{"id":4743,"date":"2014-07-03T09:58:47","date_gmt":"2014-07-03T15:58:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=4743"},"modified":"2014-07-03T10:19:07","modified_gmt":"2014-07-03T16:19:07","slug":"the-soma-cloud","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=4743","title":{"rendered":"The soma cloud"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"soma\"<\/a><\/p>\n

“The computer could program the media to determine the given messages a people should hear in terms of their overall needs, creating a total media experience absorbed and patterned by all the senses. …\u00a0By such orchestrated interplay of all media, whole cultures could now be programmed in order to improve and stabilize their emotional climate.” \u2014Marshall McLuhan<\/a>, 1969<\/p>\n

“The experiment manipulated the extent to which people (<\/span>N<\/em>\u00a0= 689,003) were exposed to emotional expressions in their News Feed. This tested whether exposure to emotions led people to change their own posting behaviors, in particular whether exposure to emotional content led people to post content that was consistent with the exposure \u2014 thereby testing whether exposure to verbal affective expressions leads to similar verbal expressions, a form of emotional contagion.” \u2014Kramer et al.<\/a>, 2014<\/span><\/p>\n

“I’m excited to announce that we’ve agreed to acquire Oculus VR, the leader in virtual reality technology. …\u00a0This is really a new communication platform. By feeling truly present, you can share unbounded spaces and experiences with the people in your life. Imagine sharing not just moments with your friends online, but entire experiences and adventures.” \u2014Mark Zuckerberg<\/a>, 2014<\/span><\/p>\n

The strategy behind the Oculus acquisition has become much clearer to me over the last week. Haters gonna\u00a0hate, worrywarts gonna\u00a0worry, but [inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=””]I for one am looking forward to Facebook’s\u00a0Oculus Rift experiments[\/inlinetweet]. Once the company is able to manipulate “entire experiences and adventures,” rather than just bits and pieces of text, the realtime engineering of a more harmonious and stabilized emotional climate may well become possible.\u00a0I predict that the next great opportunity in wearables lies in finger-mountables \u2014 in particular, the Oculus Networked Mood Ring. We’ll all wear them, as essential Rift peripherals, and they’ll all change color simultaneously, depending on the setting that Zuck dials into the Facebook Soma Cloud.<\/p>\n

I know, I know: this is all just blue-sky dreaming for now. But as the poet said, in dreams begin realities.<\/p>\n

At least I think that’s what he said.<\/p>\n

This post is an installment in Rough Type\u2019s ongoing series \u201cThe Realtime Chronicles,\u201d which began\u00a0here<\/a>. A full listing of posts can be found\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Image: detail of cover of paperback edition of <\/em>Brave New World.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“The computer could program the media to determine the given messages a people should hear in terms of their overall needs, creating a total media experience absorbed and patterned by all the senses. …\u00a0By such orchestrated interplay of all media, whole cultures could now be programmed in order to improve and stabilize their emotional climate.” […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4743","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-realtime"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4743","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4743"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4743\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4762,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4743\/revisions\/4762"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}