On the other side - The Flow

In my quest for finding a usage of a double sided mobile device I have tried to be as exhaustive as I can. I have put a flashlight on the backside. I have even put a mirror there for the vain mobile users. Here's my third attempt to fill that empty space. I've been thinking of the possible yins and yangs of a mobile device. My first thought was content/applications on one side and communication on the other. It may not be possible to separate those entities since they might overlap. Why not put the Flow there which I tried to describe in my previous post? It would be like a digital diary of your life. You can go back in history of your Flow as long as you would like to. From the days when you were a kid (if you wish) until now. You would also have the possibility to bookmark certain dates or events in your flow, so that you'll find them easier later on.

In some of my first posts, I was hallucinating about "context sensitive time navigators" and proposed the turntable. I don't know if that's the best way to navigate in the Flow. But since I came up with that idea then, I thought it would be nice to squeeze that one in as well. So, what you see below is the backside of your future mobile device. All events in the Flow go in the first tab, while the other tabs filter specific types of events. The Flow will not be bound to your mobile device since all handhelds will use fingerprint biometrics for authorization. That means you can access your Flow in any mobile device or computer. The Flow will be stored on the net somewhere, somehow. Hehe, when thinking about it, the Flow will be ridiculously long when you have turned 86... :-)

The Flow

The small pieces of updates sent to you from other people via services such as Twitter and Facebook "status updates" might be seen as nonsense and non-important information. Well, they may be that. They are the messages that are not worth to be sent via e-mail or instant messaging. But still, the messages are not meaningless. They can even be sort of addictive to read. Suddenly a friend or a person you met at a bus stop three years ago is telling the world what he/she is doing right now or what music he/she likes or whatever. And in a weird way it's interesting because you get that person in your mind's eye, which would not be the case otherwise. Flemming Funch writes about this phenomena in this blog post:

"But it keeps people on your radar screen. You don't have to respond, but you can, if something somehow rings a bell. It doesn't have to be your close friends either. It is surprisingly meaningful, even if it is people you've never met, but you have some kind of interest in what they're up to."

He continues:
"I watch a screen where a few dozen people say something once in a while, and I can say something too. Interestingly, they aren't all watching the same screen, as they have different groups of friends than I do, although they overlap. They aren't all there at the same time either, and they aren't all paying attention. But once in a while somebody feels like saying something. That will be something that relates to what's going on for them at the moment, and it will also be something they feel like saying into that fuzzy kind of space, usually without saying it to anybody in particular. They typically don't expect a response either. Other people do the same. Whether you directly comment on anything else or not, what you say will necessarily be colored a bit by what you see already on the screen."

I wish I could summarize this in some kind of a definition. I guess that will take a while. For now I call this phenomena "The Flow".