Are You Ready for the Experiential Web?
There is a palpable shift in how we consume, communicate and interact in our post pandemic daily lives that extends beyond social and mobile apps. Tim Chang describes this as:
interconnected real-time experiences of many different formats and immersive ness, denoted by a descriptive markup language, supporting a variety of front ends: browser, mobile device, XR headsets, smart EarPods, haptics, wearables, smartphone devices and portals.
Tim sees our browsing behaviours becoming a:
mix of serendipitous wandering across a virtual Playa, auto-following your posse, chasing down a friend on a virtual “Marauder’s Map”, teleporting to a point of interest, and bopping between multiple break-out bubbles in the sidebar chat menu. We’ll be virtually cloning our realtime presence and sharding our attention across multiple screens, attempting to participate in simultaneous happenings all at once, some programmed and scheduled, others emergent and ad-hoc, the rest always-on and ambient.
I’m excited by the possibility this shift has for us to move from shallow, virally constructed posts in which our activities are designed to achieve maximum likes and shares towards greater authenticity and human-centred content that focuses more on true realtime personality and vulnerability.
Just as human touch is now so much more highly valued in our covidian dystopia, so too will intimacy become more sought after than information.
We are already seeing on platforms like TikTok that awkward, raw and weird is more appealing than the polished, algorithmically tuned posts of Instagram (see the Stepchicken personality cult that has emerged on TikTok).
Belonging and connection are becoming more powerful than collection and content.
As Tim exhorts us:
might we re-humanize media with realtime, authentic, longform, conversational experiential interactivity and get away from the bot-driven feed comprised of alto-authored digital junk food.
I hope you like the new format to these newsletters. We’ve shifted from MailChimp to Substack. As always keep it real out there and feedback and insights are always welcome.