Once, when someone died, we tended their memories tangibly – by laying flowers on a grave or visiting the site where ashes were scattered. For the “Facebook Generation”, the dead are not just remembered online, they’re silent partners in an ongoing, virtually uninterrupted dialogue. Friends and family are happy to tend to the social network pages of the dead, leaving messages and posting pictures. There is also a new breed of “online memorial” sites such as muchloved.com and gonetoosoon.com, where you can pay your respects for free – regardless of whether you knew the person – and areas where you can make donations and “light candles” or “plant flowers” to commemorate someone. It might seem peculiar, until we consider the real life alternative. Many people find funeral homes and graveyards grim and depressing. What’s more they are often in inaccessible parts of town, with inconvenient opening hours. At the very least, online memorials allow the bereaved to remember at a time of their choosing and pay tribute in a variety of media. Many are also religiously neutral.

Image Credit:
River of Memories

Crazy innit. iTunes launched, what, 9 years ago and still we listen to our albums gazing at one static jpeg of the single or artwork of the album. Arcade Fire’s synchronised artwork for their new album The Suburbs looks to change things. Each track on the album has an individual image that appears on your iPod when it’s played, with the lyrics then appearing on the screen as they are sung. Think of it as a sing-a-long analogue MTV video. Oh, the good old days of music packaging. In a similar vein, there’s a new music visualisation piece in our namesake – Mother, that can dynamically load/unload sketches. You can then mix the visual output in a manner not unlike VJing, to accompany both recorded and live music. Music + visuals = happiness.

Image: The Guardian

A recent ILM report has revealed that over two-thirds of UK workers can’t help but check their emails while they’re on holiday. Sound familiar? Well, it might be about time to make a little more positive use of that Smartphone addiction. Remember sitting through your Uncle’s tiresome post-holiday slideshow and marvelling at all the little boxes of slides? There’s now a Web 2.0 way to deliver a much richer version of that very experience – while you’re on holiday. Tripline, launched in beta this week, gives you the tools to create an interactive story of your holiday; a way to plan and share your trip while you’re there, and a much more exciting way to tell everyone about it when you get home. Beyond sharing, Tripline obviously also makes bragging rights far easier to come by, combining your Foursquare check-ins, Facebook status updates, tweets, and Flickr uploads onto your geographical journey. It’s more than just a map mash-up; it’s a story of your holiday in real-time. As Techcrunch point out, Tripline isn’t in of itself unique, but what’s caught our eye is the fact that (unlike Where I’ve Been) when the user base reaches critical mass, it could offer real-time stay/eat/drink/do recommendations. A future for the suffering travel guide publishers perhaps?

Thanks to TechCrunch and PSFK for the nod about Tripline.

Image Credit
Tripline.net

Much has been claimed of Twitter – from the most “popular” word in the world to the scourge of society. Scientifically, Twitter must also take at least 12.47% of the blame for Justin Bieber and over 9000 really bad jokes about people tweeting what they ate for lunch. But the one thing that’s definitely true is that microblogging is “social” media and is about connecting to other people, right? Possibly not. In a throwback to Stanley Milgram’s gloriously misanthropic experiments of the 1960s, a bunch of sadists at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore deliberately caused a group of subjects to become “socially anxious” by getting them to play an online game where players pass the ball to each other, but deliberately never passing the ball to the subject. This had no effect on the subjects’ tweeting. However, when they instead made the subjects “existentially nervous” by getting them to think about death that led to a marked increase in tweets. So social media might be better named “narcissistic media”? The 40% drop in US college students’ empathy scores over the last 30 years would certainly bear this out.

Thanks to Samuel Payne.

Image Credit:
SDSmith blog

Shooting and editing film has been democratised massively over the last few years, with all of the tools to make movies readily available to the amateur auteur. And now the iPhone 4 looks to take amateur film to a whole new level. iPhone 4’s camera is capable of HD video recording in 720p at 30 frames per second (so as good as a standard video camera). And with the iMovie function, its ability to shoot, edit, and share high-quality video all on a phone means there’s no need for a computer. A raft of brilliantly produced iPhone 4 videos have started appearing online, so much so that the guys at BBH Labs and Freedom + Partners have launched a competition The iOscars, to see how good the films can get. It highlights another example of the tools that were once the domain of the professional being put in the hands of everyone.

