[Note: This is the final of five posts related to Nam-Ho Park’s talk and blog post on Mobile Storytelling. Links to my other posts are at the bottom of the page.]
Nam-ho ends his post with thought-provoking questions about the potential of mobile as it relates to identity and collective storytelling:
Our identity is the story we repeat to ourselves. If that is so, what is the story we repeat to ourselves as an individual, family, community, region, nation or as a humanity? For the first time in history, as we collect so much data about ourselves, we have the potential to simultaneously see our stories unfold dynamically at different scales. And maybe that can teach us something about ourselves. [his emphasis]
Last year, Marshall Kirkpatrick spoke passionately about the potential of mobile in this 5 minute Cinch cast. Marshall is one of my favorite writers and thinkers on mobile and social technology (and Big Data, too!). His enthusiasm for and ability to communicate the great potential and power of these technologies personally inspires me. As a bit of background, Marshall’s Cinch cast is a reaction to a Facebook Mobile event that happened that day, and the discussion around what Facebook Places could mean in terms of marketing and commerce (for instance, as Marshall mentions, giving people coupons):
There is a lot more to mobile technology than sales, marketing and commerce. There’s culture, there’s people, there’s intellectual and emotional enrichment. There’s the ability to tell, and share, and hear stories that are connected to the places that we go, to the places that we live, not just to the places that we shop.
…
There’s so much more potential. There’s a rich history that mobile could help us engage with. There’s art that mobile could help us engage with. Look how excited everybody is about Instagram…. That’s a mobile app that involves location, that involves social, and it helps us to understand, and to share the beauty of the places that we go, and the experiences that we have together.
I hope we can take this opportunity, too, to consider the other possibilities… of local, mobile, social software. Because there’s so much more to life, and there’s more to the Internet, and there’s more to our phones. There’s knowledge, and wisdom, and art, and sharing, and expression, and awareness, and collaboration, and communication.….
May the commerce that’s enabled on these platforms be commerce that supports, financially, higher goals and higher purpose in human social life. [my emphasis]
We have the pleasure of living during such an exciting time in human history. The collective experiments we’re trying, the ideas we’re throwing out and testing with others, the ways we’re helping friends and strangers alike are laying the foundations of a more connected and more rich world. I sometimes feel like it’s hard to wrap my head around all these various moving parts. But then I stop and just try and imagine.
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Links to the entire five-post series:
7th December 2011
