I'm moving home (out of my parents, over to Yorkshire for a new job) in the next couple of weeks and I'm doing something similar for entertainment. Rather than shelling out £12 a month for a broadcast TV licence for my new house, I'm using that money on a decent internet connection (S Yorkshire has subsidised FTTC broadband), buying a nicer monitor instead of a TV, and just watching recorded and on-demand stuff online.
Having said that, I'm not sure about the other stuff. I actually like going out into town and buying my groceries. It's social interaction, it supports local shops, it's a great way to get to know the place and the people. I could easily sit in front of a computer, pull up Tesco.com and order stuff in, but it's not the same. I'd actually question whether that's even "living in the cloud" - surely it's just internet shopping as it's been since about 1999?
The same goes for radio. Yes, you can switch on Spotify, Pandora, Rdio or any one of those services and hear your favourite songs, non-stop and commercial-free. But who introduces you to new artists, who gives you news and opinion, who provides the bits between the songs, tells you what's happening in town that weekend, tells you when the road's closed? Spotify is just your musical bubble, in a long, boring loop. I couldn't live without my radio in the room. (Disclaimer: I work in FM radio.)
The cloud is great, the cloud is an innovation, the cloud is very useful for many, many things (I use Dropbox, Google Docs, iPlayer, and so on heavily.) But to move your entire life online? I work all week sitting in front of a PC. I couldn't transform my free time into that too.
> But who introduces you to new artists, who gives you news and opinion, who provides the bits between the songs, tells you what's happening in town that weekend, tells you when the road's closed?
This is just my personal opinion, but I (and most of my friends) absolutely hate having to listen to FM radio for those exact reasons. All of my in-car music is played from my smartphone. I don't even remember when I last heard the radio.
For new artists, there's nothing that can beat online music services giving personalized recommendations based on your own preferences (or even based on what's popular). A generic radio presenter can't even come close.
As for the news, what's happening, closed roads, etc. I can get all that info online and skim across it in seconds, rather than having fragments of information trickle down from a radio presenter between songs and commercials.
I understand it's your area of work, but there is no way FM radio will ever survive in it's current format as we move forward.
I think the days of generic local and national radio services, which play a mix of popular music carefully chosen to be as inoffensive as possible, and provide a diet of celeb gossip, political squabbles and local roadworks, are numbered. The era when half of, say, London listened to Capital Radio every day is long gone (and Capital itself now resembles an iPod on shuffle with the hits of Rihanna, Adele and Katy Perry all day and night with almost no speech). If being bland enough that no one switched me off was my business model, I'd be filling out my application for unemployment right now.
Where radio still has a significant role to play is in the discovery of new content, new information, things you might not already know you're interested in, and that might be so far outside your sphere of influence that the computer hasn't been able to guess you'd like them yet.
I work in the community radio sector these days; small, non-profit local stations staffed by volunteer presenters passionate about what they play. In my own opinion, all the algorithms in the world can't replace someone who knows their specific style of music and has the enthusiasm to present it to the world. This, I believe, still has a bright future.
I guess we're looking at two different approaches to the same problem of discovering new information and content. There are those who advocate an automated approach--you like X, lots of people who like X also like Y, try Y, here's an automated feed of Y--and there are those, like me, who prefer the more curated experience of broadcast radio, from a studio, with a presenter.
I don't sit still, sticking my head in the sand and pretending everything will be the same forever, with people gathering around the wireless to listen to the latest Bob's Country Music Hour on 1170AM. It's my job to reconcile this stuff, and make sure we move with the times, give people what they want, and leverage this new technology to benefit communities for years to come.
I listen to the radio for music when I'm driving (no particular reason other than I'm lazy) and I can not remember any time I heard something introduced that was new to me.
My greatest period of musical growth was college. This was years ago (Win XP was just released) when Napster was still around (briefly) and we had a campus-wide filesharing system[1] (also briefly).
"But who introduces you to new artists, who gives you news and opinion, who provides the bits between the songs, tells you what's happening in town that weekend, tells you when the road's closed? Spotify is just your musical bubble, in a long, boring loop. I couldn't live without my radio in the room"
Pitchfork.com and Wire magazine serve my music recommendations, Songkick and Facebook keep my social calendar full and Google Maps has fine traffic indications. Podcasts like WTF, Superego, Econtalk and the Indoor Kids provide better "company" than any radio DJ I've heard.
Good point. I have the fantastic Pure One Flow[1], a radio which looks like any other old-fashioned set, but which picks up local stations on FM, the national and regional stuff over DAB digital, and then connects to wi-fi to receive internet streams from all over the world.
It's a brilliant device, and so seamless. Switching from the FM community station two streets away to a broadcast from Seattle takes seconds. It'll also connect to a uPnP server and play your own music collection over the LAN.
I prefer a converged solution like this, rather than just picking up live radio online all the time. Listening on FM and DAB saves bandwidth, and a lot of local stations are broadcast in better quality than they're streamed. FM is, to all intents and purposes, lossless.
This is the kind of thing 'everything-in-the-cloud' advocates forget. Broadcasting is just so efficient for sending one programme service out to millions of people. It'll never go away.
