As part of the preparation for PlayTime, I wanted to see how I might entice people into a basic text interaction with the GolfontheMoon project.
When I say people, I mean mainly people who had already agreed to speak or participate in the event itself, so we’re talking about a group of fairly playful friends with a high tendency to interact.
First off, I sent them this text message:
Task 1: attempt a sense of weightlessness today. Report back with your results. Did you achieve it? How? And how did it feel?
Here are some of the responses. Those who replied to this first message then got a second task:
Task 2: be short sharp and concise in all communication. Send me an example of the quickest way to say something important
Here are the responses to this second SMS. Quite what I now do with this material I’m not sure, but I think it’s probably my task to somehow work these texts into the golfmission. Are they the meat of imagined conversations with Bowie on the way to the moon? Are they instructions from mission control that need to be carried out by me, the astronaut as part of my training?
Thanks to Jamie Cason BTW for observing that he was expecting me to devise training for him, rather than him having to formulate something for me. As he put it: “I was expecting some hidden agenda to be provided to me, I guess I'll have to devise one of my own now.”
It is a salutory reminder that in expecting people to devise their own creative stuff and then hand it over to me in a timely fashion in the right format, I am almost certainly asking far too much. Most people don’t have time or the inclination to respond or interact to even the most compelling content with little more than a few button presses.
Comments