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This Is Your City In Name Only (The Art of Co-Cocooning)

A train plastered in advertising glides into and out of this Bangkok station.

One of the striking aspects of commuting on the Bangkok SkyTrain is the in-your-face level of advertising that dominates the station infrastructure - it includes flat-screen TVs with accompanying audio both on the platform and on the trains. The BST is designed from the ground up to maximise its advertising potential - seemingly with no surface deemed to inappropriate to be adorned with a message about a massage, or credit card, or, or. Revenues from advertising could make the difference between offering a service that is affordable or indeed no service at all, but I'm left wondering how, in cities where no holds are barred how the level of intrusion will play out when there are more ways to identify individuals, their tastes, their everyday interactions.

A scattergun of thoughts on this balmy Tokyo evening: To what extent does an uninterrupted view of the city affect our sense of journeying? And to what extent does this affect our sense of well being? For what kinds of journey is this important? Or for what aspects of each journey? And, assuming it is desirable, how will individuals recreate that sense of journey in real time - perhaps with this or as some other life stream collider.

The speed at which large screen display technologies showing poster quality moving images will replace what is left of windows on commuter transport? Whether (and in what urban centers) we will see a wholesale shift towards commuter transport where passengers expect to be cocooned from what lies out there. Whether this in turn makes the shift towards more autonomous, 'self-driving' vehicles a more acceptable proposition - with passengers pre-conditioned into mentally switching off? Who will be first to offer personal urban transport where windows are an optional extra?

In some cities the future public service will offer passengers a way to get from A to B, mentally and physically insulated from what's out there, creating a head space that's just ripe to feed the message of the day/minute/second. The easiest way to kick-back is to retreat further into your own bubble - using a superlite version of today's head mounted displays perhaps, or simply your tunes.

At some point the race for your mind-share and the wallet-share that goes with it will need to dig a little deeper.

How low will they go?

And, ultimately how far will you allow them to go?

Writing from Tokyo | August 26, 2008 | Permalink