Future of Persuasion
feed3 Word Introductions at Future of Persuasion
To kick off the Future of Persuasion conference, Technology Horizons program director, Lyn Jeffery led attendees in a twitter-like, get-to-know-you exercise. Everyone in the room was asked to pick three words to describe themselves, below are some of the very interesting picks from our guests:
canadian
paranoid
internet
filters
...
Out of the Box Perfect Speech Recognition
Here's a signal on the future of conversational interfaces.
I'm creating this blog by speaking into my iPhone. My words are simply being transcribed into text using a cool free iPhone speech dictation program called Dragon Dictation.
I suppose that composing thoughts this way will take some getting used to. It's amazing that the text is coming out perfectly nearly every...
Free will and choosing your own adventure
This page from a real or parody choose-your-own-adventure book turned up on Boing Boing. Click the image to see it larger. Please learn it well, as it is now the basis from which I will continue my research into the future of persuasion. (I'm kidding... kinda.)
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From torture to persuasion
Not only are torture techniques like waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and forced stress positions evil, they don't work very well for interrogation. Former IFTF researcher and boardmember Jacques Vallee talked about that on Boing Boing last year in his provocative essay, "Waterboarding's curious corollaries." This week's...
People still want to dream: Stephen Duncombe Interview, part 3
Our third and final installment of the Stepen Duncombe interview begins with the way those on the Left and Right (with all caveats about generalizations acknowledged) think about and use power and persuasion.
JD: You wrote in Dream, that progressives worry about abusing their power even when they don’t have any power. Now that Democrats have some measure of power with the White...
Rushkoff on persuasion, coercion, and why we listen to what *they* say
As part of my research on the Future of Advertising, I'll be interviewing Douglas Rushkoff, professor and author of Media Virus, Coercion, Life Inc. and other books about culture, technology, and the mediascape. Several years ago, Douglas wrote and narrated The Persuaders, a PBS Frontline...
"The Lightest of Touches": Interview with Stephen Duncombe, part 2
Since our first installment of interview highlights with Stephen Duncombe, there's been a big announcement concerning our interviewee. It seems that Steve will be leaving NYU to take become co-director of the the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT (the chair formerly held by Henry...
Ends vs. Means and Persuasive Games
A video featuring Carnegie Mellon Professor of Entertainment Technology Jesse Schell has been making the rounds this week, and it touches on a number of themes that I think are central to understanding the intersection of games, education, and persuasive technology.
Schell's talk...
The Non-Sponsored Moment: An Interview with Stephen Duncombe
As part of our Future of Persuasion research, we are conducting interviews with scholars, activists, technologists, and other experts who have been thinking deeply about influencing human behavior. This week, I had the privilege of talking with NYU media, culture and politics professor Stephen Dreampolitik Duncombe.
The...
Manamana as persuasive technology
Games and Education / Games as Education
Last week the New York based Games for Learning Institute, in conjunction with NYU, hosted a lecture by game developer Will Wright. I've been thinking a lot about games and education for our upcoming Future of Persuasion conference, and my ears perked up when I saw that the lecture had been put online, and after...
Neuromarketing and soup labels
Several weeks ago, I posted about a possible resurgence in neuromarketing, using brain imaging and other physiological monitoring to directly measure consumer preference and the effectiveness of advertisements. Now, Campbell's Soup boasts that they've used biometrics, such as measurements of galvanic skin response (moisture) and heart rate, to get a...
Self-reflection as a form of persuasion
From the MIT Media Lab, a project called: "ReflectOns: Mental Prostheses for Self-Reflection."
ReflectOns are objects that help people think about their actions and change their behavior based on subtle, ambient nudges delivered at the moment of action. Certain tasks—such as figuring out the...
The Flintstones and the Epistemological Rapture
A recent survey by the University of Texas/Texas Tribune showed that 30% of Texans believed that humans and dinosaurs lived together at the same time--and not over 60 million years apart as all our current science indicates.
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Life as a Persuasive Role Playing Game
Here's a video of an energetic and provocative talk by Jesse Schell, Carnegie Mellon Professor, and former Disney Imagineer, on how we will be persuaded by ubiquitous interactive games.
"What do these have in common? A variety of psychological tricks," explains Schell, who then goes on to examine how these various gaming successes take advantage of humans instincts, and how we hunger "...
Funny because it's true: The Onion and the future of persuasion
Leave it to satirical local newspaper The Onion to make an astute observation relevant to the future of persuasion. From their recent article...
Google buzz wasn't invasive—just persuasive!
This past weekend saw Google on the defensive over Google buzz, their Twitter-like micro-updating service. Last week all Gmail...
bots and chatbots
As part of IFTF research on futures of persuasion, we might consider the role of non human intelligence persuaders:
Chatbots are conversational programs that mimic human intelligence and are sometimes animated. Chatbots are a sub genre of 'bots'(short for robots) applied to both 'good' (search engine web spiders and crawlers) and 'bad' (malware and spam zombie servers)
Bots,...
Bus shelter ad with built-in scale
Amsterdam agency N=5 created this bus shelter ad for Fitness First, the world's largest privately-owned health club chain. The bus shelter displays the weight of the person sitting on the bench. It's a...
The secret of encouraging girls to be geeks
Carlos McEvilly is a self-confessed "geek dad" of a tween. He wanted give girls an opportunity to learn that being a geek can be cool, so he created an iPhone app called Secret Ada. From the App Store description:
Science and technology are NOT cool, especially for GIRLS....
