Interactions - January/February 2009

But perhaps remote gigs are the future. So next, perhaps we could connect clubs in Moscow with clubs in Madrid and San Francisco and flirt with folks from far-flung places. And looking at my friend’s 52-inch high-definition TV (and there are some 73-inch ones out there ostensibly aimed at the consumer market), I am wondering if I could host a party in my living room with John Digweed spinning. And in his turn, he could be looking at a stack of monitors of all the living rooms that are listening in, worldwide. But if I were John, under those conditions, I’d insist all those guys buy shirts.

We are not at the point where soloists can play together over the Net. But the DJs we talked to are pushing the edge of what the technology can do. What can DJs webcasting tell us about how to create truly interactive TV?

And while I am flying high with eutopian goodness, could webcasting musical performances bring the world together? Could we explore the differences between cultures and their musical proclivities? Could we get one planet under a groove?

IBM researchers Tom Erickson and Wendy Kellogg have spent some time looking at these kinds of minimal visual cues in interfaces that signal someone is there and possibly available for conversation—or perhaps just idly lurking. These simple visual representations create what they call “social translucence.”

In this world of the webcast, it seems that view counts substitute for watching the crowd. View counts turned out to be really important to every DJ we talked to. A higher view count signifies a larger crowd, even if that crowd comprises a bunch of individuals sitting on their sofas or at their desks all over the planet. DJs closely monitor the audience cams for the movement of a head in time with the beat, for a look of close attention, and for the appearance of a familiar face. Chat logs are monitored for comments, requests, and conflict. Chat lets people know what is being played. And all this while slipping from one track to the next.

There is a reciprocal relationship of looking in Y!Live. That is, the viewing is two ways. DJs watch us closely for response, for engagement. We watch them for technique, for the performance of their craft, and because we want them to recognize us as one of their fans. When DJ Doolow waved to me during one of his shows, it felt like a friend had given me a hug.

It is very difficult for an audience member to get a sense of the crowd because the crowd is pretty hampered in the ways in which they can interact. It is difficult to sidle up to someone and impress them with your

moves when you are sitting in an office chair at your computer. Most of the people who perform and/or watch are webcasting from their living rooms and kitchens, making for an odd array of domestic scenes conflated into one screen and an odd kind of club setting.

These mechanisms all seem too fragmented, and too crude to create closeness—slim ways of being in touch and reaching out to the audience. But they work… sort of. And although crude now, they point to the future of connected performance.

As designers we are not yet sure how to create co-presence and create a crowd out of a disparate group of individuals with webcams, their worlds connected only by the fact that their video feeds are collated onto one webpage. However, I think these performances are a way for us to think about the construction of audience and the creation of crowd.

Social interaction researchers warn us not to take the ways in which people interact face to face as some kind of benchmark or gold standard of human-human interaction, suggesting that mediated communication is fundamentally different. Yes, but from my perspective it is a good starting point. Designing to help DJs create really compelling and effective performances using webcasting technologies forces us to think about the ways in which social feedback is or should be built into these two-way broadcast technologies. So I ask: Is webcasting going to change the DJ performance? Probably not as much as the slider or the mixing desk did.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Dr. Elizabeth Churchill is a principal research scientist at Yahoo! Research leading research in social media. Originally a psychologist by training, for the past 15 years she has studied and designed technologies for effective social connection. At Yahoo, her work focuses on how Internet applications and services are woven into everyday lives. Obsessed with memory and sentiment, in her spare time She researches how people manage their digital and physical archives. She rates herself a packrat, her greatest joy is an attic stuffed with memorabilia.