Bits of Personality Everywhere: Implicit User-Generated Content in the Age of Ambient Media

This article approaches the way how to think about collaboration with pervasive technology in a new way. It introduces ambient media as new form of media, where the media as such is linked to physical worlds, and smartly aggregated rather than generated with a push or pull model. Collaboration between human man and technology becomes a issue of collaboration, rather than a question of human-computer interaction. As far user contributed content was mostly seen as process, where consumers contribute to online Web forums or create their own videos and upload it to YouTube. The user actively contributes and collaborates to create the content of the media. However, pervasive technology enables much more: pervasive technology allows implicit collaboration, thus the collection of consumer data passively and aggregate the content of the media. One example is the open source platform Portable Personality (P2), whose goal is to generate a personality profile of the implicit collected contextual information. P2 will offer the possibility of personality profiles, rather than simple usage history information or sensor data input. Within the context of this article, the notion of ambient media is introduced. As a practical example to underline the new way of thinking about media, P2 is introduced and the underlying principles explained.