The core purpose of physical shopping has turned into entertainment.

With the growth of the online store, I can now click and press to receive my goods delivered to my front door.  Gone is the need to walk in the world to gather essentials for myself and family, gone is the worry of finding the thing I want amongst a poor selection on shelves, gone is the hunting in different shops to find something suitable, gone is the lugging home large parcels of stuff.

Now women take this differently to men – and boy don’t we know it!  Whilst I cannot fully participate in the experience they receive from gazing at clothes I do appreciate that my young daughter likes to spend a lot of time in her browser doing just that – is there a generational shift happening here?  However the call is strong even for her and mother and daughter still walk the clothes boutiques getting pleasure from the “gathering fruits and berries” exercise.

Where is the pleasure?  Maslow would have us believe that if we answer the lower calls of essentials, then the higher calls of self-actualisation come into play – so shopping become entertainment rather than food-gathering, drinking coffee becomes socialisation, and online shops become what?  Our grain silos?  Certainly the shopping centres that I see growing are combinations of eating, entertainment, climate control and relaxing – not hard pavements and boring flat shop fronts trudged past by shoppers ‘looking’ for items.

We are the people, and we want entertainment.

I’m looking to install a suspended ceiling into my 90-year old house.  I could get a contractor in to do it but in a long tradition of learning other skills want to try it myself.  More recently I’ve been doing less ‘heavy’ DIY recognising that laying concrete or building brick wall may be best left for those with younger muscles, or more talent than me.  But suspended ceilings seem relatively easy and more importantly relatively quick to erect.  Plus there is a puzzle to solve.

With the advent of the internet group memory is starting to change, along with spacial memory through things such as static maps and the like.  I’m sure that there is any number of studies of the Google effect or how most kids homework seems to exist of searching the internet and printing pictures.  But what about things we learned as skills and became as specialised in our jobs as individual craftsmen?  What is happening to things such as problem solving, or doing things which no-one has yet done?

Take my ceiling-line-leveling challenge.  I have to draw a line around a room which is absolutely horizontal and attach the edge trim for the suspended ceiling.  I realise that the ‘professional’ way to solve this is to obtain a “self-leveling construction laser” which is a device that shoots out light from a rotating head based on a floating platform which seeks dead level.  Now I just have one room and the cost of these is approaching one month’s salary, or to hire even for one day it is £100 – almost as much as all my other materials.  Should I abandon my attempts to do-it-myself and just call a contractor who can amortize the cost of purchasing one of these over many jobs, or should I search the internet for cheaper ways to do it?  Having searched the Internet I actually can’t find any way other than measuring from the floor or using lasers.

Which brings me back to group memory and learned skills.  I actually do have a way which is almost zero cost, but the Egyptian pyramid builders thought of it first.  They had the task of getting the base of their structures dead flat so that the enormous weight of stone above would look good from a distance – no cheating the Pharaoh.  It is believed that they used the idea of filling small channels with water – which over a large distance self-levels – then marking the height and building from there.  I want to use the same idea.

I’m not going to fill my kitchen with water like a bathtub but use a thin transparent tube.  One end will be held at the right height up the wall, and water on the other end will self-level to the same height.  Exactly the same height.  Cost?  One thin tube and the kitchen tap.  The Internet didn’t (and maybe still doesn’t) carry this simple idea in a retrievable form because the group memory links aren’t there.  The internet and present search engines don’t have the advantage of our electrical/chemical wetwear brains where memories are reconstructed as they are recalled, nor does context or ‘usefulness’ play a very large part.  Most successful searches require the user to construct what they need in the same language as expressed by the writer, rather than the rather more messily architecture on which our memories are stored.  Does this mean we need new skills, just like Vernor Vinge’s Rainbow’s End, of people who’s role is to construct searches rather than providing answers?  Good questioners, so to speak.

It used to be that our family would cluster around the single television screen in the house, and argue over the controls and what programme we’d next watch.  It got so bad that we instituted rules over how the selection baton would pass from family member to member.
Then all that changed.  How, I don’t know because the change was sutble and not documented.  I think along the way we gained a second television when my sister in law came to recuperate from some surgery one month, but now that screen lies dormant most days and the back screen is little used by all except for the mandatory morning chat shows seemingly aimed at stay-at-home housepersons – and it seems to assume that most of those are female.  So much for equal gender!

But something else has happened as well.  Where once the male child would have his favourite shows he now departs the house for college at some early hour, and forgoes switching it on.  The female child uses it more for dancing games on the games box we have, and most of the time I find them glued to Youtube or other internet pages.  In fact almost the entirety of what we did via the TV screen has now migrated on to the other things such as my partner watching films on a tablet in bed, while I only watch something about once per month via a streaming film service.  All in all it has moved us apart and requires that we make concious efforts to hold ‘family’ times where we talk, rather than conduct bilateral conversations that are based around barter and negotiation rather than observation and reflection.

We’ve become a family of businessmen.

Are the payment processors (Visa, Paypal, payment processors) becoming the new banks?  Will they take over the traditional role which saw banks as the holders of personal wealth?

Banks arose as places of transaction where something of value could be exchanged or held to facilitate commerce.  Of late many of them seem to transmogrify into traders themselves, so witness the use of complex derivatives and speculation for its own sake rather than the more humdrum idea of transferring currency and acting for escrow.  In other words banks seem to think they are a business in their own right!  Given that much commerce is moving online, why do we need banks?  Most of my wages go directly into paying bills and daily living, very little goes into investment although the traditional banks would like you to think that’s their role.  I see a  collapse of the need for banking once a new and simple means of exchange arrives, in pretty much the same way that movie houses are being disintermediated by the arrival of self-produced and direct to consumer mechanisms such as YouTube.  While cinemas won’t disappear immediately they are far less important now than they used to be.

But with the rise (and now wane) of the internet, mobile world and especially the Internet of Things it seems that banks may be superfulous – after all most of us nowdays never enter a bank branch to transact and I’m simply astonished even when they ask you to ‘print, sign and return’ some form.

Am I about to become one of the great ‘unbanked’?  Could I ditch banking altogether and survive using Other Means of Exchange?

I have a fascination with note taking.
My life at the moment seems to consist of
Digital pens, while having several downsides (most of them are fat, for example – and one stressed sales person assumed I was recording one meeting where I docked my pen in its holder) do have a major advantage of being physical stuff which the customer can see, so allaying fears that you are doing your email whilst clicking away on the laptop. Tablets also have this advantage, they lay flat and everyone can see you taking notes as they talk. I’ve been in meetings where the leader has commanded everyone present to ‘close the lids of their laptops’ so as to get their attention – the fact I was merely taking notes from what he said didn’t wash.
I guess the ultimate would be some sort of unstructured, tagging concept map on a tablet which converted into structured data (with blanks) so I could export it as a presentation, spreadsheet, or document as needed. This of course brings me to think: am I creating a model for which the various instantiations are just views? Should I edit the raw data underlying the models – yet often the way that I edit needs to be through a view as well? (After all, often the order I receive data varies with the context of the meeting in which I am taking notes.)
Perhaps that for which I am looking does not exist. Perhaps I am doomed to a dismal search for the ‘perfect’ way of taking notes when all I really need to do is relax and use what information I already have. I agree a little with this since I recall when I threw away my diary I remembered appointments more accurately, not having that aid. Using the diary meant that I relied on it to remember things for me – and my memory grew correspondingly lax. I guess a similar thing occurs using sat-navs?