.

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whatsinmybag

Originally uploaded by ejhdigdug.
The whatsinmybag meme is what got me using flickr to begin with and is an example of how people are going to shop — and keep shopping — in the future. A social, curated consumption of goods based on the show and tell mode of presentation.

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One of the greatest losses of the online age, and something I think about often is the loss of the paper “stuff” of life. We used to hang on boxes and boxes of documents, and I suppose if you’re living under the spectre of Sarbannes-Oxley, you still do, to some extent. But the personal goodies – the postcards, the letters, what is now in the ephemera category of eBay has largely gone away for a new generation. So has the need for space in one’s habitat for CD collections. So, I was thrilled to find PSFK’s link to this treatise on Temporariness, a meme that’s cropping up all over the place these days. From timeshares and music to clothing and more, the notion of “ownership” has changed dramatically. For the consumer, consumption seems to be more and more about the purchasing of sensation and experience rather than the old notion of ownership, which very often included a box, some tape, and the need for space. All of this a natural complement to “digital living,” to creating a myspace page, or living virtually in a metaverse like Entropia Universe or living a second life. We no longer need the deed, per se, on the things we handle or enjoy.

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