Check out this video about the story of the nativity, told as if the characters had access to the latest technology and social media. The message at the end: “Times change, feelings remain the same. Happy digital Christmas.”
I searched the video’s creator, Excentric, on Google and found their website (click on English in the upper right corner). Maybe it has something to do with the fact that during my first few minutes on the site I couldn’t get the guy to speak English instead of Portuguese, but it’s all very mysterious and intriguing.
Turns out, Excentric is a digital media branding firm based in Lisbon, Portugal, that urges brands to accept a new era of digital media that goes beyond the dimensions of the internet. They advertise services like virtual reality, holograms, 4D, augmented reality and emotion recognition. They claim to have developed an emotion-detecting kiosk that reads the emotion of the consumer and sells a product to them with a strategy based on that emotion.
The nativity video was funny. Excentric is scary. Personally I’m unnerved by the idea of King Melchlor buying gold for baby Jesus on amazon.com. And I don’t buy their message of “times change, feelings remain the same.” Feelings do change when media allows people to disconnect and disengage. Buying things from amazon.com, for example, often implies a lack of human or emotional connection between the maker of the item and the buyer. Belongings start to lose meaning, and relationships degrade. And an emotion-detecting kiosk– really? It seems that Excentric is trying to void all human interaction in the buying and selling transaction.
We’re living in a time of globalization and conglomeration where we barely know what it is we’re buying– a time when buying sneakers can mean funding sweat shops, buying a can of beans can mean buying estrogenic BPA, and buying an engagement ring can mean supporting a “blood-diamond” industry. What we need now is people connecting with the products they buy, where they come from, and who made them. Digital media can be a useful tool for educating people about these things, but when it’s used in ways like Excentric proposes, we risk losing the world to fantasy.
