Digital Convergence and the Couch

Last Wednesday, the New York Times broke a story about Google teaming up with Intel, Logitech, and Sony to bring TV and the internet together in new ways into your living room.  That’s interesting, but hardly surprising. Everybody seems to know that these media will inevitably converge, and every company wants a piece of the action. Apple has been playing with a device, Netflix has a box for streaming, and has promised to allow streaming of its movies to your Wii, too. New sites and services like Hulu and Boxee are doing interesting things with online video, and Blockbuster wants to be relevant again.

So how do parents make sense of all of this? What technology do we really want in our homes?  Do we just wait until corporate marketing departments announce the latest offerings? And how do we know what a digital home is supposed to look like?

In advertisements, visions of “family togetherness,” are centered in the living room. Specifically, they focus on the living room sofa as the seat of family relaxation, togetherness, and delight. This image has long roots—earlier incarnations of this vision helped to sell La-Z-Boy recliners in the 1970s, and universal video remotes in the 1980s. By the mid 90s, you could get a taste of the future with WebTV, which offered “more choices, more control, more entertainment” all from the comfort of your plush recliner. Apple currently advertises its Apple TV with this tagline: “HD movies, shows, music and more. Couchside.”

Is this sofa-centered idea of family togetherness a good thing?  What if we turned this on its head, and started with some notions about what kinds of family interactions we wanted, and then chose technologies to fit?  I think that’s a question worth asking.

Here’s an example of one quality we may want to foster: generativity. Generativity is just a fancy word for talking about how some things foster additional creativity. Think of the difference between a coloring book and a pile of art supplies. An Aladdin coloring book may give you some flexibility and choice, but there’s really only so many different colors you can use for Jasmine’s dress. An art set would be far more generative: you might choose draw a picture of Jasmine, but you could make or a million other things instead.

So does the technology in our homes help us to make new things, or just to consume whatever is available?  

Choice is good, but it’s not the same as the open-ended ability to make stuff.  There is no shortage of options among cable stations for every interest and persuasion. But simply choosing among the myriad television stations and various movies isn’t the same as being able to tell your own story. The idea of switching from being passive viewers or receivers of stories, to becoming active participants and storytellers may sound daunting.  It doesn’t have to be. Though you won’t have the production values of a blockbuster film in family-produced home movies, you can arm your family with a simple digital still camera or Flip video camera and make time for sharing these photos and videos.  And you can find ways to share good things with your family. With a multiplying number of devices in each home, we often are not sitting around the same screen, so it’s not always easy to share the good videos and sites we discover with others in our family.  The Boxee bookmarklet offers one way to do this– you can bookmark online videos whenever you find them–the new Ramona and Beezus trailer, a YouTube replay of a sports event, you name it–and Boxee will add them to a queue behind the scenes so you can watch them on the big screen when you have some family down time.  

It’s not always easy for companies to give us generative tools. Remember the early Apple iTunes commercials, promising to let you have your music your way? With iTunes, you’d be able to get music off your CDs, mix it into collections the way you wanted to, and even make new CDs for yourself with these mixes. In other words, “Rip, Mix, Burn”. Concerns about copyright infringement put some restrictions on that vision over time–how many users could listen to your shared iTunes library, for instance.  

Fast forward ten years or so, and Apple is coming out with what it hopes will be another breakthrough product… but it’s not yet clear how generative the iPad  will be for its owners. It will certainly be a fun way to consume content, whether ebooks, movies or music, but how much user creativity it stimulates will depend on developers of applications…many of whom aren’t happy with the closed ecosystem Apple has created.

One of our challenges as parents is to create rich home environments where we can tell and curate good stories. What technology do you need to do that?  SixSeeds.tv hopes to be one ingredient in that mix–a resource for passing along good, fun family stories and sharing your stories about how things work in your homes.  I also suspect that the more that we can be proactive, the more opportunities there will be for companies big and small to help us: the more we talk about these things, the more they will listen to our emerging needs and ideas.

Over the next few months, we’ll look at other qualities that families want to encourage, and think about how technology might help.  For instance, how do we foster the classical virtues of courage, restraint, cool judgment, and determination in our kids?  David French has already written persuasively about some of the positive qualities of video games.

Along the way, I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences from your own family.  What do you think? Is generativity important to you? Is technology at your home more like a coloring book or a set of crayons?