1) Our top story because APPLE: This past Tuesday an Apple press event marked the announcement of two new lines in the massively popular iPhone series, the 5C and 5S. The 5S is presented as the fully upgraded new model with the 5C as a budget-friendly (relatively) version of last year’s iPhone 5. The most talked about new feature of the 5S is TouchID, a thumbprint authentication security system that has some excited over an end to PINs and others fearful of the possible hacking opportunities the feature opens up. Wall Street seemed less impress than this Tokyo man already in line, as Apple stock took a large tumble following the announcement, losing $30 billion in market cap value.

2) IT. IS. OVER! The beginning of September brought an end to the month-long blackouts of CBS, Showtime, and other channels from Time Warner Cable in a disputed negotiation over retransmission fees. It seems CBS eventually came out on top, gaining increases in fees and a rise in their stock following the new deal. CBS head Leslie Moonves claims the blackout had no financial impact on CBS, calling the cost “virtually nothing.” Time Warner Cable, on the other hand, did lose subscribers during the blackout, as well as costs for marketing expenses, distributing free antennas, and other promotions. If this story was more exciting for you to follow than, say, CBS programming, don’t worry! Analysts say more blackouts are bound to happen in similar disputes, with prices likely going up for cable consumers. Hooray!

3) There were two type of shakeups at NBCUniversal over the past two weeks. The first comes within their management, as TV executive Jeff Shell is moving up to head Universal Studios replacing Ron Meyer, who is being promoted within Comcast. The movement is seen as a bit of a shocker, as this means former Universal Pictures chairman Adam Fogelson is out, despite performing adaquetly but focusing on domestic distribution and marketing. Shell’s previous position at Universal International within Comcast indicates this is a shift towards a more internationally-focused campaign for Universal.

4) The second NBCUniversal shakeup comes on the cable channel end, as the previously announced Esquire Network will take over and replace Style on September 23, and not G4 as previously announced. Cable group chairman Bonnie Hammer noted in a memo that the shift was due to Style presenting a “brand overlap” with other NBCUniversal networks like Bravo, E!, and Oxygen. This means G4 will remain for the time being, despite canceling most of its gaming/technology original programming in anticipation of the rebrand. There are always COPS reruns to show.

5) Twitter has officially announced plans to go public, with the social media giant filing for IPO being officially announced in, appropriately, a Tweet. Estimates place the company at a worth of about $10 billion with the company making $583 million in revenue this year. This is the second major social media giant going public, and after the fiasco of Facebook’s opening that saw initial prices plummet, Twitter’s offering poses to renew the battle between the sites, as well as impact values of burgeoning social media enterprises.

6) BBC executives faced Parliament last week over excessive severance packages paid out to senior execs during widespread austerity cuts in the country. Most of the attention is on former BBC director general and current CEO of The New York Times Mark Thompson, who is trying to shift some of the blame to BBC Trust chairman Chris Patten, claiming he was misleading Parliament about the severances. In front of Parliament, Thompson made the argument that, and this is true, the severance payments helped reduce costs. The entire ordeal has lead many in Britain and Parliament to call for tighter scrutiny over the operations at BBC, with an upcoming review of the internal governance systems and relationship between BBC management and the BBC Trust, the broadcaster’s regulator.

7) In a move that seems to indicate a refocused direction, Microsoft has eliminated all contract and freelance writers from the company’s online news portal MSN. Despite the site getting solid U.S. traffic, comparable to AOL and Yahoo, all current assignments will be cancelled at the end of the month. It has not been revealed the fate of the site, or the amount or status of the freelancers affected.

8) While broadcasters continue to struggle in court over Aereo, they did gain a victory against another internet streaming service, as a collection of networks have successfully filed an injunction against FilmOn X, a service allowing live streaming of local networks online. Although just a preliminary decision, the case marks a departure from the standards set in the Aereo ruling which allowed the streaming service to continue operating during hearings. The differing opinions could lead to a date at the Supreme Court down the road.

9) SirusXM, the satellite-radio giant, is facing a fourth $100 million lawsuit in just this past month over SiriusXM not paying rights fees for playing pre-1972 recordings which are protected under state laws. It doesn’t stop there, as SiriusXM is facing its fifth and largest lawsuit yet, this one coming from major labels Sony Music Entertainment, UMG Recordings, and Warner Music Group. SiriusXM has yet to respond to any of these lawsuits.

10) And to end on a lighter (ha) note, here’s the story of a man, inspired by the Pixar film Up, who tried and failed to cross the Atlantic via a cluster of balloons. Just 12 hours after his departure from Maine, a “technical glitch” forced him down in Newfoundland. Though 12 hours, that’s something!

Way of Life, "The Ultimate Habit Building App"

On New Year’s Day, instead of signing up for a gym or joining a writing group, I binge downloaded apps on my iPad. Perhaps it was the grease hangover from a night of eating only chicken wings in a comedy club upstairs from a Chinese restaurant, or perhaps it was the usual grad student anxiety made worse by habitual procrastination to Academic Coach Taylor memes. Whatever the cause of my guilt, my answer was in the App Store. So, I downloaded a bunch of apps: one to count calories, another to create ambient music in order work better, harder, and faster, and another to figure out what mental roadblocks weigh me down, in order to – as the app urges – “live better every day.” To top it off, I bought a habit building app that reminds me to record whether I counted my calories, whether I worked harder, better, and faster, and whether I overcame those mental roadblocks. The app charts my progress over time and shares it with my social networks.

