Public prethinking
Jamais Cascio, the popular ethical futurist that regularly writes for Fast Company and other publications, dovetails the notions of prethinking combined with AR in his notion of "focus assistants," or filtering tools that screen content you don't want to receive. In his article for the Atlantic, "Get Smarter," he notes that, "as our capacity to provide that filter gets faster and richer, it increasingly becomes something akin to collaborative intuition -- in which everyone is effectively augmenting everyone else.
This process of collective intuition is amplified by AR applications like Pelago's visual storytelling tool, Whrrl. The service, according to CEO Jeff Holden, is a "real-time storytelling product for people's daily lives," which aggregates multiple tweets, posts, and updates to form a kind of visual Twitter. These communal events are also shared to the larger community, which can comment while stories take place. This process creates a form of public prethinking known as group awareness. And it's the data culled from these multiple communal stories that will form the basis of future interactions in commerce and culture at large.
Conclusion
Augmented reality offers multiple touchpoints to interact with consumers in an intimate and impactful virtual landscape. When commercial experiences in the outernet honor consumer privacy, are relevant to location, and embrace communal group experience, marketers will benefit. But like GPS and our Xbox family demonstrated, AR is just a few steps away from being invisible. No experience is required and prethinking will become a habit without our realizing its taken place.
Just remember that, like the mom at the end of the video, you can always turn the AR technology off. And unless marketers collaborate with consumers on their virtual sojourns, they're likely to do the same to us.
John C. Havens is vice president of social media at Porter Novelli and the author of "Tactical Transparency: How Leaders Can Leverage Social Media to Maximize Value and Build Their Brand." He is co-founder (along with Jack Mason of IBM) of the Outernet Guidelines Initiative, a program created to help understand the nature of emerging technologies and culture.
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