Technology Reveals Its Softer Side

Guest Post from Image Source
By John O’Reilly

We’ve entered a dramatically different relationship with technology, an age where machines talk to each other, where we’re developing new rituals and routines and where advertisers and brands tell stories about the soft benefits of hard technology. And it will change our relationship to images. Welcome to the Age of Hard and Soft.

The conversation around technology is already changing, slowly, discreetly, the network has become ‘pervasive’, ‘embedded’,’wearable’ – it’s in the ‘cloud’. You get a sense of the prevailing winds when in the UK the BBC’s The Apprentice features a task to design wearable technology, amid anxieties over privacy, and despite one of the products looking like a jacket with added gaffer tape one retailer ordered 250 because they “like to be early adopters of technology”.

Welcome to the age of Hard and Soft, the age of the internet of things where machines start chatting to each other, an age where we human beings fold ourselves into the network, and where objects communicate, inform, talk to each other. “Hello” says the milk bottle to the fridge, ‘I am empty”. The Fridge (the star of all Internet of Things conversations) adds milk to a shopping list which uploads to the supermarket site who tells the staff to deliver an extra carton to Bill at 42 Acacia Way. “Oh” says the fridge, “and print a cake and a candle on the packaging, it’s Bill’s Birthday.” Business inventory and logistics will become even more time-sensitive reducing waste of all kinds. But most of all the age of Hard and Soft will subtly shift our relationship to things, to places, to ourselves. The difference between the digital and the physical world will get more complicated, and as technology gets more customized, targetted and functional, advertising and marketing will seek to tell softer emotional stories. Likewise the institutional and corporate power of hard quantifiable data will only serve a purpose when delivered through softer storytelling (read psychotherapist Peter Kramer in the New York Times on the necessity of storytelling in an age of medical big data). And in other words, the age of Hard and Soft is about a changing relationship between Art and Science, in sectors such as technology, healthcare and education.

The material and immaterial worlds are connecting and combining in unexpected ways. Not least in the recent free download of U2’s Songs of Innocence, whose booklet wasn’t at all innocent. In the absence of anything physical, the digital booklet displays an image of the vinyl version: the sleeve indented by the record, ‘U2’ stamped and faded, and the letters ‘LP’ written and circled in felt tip. The representation of this old physical technology now has serious soft power though it has little ‘hard’ commercial power in terms of actual vinyl sales, The Telegraph suggests vinyl records are largely bought as collectors items, as desirable non-functional objects. Nevertheless the cultural power of U2s black and white vinyl, its ‘authenticity’ is magnified and mirrored by the black and white photo of the band opposite.