Websites like Turntable.fm are great for discovering music. They let other people be the DJ and you don't have to deal with the terrible FM radio commercials.
Community radio stations like ALL FM (allfm.org), Sheffield Live! (sheffieldlive.org), and Resonance FM (resonancefm.com) to name just a few I'm familiar with are great for discovering music, let local people passionate about music showcase their skills and their passion, and don't have commercials.
On radio, I agree: I enjoy the wit of certain hosts. You can stay on the cloud however - most radio stations have net radio so I can listen to my favourite hosts all over the world. I switch between NPR's awesome SandBox [1] and various student radio stations during the day.
In the UK (as in South Africa incidentally), the public broadcaster (BBC) gets its money via a license fee that tv owners pay rather than out of the government budget as happens in Canada (CBC).
Not owning an actual TV set doesn't exempt you from buying a TV license. If you own a computer or mobile phone you need to buy a license for £145 per year. It's basically a flat tax imposed on every household.
You are correct in pointing out that a license is required no matter what device is used to watch or record broadcasts. However, just owning such a device does not mean that you have to automatically pay. If you use your TV only to watch DVDs, or your computers to only watch on-demand material, you don't have to have a license. The key word here is "broadcasts".
The tricky part is convincing the TV Licence goons that you either don't have any receiver, or that you don't use it. It used to be that you could have the RF unit specially mangled as proof you don't watch broadcasts, but now with set-top boxes and TV tuner cards and iPlayer and whatnot, it's a lot harder to demonstrate conclusively that you don't use any BBC services.
So they just keep sending you threatening letters.
Someone should mention: this "cloud" is not actually a cloud, but relies on physical things to exist. At both ends, loads of electric current is needed. It relies on mining to bring the infrastructure, and it replaces your own information management with facilities managed by people you'll never meet and companies you'll barely know. But you have to trust them and agree to their terms, and become their customer.
Living in the cloud could be the most you've ever sold out without knowing it.
My advice: keep a few books. Bookshelves can be left in standby mode for years without needing a recharge. When people come over you can hand them a book, maybe an art book, and they will enjoy flicking through the pages. The UX of a book is top notch. Leave and rotate a few on the coffee table (if you have a coffee table, or is that in the cloud too?).
Interesting resolution. I wish Leah went into some of the negative affects living in the "cloud" had, rather than just promote all the services she uses.
The problem is, most of the negative effects of the cloud are not immediate downsides; rather they are future risks of catastrophe, which people are generally very bad at measuring and accounting for. What's the probability that Google accidentally flags you for abuse and eats your Gmail account tomorrow, consuming your internet identity along with 5 years of email, documents, blogposts, photos, videos, etc.? How do you rationally place an expected value on that outcome?
I had never given it much though, but Tuesday my primary gmail account went down. This (http://douglassims.org/gmaildown.png) is all I've seen of it since then. My contacts, calendar, lunch plans, flight reservations, all are unavailable to me. It's made this week rather a catastrophe. It's also made me reconsider my dependence on the cloud and I'm going to start the new year off trying to take back control.
I've had no indication from Google as to when it might be back, but I see in some forum postings that at least one person with the same error message had 84 days of downtime. It's sort of a black swan thing - very unlikely, but with such great consequences that it's worth avoiding.
Nothing negative happened at all! I think the difficult part was realizing that I didn't need so much "stuff" and it took a while to adjust to not owning everything myself. However, I wish I had done this sooner.
This is awesome. It's showing how more and more of today's society is moving to niche marketplaces. Roughly 30-35% of Leah's "Cloud" living was simply offloaded to marketplaces that perform a niche service.
Of course, I realize I might be using the word marketplaces loosely.
As someone who lives in the cloud already, and has been for a few years, it's very easy and efficient. I use Chrome's sync to have all my bookmarks everywhere, lastpass to keep my passwords, pandora for my music, google reader for my news, github for my code, gmail and google calendar, and dropbox with a truecrypt blob for ssh keys, gpg keys and a few other things.
It's not hard to live in the cloud you just have to deal with a service possibly going away or falling apart security wise. If you make the proper precautions it's all good.
Interesting that this is mostly about lowering costs by exploiting, and encouraging, the increase in liquidity of many goods and services, facilitated by tech infrastructure.
Having said that, I'm not sure about the other stuff. I actually like going out into town and buying my groceries. It's social interaction, it supports local shops, it's a great way to get to know the place and the people. I could easily sit in front of a computer, pull up Tesco.com and order stuff in, but it's not the same. I'd actually question whether that's even "living in the cloud" - surely it's just internet shopping as it's been since about 1999?
The same goes for radio. Yes, you can switch on Spotify, Pandora, Rdio or any one of those services and hear your favourite songs, non-stop and commercial-free. But who introduces you to new artists, who gives you news and opinion, who provides the bits between the songs, tells you what's happening in town that weekend, tells you when the road's closed? Spotify is just your musical bubble, in a long, boring loop. I couldn't live without my radio in the room. (Disclaimer: I work in FM radio.)
The cloud is great, the cloud is an innovation, the cloud is very useful for many, many things (I use Dropbox, Google Docs, iPlayer, and so on heavily.) But to move your entire life online? I work all week sitting in front of a PC. I couldn't transform my free time into that too.