This little guy was one of the stars of the show at Lift Asia. Wait until you see the talk in video and you will understand why. Pretty amazing toy coming out on the market in 2009.

Well we’re still selling a few tickets because we managed to extend the room’s capacity, but Lift Asia is pretty much sold out with 413 registered participants. On Saturday morning we had 210 registrations, so you can imagine how the past four days went for us. We are learning on the job what “last minute” means in Asia.

And we are talking a conference that happens on an island, which means you need to book a hotel and plane ticket… We have never seen this but it is superb news!

We will adjust a few things for next year, and I will not worry about being alone with the speakers for Lift Asia 09 ;)

Nicholas Carr compiled interesting examples of how our tools are affecting our thinking. Type machines change how we think and write, and clocks changed our relation to our own senses… Time to rethink our daily relationship with the internet’s fragmented information? I think so.

Is Google making us stupid?

Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter […]. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.

But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”

“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler, Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”

[The clock also made us turn down our capacity to listen to our own bodies signals]

As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies. The mechanical clock, which came into common use in the 14th century, provides a compelling example. […]

the conception of the world that emerged from the widespread use of timekeeping instruments “remains an impoverished version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality.” In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.

Link (thx Amy ;)

This reminds me of Cory Doctorow’s Lift06 speech where he explained how the recording technologies reshaped music, forcing musicians to suddenly fix on an object something they had the habit of changing on the fly every time they were playing.

Here is an interesting article talking about the state of the video games market in Korea, and the effects of gaming in society. This market is set to undergo MASSIVE change in the coming years, with offline gaming losing ground to social/group/online gaming:

The Korea Herald: Unlocking the positive potential of video games

According to […] the official report of the Korean game industry, […] revenues totaled 5.14 trillion won in 2007, a 31 percent drop from 7.45 trillion won in 2006. The sharp drop was caused by the drastic shrink of the arcade game sector, whose revenue plummeted from 3.3 trillion won in 2006 to a mere 87 billion won in 2007 [Korea, where a market size can be divided 40 in a year…].

In contrast, online games enjoyed solid revenue growth of 26 percent, from 1.78 trillion won in 2006 to 2.24 trillion won in 2007. Mobile games posted healthy growth of 5 percent, with income totaling 252 billion won in 2007.

(((Video games create more self-efficacy…)))

Regarding the positive effect of computer games on personal behavior, […] playing online games enhances users’ “self-efficacy” and leadership. Self-efficacy is an educational psychology term that means capability in performing actions needed to attain certain goals. It is critical to distinguish between self-esteem and self-efficacy. Self-esteem is a sense of sense-worth or self-respect, whereas self-efficacy is one’s ability to produce effects. […]

(((…and teach you how to be a “leader”)))

When people become a leader in games they learn how to manage and control a number of team members. Those leaders actually perform a similar role as they would in reality in terms of organizational management and strategic challenges. Whether it is online or offline, the way we cooperate as a team to solve a problem basically shares the same modes of activity. […] higher game leadership actually presented higher offline leadership, leading us to the conclusion that “virtual leaders are real leaders.”

Link