This remedy is one part Lifehacker’s cult of productivity, half part Anthony Robbin’s self-help-ism, and two parts Kevin Kelly’s Quantified Self. And like eating fried chicken in the dark, this remedy instantly gratifies but never quite satisfies. Like other purported technological cure-alls today, this one is identified through a neologism, is criticized as a buzzword, and is hailed by proponents as a movement. “Gamification” is this process of using game logics such as points, badges, levels, challenges, and rewards to enhance traditionally non-game experiences. This experience might be uploading your fitness milestones onto Nike+  and syncing it with your workout on the Xbox 360 Kinect; it may be boosting productivity at a call center by using leaderboards and badges; it may be competing with your roommate for tangible rewards using a sophisticated system of rules to more pleasantly accomplish household chores. It is the carrot and the stick; it is putting more life into your life.

Nike+ Kinect Training

In all these examples, there is a representational structure linking reward to achievement, cause to effect – a structure that gamification enthusiasts claim produces unprecedented behavior change. Gamification allows you to incentivize anything in your (or your employees’) life to make it more fun, more efficient, more effective. In the words of Jane McGonigal – the movement’s high priestess who galvanized a legion of marketers and game designers in that TED talk – games can make a better world and make us “SuperBetter”™ – incidentally, also the name of her latest game.

At MIT’s Futures of Entertainment Conference, a panel of gaming experts playfully refused to respond to a persistent question rising to the top of a crowdsourced backchannel – “What is the future of Gamification?” Dismissed by these experts as a a fancy name for customer loyalty programs that are a perversion of game mechanics, and disdained as “marketing bullshit,” it is easy to write off gamification as the latest marketing buzzword. However, as media scholars have witnessed in half a decade of critical deconstruction of what was known as “Web 2.0,” technological buzzwords are never empty – they are ciphers for configurations of cultural values that iteratively shape relations between people, systems, and institutions.

The gamified website for NBC's The Office

On The Office’s gamified website, users signed up as employees of the fictional Dunder Mifflin paper company and earned “Schrute Bucks” for making comments, posting photos and performing tasks that built engagement and buzz for the show. It didn’t take long for the site to be populated with user-generated content. In an interview with Mashable, the gamification startup Bunchball raved that “NBC loved it because they were paying all these users fake money to do real work.” Unlike the conception of pure waste that game scholars such as Roger Caillois have used to define play, the playfulness of gamification is consummately productive.

According to the Pew center’s survey of experts, gamification may retreat as a fad, but only because its mechanisms will become more entrenched and quotidian – a trajectory that Web 2.0 took in becoming simply “social media.” Therefore, despite the fatigue from yet another marketing revolution, media scholars must map the contours of Gamification’s discourses as they erect and legitimate motivational structures for narrowly predetermined behaviors in our work, leisure, and psychic lives. These are structures that capture our playfulness, our guilt, our desires, our energies, and convert them into quantifiable outcomes such as engagement in platforms, loyalty to brands, user-generated data, and user-generated content. In Blade Runner (1982), the visionary doctor proclaimed that “commerce is our goal here at Tyrell; more human than human is our motto.” And as the film has taught three decades of moviegoers, we have to ask ourselves what it means to be human. Similarly, as we reinvent our lives through gamification, we have to ask ourselves what it means to be alive.

What I discovered was that after the many changes in technology, when it comes to some video games you truly can never recapture them as they originally existed. It is over 16 years since Myst’s original release, and it is having a revival. In the last three years, it has been re-released on the Nintendo DS, the PSP, and, most recently, the iPhone/iPad OS. Having difficulty locating a copy for my computer, I ended up playing the iPhone OS version on my iPad. I was surprised by how easily the game had been adapted to the iPad’s input methods. Myst had always been notorious for its visual beauty, and it was deeply pleasurable to find myself traveling its luscious landscape. The system of touching where I wanted to go, what I wanted open, etc. was surprisingly seamless and intuitive; but I couldn’t shake the feeling that by giving up the mouse and keyboard, I had somehow radically changed the experience of the game.

This experience only increased when, after exploring an underground chamber, I had to run off to a meeting. The game saved at the exact point that I had finished playing, and it was all too easy to pull the game out as I was waiting for my student to arrive and quickly finish off the puzzle I had been doing. In the early 90s when the game was released, it required reasonably powerful computing power and a game play experience was bound by these technological limitations to particular spaces and, generally, dedicated play time. By choosing a version of the game that I could easily pick up and put down at a moment’s notice anywhere at all, I had changed it drastically. Now, instead of being a dedicated journey, it had become a world to explore and puzzles to do in the dull moments that are part of everyone’s life.