Reference:
BBH Labs

Image Credit:
iPhone Fans Forum

There’s an “unprecedented intensity” of innovation right now, according to a report by Morgan Stanley. Much of it is driven by a sudden boom in “location-based services” – applications that allow you to post your physical location to the web. Why would you want to do that? According to an article on ReadWriteWeb, there are a few reasons. One is to allow chance connections with people that you know (Foursquare) or people that you don’t know yet (Grindr). Another is to get local news and information (Google’s NearMeNow). Or it may just be entertainment, such as Gowalla or OK magazine’s new celebrity stalker app. There’s even an application called ASBOrometer that displays dodgy hoodie behaviour in your vicinity (Dan Broadwood, Shoreditch House alert). So what’s driving this sudden explosion of innovation in location-based services? It’s all down to rapid advances in smartphone technologies, especially access speeds, battery life and always-on functionality. And where will it all lead? If you believe the hype, location-based services aren’t just part of the future of digital – they are the future. We think it’s likely they’ll take over social media, but we don’t think brands have really begun to exploit the potential here. Nike’s TrueCity is a good start, but there’s plenty of opportunity for more.

Thanks to Jon Miller for this story and for editing this week’s issue. Mother Social strategist Jon is sadly leaving us soon to follow his altruistic interests. Keep in touch here.

Image Credit:
TheNextWeb

Our friends over at cult film magazine Little White Lies have decided to launch a new title dedicated to the culture of video games called ‘Invert Look’. Recognising there was a gap in the market for a culture led take on video gaming,  they expect the magazine to follow it’s big sister LWLie’s and gain a bit of a cult following. Editorial Director Matt Bochenski explains how the idea came about. “Videogames have long been ring-fenced as junk culture, relegated to a ghetto and populated by the slack-jawed adolescents of critics’ imaginations”, he says. “Whilst the videogame generation has come of age, and the medium is now both financially successful and culturally influential, you’ll see that videogame magazines have actually become stuck in a rut”. Bochenski explains that ‘Invert Look’ will have a focus on gaming’s cultural link with cinema, art, music and popular culture, rather than being tied to old formulas of news, reviews and previews, which already exist within passionate online communities anyway. He tells us the ambition is wider-reaching than the 14 year old kids that most of today’s magazines are aimed at. “We are going to write long form features about where games are right now, and hopefully that’ll speak to gaming’s new, more mature constituents” he continues. “We want to take the time to offer gamers something they can’t get online; such as real stories and in depth features by great writers about the areas where games and culture blur and intersect”. Invert Look kicks off with a 36-page taster issue inspired by the theme of Origins, the first full issue will launch in September.

Thanks to Matt Bochenski, Editorial Director at The Church Of London

Image Credit
Via Invertlook

Last week Mother went to Offf, a three-day festival in Paris. In it’s eighth year it is known as ‘the International Festival for the Post-Digital Creation Culture’. The festival showcases some of the best digital artists, web, print and interactive designers; motion graphic studios and new music adventures from around the world. Our first festival highlight was the Image Fulgurator by Julius Von Bismarck. It is a device for physically manipulating photographs. It intervenes when a photo is being taken, without the photographer being able to detect anything. The manipulation is only visible on the photo afterwards. See The Image Fulgurator video and examples to see how it works. A second highlight was a campaign we remember well. It was done a couple of years ago but it’s well worth sharing again. The Uniqlock is a live look book for Uniqlo. It fuses together music, dance videos and time into ever changing video performance that seems endless. Every 5 seconds the video seamlessly updates with a different dance sequence in accordance to whatever the time is. In the summer the dancers wear polo shirts, whilst in the winter they wear Cashmere sweaters as playing to the seasons. Our final highlight was something more recent. Summit on the Summit was a campaign from earlier this year to highlight the global clean water crisis. Via the 19,340 ft website, you could follow a group of celebrities climb mount Kilamanjaro. It’s here visitors to the site could interact with the climbers in real time, check out their vital statistics and sponsor them. The great work at Offf reminds us that in the Post-Digital Creation Culture, the lines between the real and digital world have not only blurred, but have disappeared altogether.

Reference
Projector

Clip Credit
Via Julius Von Bismarck’s website