Albert Tanutama

Technologies and religion might not appear to get along well, each promoting values that are opposite of each other: material vs spiritual, individual vs collective, reason vs faith. Given the importance of both in our lives, what if we can bring them in harmony? What if beneath this seemingly odd relationship, are unexplored potentials for making technologies that fit better, harmoniously and ubiquitously in our life? This is what Genevieve Bell, an anthropologist from Intel, explored in her paper “No More SMS from Jesus: Ubicomp, Religion and Techno-spiritual Practices” (The PDF document can be found via this post).

In her research, Genevieve noted unexpected richness and complexity interplay between technologies, spiritual and religious activities. Although this interplay is still elusive in HCI community, it is important to embrace this challenge to talk about religion despite its “highly personal and emotional and increasingly politicized” nature – notably because “technologies rapidly scaled only at the point that they were invested with spiritual significance”. Since religious systems have impacts in which “new technologies are created, consumed, and indeed rejected”,  it is important to “move beyond efficiency as a useful metric for measuring technology success”  and to “re-image the very contexts in which those technologies are conceived, created and consumed, making room not just for fun and enjoyment but also another fundamental set of cultural and human needs” - leading to new ideas of privacy, identity, and security; and set of values such as simplicity, grace, humility, modesty, and purity into technologies.

An interesting possibility is calm computing described by Weiser and Brown, “if computers are everywhere they better stay out of the way, and that means designing them so that the people being shared by the computers remain serene and in control. Calmness is a new challenge that UC [Ubiquitous Computing] brings to computing … Calmness is a fundamental challenge for all technology design of the next fifty years”

One example of Google application that failed to excite me was Google Reader. I do not find it user friendly and easy to use for both reading and managing my RSS subscriptions. However, today was a totally different kind of experience – almost a year after since it was launched – the team introduced a totally new look and feel of Google Reader. It is superb!

These are three top features, enough to make me become a convert:

• Unlimited post! I think this is the ultimate features that I really (really) love from Google Reader. With this feature, I no longer have to worry about missing interesting posts because I do not have the time to turn on my news aggregator. (I was hoping such feature from FeedDemon and Newsgator, unfortunately, its synchronization feature wasn’t working that well, and often crashed my computer). In fact, I can easily read, and bookmark interesting posts without having to bookmark it in my del.icio.us account (Keep it clean and simple!)
• Easy to subscribe and to manage – Google Reader comes with handy bookmarklet so that I can add new subscriptions with two clicks (one to bring me to Google Reader page, and another one to confirm). And it is equally easy to manage, with its tagging and filtering features.
• List and Expanded view, plus ‘unlimited’ scroll – Love it! It makes it really simple and fast to browse through blogs! It saves me from clicking previous or next entries again.

Minus point? I do not see the search box; so, it could be a problem to find certain topics within my subscriptions (it seems this is a pretty tough thing to do for the team as well). Nevertheless, Google gain manage raising the bar higher for the rest of online news aggregators.

It has been a (long) while since I post here – and so many things has happened since then. I have joined a new company, working in the eLearning industry as a senior consultant focusing on the visual aspects of our eLearning solutions. Although this industry might not appear as vibrant as it used to be in the past – I feel that the fundamental concepts and ideas behind it are still relevant and applicable in many other industries – after all learning is a life long process. The abilities to make this process more effective, efficient, and satisfying are still required and in-demand.

Apart from this new job, I managed to clear all my microsoft exam certifications – and few days ago, I received my welcome kit as MCSA (Microsoft Certified System Administrator). With this credential I could theoretically manage and administrate organization information infrastructure using Microsoft based technologies. Although at this present time, the certification has limited benefits, it helps me to get more familiar with security, technical and infrastructure issues in organizations. At minimum, I hope to leverage this certification to open up opportunities to interact with bigger group of people (who usually working behind the scenes)

Finally, I think it is a good time to put this blog a little bit more alive again, and get ready for a new life changing experience!