Perhaps the change that had most drastically altered my experience of Myst was the rapid and extensive growth of the internet. After about an hour and a half of play, I found myself stuck. This is not an unusual experience in Myst. Friends who had finished the game, and most hadn’t, had told me about creating huge bulletin boards and walls full of maps and post-it notes in order to keep track of the information necessary to finish. Most had eventually just given up. I had a choice that wasn’t available to them, a choice that as I played became increasingly difficult to resist. As the internet has grown, it has been a repository for what Pierre Lévy has called collective intelligence. Some of this collective intelligence has gathered around games. The internet is replete with detailed walk-throughs, explaining how to beat a game step by step. While many consider this cheating, something Mia Consolvo has effectively explored, others consider it a productive use of shared knowledge that makes video games accessible to more players. That was the logic that I used when I took my first peek at a Myst walk-through, quickly gathered the information that I needed to get the code for the next step of the game (all in less than five minutes), and returned to playing.

My attempt to discover Myst as it was discovered by so many others almost a decade ago was an enjoyable and exciting one. I finally understood why its graphics were considered so newsworthy and was impressed that even today the aesthetics of its world held up. While it was inescapable that I experienced this in the context of the many games that built on it and the tremendous evolution in graphics that followed it, it is notable that over fifteen years later its visuals hold up well. I was fascinated by the game’s incorporation of live action video, something that has not been taken up by other games on a large scale, and found it very effective. While in the time I had, even with cheating, I was not able to find my way off the island (which reminds me of the next important thing that I missed), I did feel that I had begun to see what had made the game so powerful at the time and appealing enough to continue into the new millennium. But even more distinctly, I realized that I, and the many others who were playing for the first time on PSPs and iPhones, had not really had the Myst experience and that, when technology had changed so drastically , I probably never would.

Among the things we grappled with while developing this project was how to use smartphone technology to enhance rather than replace a user’s experience of physical space. The intention of many apps is to bring the world to the user, rather than the other way around. The tendency of such apps is to de-spatialize or trans-spatialize the user, allowing her to review, survey, or experience spaces without moving. To put this in terms that Paul Virilio might appreciate, this is the tendency of an app—or mobile media in general—toward a spatio-temporal totalitarianism. “If in preindustrial eras the low speeds of various vehicles structured and geometrized the social landscape,” Virilio writes in Bunker Archaeology, “since the acquisition of high speeds… it is here, and not over there [emphasis added], that the critical is from now on played out.” To encourage mobility, exploration, and discovery, to insist on the “here-ness” of spatial media, we designed the app to allow users to listen to audio tags only by physically encountering the tagged spaces. For Bike Box, there is no content without negotiating physical space. In addition, we designed the app so that there can be no overlap of audio tags. Rather, a participant who adds a tag “owns” a 30 meter sphere of space. Among other things, this encourages a centrifugal or expansive relationship to space, propelling participants ever onward and outward toward unexplored and “unclaimed” territories.

The meaning of the term “space” is a complex one. On the one hand, one can argue that Bike Box opens a new space for communication, broadcast and social struggle, and on the other hand, this space may only be the virtual space of capitalism created for the purpose of being colonized. Geo-locative space is absolute space, as David Harvey puts it in his book Spaces of Global Capitalism: “[absolute space] is fixed and we record or plan events within its frame…. Socially this is the space of private property and other bounded territorial designations.”

Yet Bike Box uses a space that is still somewhat open, not yet occupied or regulated by the industry or the state. For example, we did not submit our application to the App Store and were able to distribute it via the iPhone configuration tool without Apple’s benediction. Mobile technology is still in its infancy and it is still possible to utilize this emerging technology as a  “temporary autonomous zone.”

Another tendency we hoped to work against is the notion of an app as a private and intimate experience. Though users could listen to audio through headphones, we encouraged them to borrow one of the bikes we had equipped with speakers. The bikes served as broadcasting units, allowing riders to share their listening experience with friends and passersby. The speakers allowed the audio content to extend into the space. For the few moments the audio tag plays through the speaker, it becomes spatialized—no longer just a response to or gloss on the tagged space, but a part of the experience of that space.

The performative acts inherent in participating in a mobile game or interacting with a portable networked computer in public space is a rich area for research. This research could include such genres as flash mobs or even public cell phone use. Should we begin looking at this expression as a type of performance? It’s obvious that ubiquitous computing, mobile media, and invisible technologies like GPS and radio-frequency identification (RFID) are undermining concepts of public space and changing our notions of privacy. By utilizing high-powered speakers, Bike Box emphasized this extension into public space.

The advent of a new technology usually presents the possibility to repackage old media. This way, businesses can sell the same idea in a different package. The profit-motive aside, it behooves us to consider what new forms of communication and community are possible as a result of technologies such as smartphones and the availability of location-aware data. The new web standard (HTML-5) incorporates geolocation, meaning that it will be easier to target specific users in terms of their location. In conceiving Bike Box, we were interested in poetic responses to locations, be they field recordings, fictional narratives or interpretive audio. Participants were therefore enabled to contribute whatever audio they wished. The content we culled was more diverse than we had imagined it could be. For all participants it seemed important that the audio be either produced locally or by a local person. As geolocation becomes attached to identification, the concept of a local acquires new meaning and becomes an important ingredient in cultural narratives.