Introduction: What is Automatic Alertness?

A central and misunderstood concept in emerging media and documentary practice is that those with the least access to critically important messages are often those who lack the intrest or resoruces to recieve them. How can we close this gap? I believe it is being closed automatically, as new media follows new generations into standardization, but we can also hasten this process through use of "Automatic Alertness" technologies. As we do this we must remain careful not to undermine our mission as documentors, by intruding upon ones inailiable right to remain uninformed.

One of the most important phenomenons in the networked society is that we can get crucial news faster than pre-digital documentors could possibly hope to arrange even a crude piece. Through blogs, wikis and online news services, we are allowed unprecedented access to alerts and information. Through even newer technologies, such as twitters, rss, and txt message "alerts." Although it seems unfortunately rare, this ability to tab into our very alertness is occasionally used for something important to our survival. Let's take the local example: New School Alerts.

New School Alerts uses a concept I've named "Automated Alerts" to warn students of anything that could interupt their attendance at school. New School Alerts uses a three front attack (cell-phone, landlines, and email) to alert students of major events that could cause problems comming to school. The reason the alerts work, is because they are able to surmount the technological barriers that prevent some users from benefiting from such saftey measures. All you need to do is register and you are automatically alerted. In fact, when the system was first implemented registration was actually required for all students. Although this may seem like an intrusion, few could dispute the advantges of being alerted before cluelessly wandering into a messy situation such as an act of terrorism or a natural disaster, when trying to attend classes, or more practically showing up to find the school closed due to unforseen events. New School Alerts hasn't fallen victim to misuse or overuse. We don't recieve messages for minor closures, and it is never used for advertisement. Like emergency channels of the past (911) New School Alerts is taken with enough seriousness that it remains a channel of alertness.

The World Health Organization has used an online database known as Epidemic and Pandemic Alert Response (EPR) since 1996, to track epidemics of infectious disease. The database is updates frequently and generally considered the best resource for precautious travelers (it is endorsed by the US Department of State's Travel website (which also has a simalar news feed, which posted travel alerts regarding Mumbai two days after the terrorism their on the 26th). The WHO resource has an RSS that can be subscribed to, but lacks the required automation of New School Alerts. This posses an ethical question: Should emergency information sent to you be required? Does the potential good justify the intrusion?

Let's think about how the Hurricane Katrina disaster could have been minimized if everyone in New Oreleans recieved text messages instantly updating them on the storms surprisingly increasing severity. Would lives have been saved? I doubt anyone would have complained about an intrusion in such a case. There is a comprehensive hurricane resource and tracking page on the state department's website, as well as on FEMA's, but when your caught in a storm you're less likely to think about logging on before "batting down the hatches." Also the crux of my argument against current uses of attention grabbing in new media documentary: These alerts ellude the very people who could from them most, due to a lack of access to technology, ineptude in putting it to practical use, or simply underestimating it's usefulness.

For a new media documentor automatic alerts are a possibility for "attention getting," but remain problematic due to a lack of percieved urgency in a documentors message. Exposing a child prostitution ring in India makes an interesting subject for a documentary (Born in Brothels), and to the children forced into such a life establishing a sense of urgency akin to a hurricane in a viewers backyard is impossible. Ergo, it is unlikely that being would find any sort of imposed alerts urging them to watch fresh, independatly produced documentaries on a famine in Africa, genocide in the former Yugoslavia or civil war in Burma to be anything but invasive, unless they voluntarily sign up for such news. This brings us back to the question that sparked my thinking: How do we get people to pay attention to what we produce as documentors?

On the surface, it is a question of urgency, urgency is the ultimate way to shuffle prioritizaiton. Even people who whimsically subscribe to RSS feeders, will re-examine the ones they check daily based on perceived urgency. Beyond that, how do we get our debatably urgent messages to people who aren't even comfortable with this technology?

I think the cell phone is the best tool in both cases. Even most people who have never subscribed to an RSS reader have gotten text message alerts on their cell phones. Maybe they purposely texted a short message to a number to recieve something like a daily horroscope or movie updates, perhaps they got an important emergecny message from a school they attend or a company they work for. These aren't considered spam messages or advertisements because they are welcomed, useful and even urgent. For those who are more tech-knowledable, text messages have the personal touch that RSS feeds lack, and automatically alert an audience better than any known method (short of the conviecable cybernetic implants of the near future).

So the quesiton now is, how do we get people to let us into their cell phones. As I mentioned in my thesis, the gap between effort and attention is closing automatically through the connectivity of our cell phone technologies. It is becoming more commonplace for new users to remain connected to the internet through their mobile phones, opening up tools such as twitter and RSS feeds for remote attention grabbing. This requires no action by documentors, it can only be noticed and examined by those who study "automatic alertness" as a sign that soon information seeking will be slowly supplemented and replaced by the information finding you (sounds like a Yakov Smirnov joke...). In the meantime, documentors can attempt to make the alertness of their audience more automatic.

What strikes me as the biggest change in documentary practice between documentors that use new and old media is that "the new documentary" is closer to journalism in that it is a process rather than a product. Instead of making a media product which becomes an artifact as it ages, we are making vlogs, film series (webisodes) and projects that require audience participation (mirroring a conversation), which require periodic bursts of attention, and users being updated on additions to the process of documentation.

It is a lot to ask of our audience to manually revisit documentary projects throughout the process of events, so it is our job as documentors to use automatic alertness techniques to keep our audience engaged. I want use this blog, as a form of documentation, to explore implementation and advancement of automatic alertness techniques and technologies.