In a recent article in Wired, Momus is concerned with marketing segmentation and how it can be a self-fulfilling prophecy:
It’s been called by some social and cultural geographers ‘the automatic production of space’; the idea that in fact these descriptions reside within software that sorts places in terms of where new stores are, where new services are, which will attract the types of people that like going to those stores, who will then receive subscriptions to the Spectator magazine or whatever…. So there is a really interesting kind of recursivity, I suppose one would call it, between the description — the virtual description — and what actually happens on the ground.
I call that the same kind of positive feedback loop that leads to increased segmentation exists explicitly (in large scale efforts) or implicitly (indie efforts) in software as well. “Power-user software” creates more and more-powerful users, while hardcore gaming genres (e.g. FPS, RTS) have repeated this circle so many times, that especially in their multiplayer aspect evolution is impossible: see for example the local optimum of WASD+mouse (Gkikas et al, forthcoming).
The problem with “junk mail” producing culture and politics is that it ultimately leads to complete entropy: no meaningful differentiations at all. Maybe that is also a danger (in the far future) for suggesting engines as well (amazon, TiVo), where the segmentation is implicit but still exists?
References
Gkikas, K., Nathanael, D., Marmaras, N. (forthcoming). The evolution of FPS games controllers: how use progressively shaped their present design. PCI 2007.
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