6. Value of this Reflection

I think it really helped me to think and reflect over this issue. As a former East German who has witnessed the communist system (even if he hardly remembers any of it), this issue of being overwhelmed with unlimited options as opposed to be told constantly what is best for one is very important. I think I can see both sides of both systems now. Im just wishing it was possible to make a compromise between these two. Leaving variety and options for the people, but at the same time, giving honest and good advise to people who need it. The latter is something that has to be filtered out of myriads of manipulative, selfish advice, given by tradesmen who just want to make profit.

5. Editing

I tried to use Jaycut.com but soon abandoned it in despair. Maybe this software can be of some use if you buy it, but this version is just full of bugs and it is very slow and limited too. For an editor it is sheer torture to be expected to edit on it, so I just made the decision to edit it in AVID.

4. Prezi

I made a presentation on Prezi.com. The Idea was to have the show run as a video which would be part of the smartphone video. I really like the zooming in and out. Unfortunately I couldnt figure out how to make a video out of it. I only have the manual show and the way I did it it wont be much use in my presentation so I abandoned it for this purpose. However, check it out if you like.

3. The Monologue

More Stuff

We live in times that demand of us to make choices constantly. From the moment we get out of bed to the moment we go to sleep we are confronted with an ocean of it and we are expected to swim or we drown in its variety. What we wear, what we eat, where we go and by which means, every article that we want to buy has to be chosen from hundreds, thousands, even millions of varieties whose difference in price, taste, utilities may be huge or small, almost indistinctive from each other.

The dogma is: Choice is good, choice is necessary and fundamental to the human mind.

But why is it that more and more people seem confused and overburdened with the act of choosing recently? If this is something so natural to us, why has it become so difficult? Is there something like too much freedom of choice? Do we have to be protected from ourselves?

Sheena Iyengar from the Boston Business School summarizes the difference in the Japanese culture in a talk at TED. The Japanese see it as a duty to protect those who don’t know any better.”

Her studies have shown that confronted with too many options, people commonly tend to make bad choices.

As editor one has to make constant decisions about how to tell a story. But recently the focus has changed. We have to choose now from a seemingly infinite array of software, applications, effects, patches, plugins, upgrades, codecs and settings to make a product. Everything is possible but what is best?

If we had unlimited amounts of time, we could spend it freely on making the best decisions, but most of us live in a constant rush, deadlines, time pressure and so we have to make bad, ill-informed or even random decisions all the time. We are reaching the limit of the capabilities of the human mind, how many decisions can you make per minute?

Nobody can say what will be in 5 years from now, but if the market doesn’t react to this trend of increasing speed and pressure to make choices in every part of our life, it will surely drive everybody crazy.

The answer can’t be to give us more variety of stuff we don’t need. We have to protect ourselves from the overflow. A phone with thousands of functions only for the sake of it is not good enough anymore, because it is overburdening and forcing us to spend time on it.

As the Canadian Journalist Carl Honore puts it in another TED talk: “Don’t overload yourself” and “Less is often more.”

2. Realisation

I decided to make my video a reflection of this dilemma which is kind of invisible but also very present in our society.
While writing my monologue I realised how vest and deep this topic was. Even the TED talkers who studied this topic and were so much smarter than me would have struggeled to make a 5 min video of this.
Also, I became gradually more busy and worried over the realisation of this. How would I be able to depicture the concepts in my video?
I decided to film examples where people would have to make choices, so I went through the inner city and filmed as much menus, timetables and shops as I could. I think overall I achieved what I wanted with the footage even though the camera of the phone delivered less then perfect images. Better in terms of the message was the footage that I shot at home though. The google picture search came up with really nice displays of variety of choice.

1. Idea

My idea of New and Emerging Technologies was born at one class with Dan, where he showed us some websites.
I thought by myself, wow, these are pretty cool but just way too many. When will I have the time to look at all this stuff?
And if I dont have the time to look at all of them, how do I decide which ones are the most interesting or relevant for me to look at?
This thought, I realised was translatable to almost all the new stuff that is emerging every day. I feel intimidated by this flood, and when I started to talk with people about this I understood that Im not alone, but rather that everybody to a certain extent felt like this. Only people who spent their entire free time on researching and testing would state to be happy with the vastness of products and services offered.
I remembered actually having seen a talk on TED about this very thing and when I looked it up found a number of other talks about the same thing Sheena Iyengar and Barry Schwartz talked directly about the issue of to many choices and how they are rather limiting the people, then opening them up. Dan Gilbert talked about the impossible to realise wish to do exactly the right thing all the times that every human being would hunt after and Carl Honore talked about the stressed, rushed decissions we are making every day and how we should try to encorporate slowness as a part of our every day life.