Just as I was thinking, “I have nothing to write about because I have been walking around in circles for three or four years I find that at least virtually I have almost achieved a big project. Walking 819 kilometres on the Camino De Santiago. I am now four kilometres from the end. By the end of tomorrow morning I will have completed this goal.
In reality nothing special, as I haven’t had to change my routine, suffer or anything else. What does surprise me is how quickly I completed the challenge. I could have accomplished the goal in more time. I have more than 100 days left to complete the challenge. Now we know how long it would take me to complete, in the physical world.
Cost
Pacer, for one year, costs 29CHF and for a while I thought that this was prohibitive for what is essentially a step counting app. I eventually did pay because I like having the longer term virtual goals. I like the idea of walking around the Mont Blanc, or walking the Camino De Santiago. It is also nice to see some of the additional data you get. The app tells me that I have taken taken 18 million steps over 768 hours over a period of 1890m days for a total distance of 21,142 kilometres. I am also more active than 97.2 percent of the users within my age group.
The Niche It Aims At
I suspect that this app is aimed at people who are not in the habit of walking two hours a day. I think it is aimed to the type of people who walk half an hour to an hour a day but want to achieve more. It provides audio coaching, simple goals for steps, duration and more. It also offers nutritional advice and more. It also offers a group of people to interact with, who are not striving for KOMs, legendary status or personal records. It is aimed at runners, walkers, hikers and people who like to feel that their circular walks are leading to somewhere interesting. That’s why I eventually decided to play with the premium features for a year.
Today I participated in two Zwift events, a social ride and a race. The social ride was one hour of pedalling at a comfortable pace trying to keep to the same speed as the group. Rather than trying to be as fast as the group I was trying to pace myself to be within the peloton rather than riding off.
Social rides are amusing because you start on the peer and wait for the counter to get down to zero and when it does you go from being on a home trainer in the real world cycling on a home trainer in the virtual world to cycling on the roads of Watopia. Social rides are interesting because you have people from Australia, England, Denmark and many other countries, so long as they are in a timezone where it would be reasonable to cycle at such a time of day.
It’s the first time that I get out of bed, look at the schedule for Zwift events and feel excited about doing something virtual like riding a bike. Keep in mind that today I could have burned diesel by heading to St Triphon to climb with people I know. I felt no motivation to drive that far so I was happy to stay home.
Don’t be fooled into thinking that riding a bike on Zwift is riding an apartment bike because it isn’t. It’s similar to riding a bike in the real world, with real hills, virtual drafting, virtual fellow drivers, no cars and more. What is real is the conviviality, the desire to share a few phrases, the cheering and the desire to ride as a group.
During the ride we did sprint twice and on the first sprint I beat my personal record and on the second go I had less energy remaining. During the first sprint I put out up to 934 watts in theory. That’s enough energy for me to rest on the handle bars for a little bit before catching my breath and continuing.
When I ride in the real world it’s usually alone and I race against myself but when it’s on Zwift I have a choice between virtual social rides, virtual races, training, or just a “as the wind takes me” option. Of course there is no wind, I mean that you ride for the pleasure of riding.
A Race up a Volcano
The second ride of the morning, about 15 minutes after the first ride finished was a 15km race up the side of the volcano on the Watopia map. I thought that with my abilities I should select group D. I pedalled during the countdown to keep warm and a few seconds before the race started I pedalled at a higher cadence to compensate for the lag that I experience with my current setup. I started well but I tired more quickly than most. While I was trying to maintain 200 or more watts they were racing off into the distance. I found myself in 110th or lower positions but I continued pedalling. I tried to maintain between 180 watts and 220 watts. I kept looking at the riders beside me and most were category C riders.
Keeping up
I worked hard to keep the power up and at moments when I felt that I needed to rest I changed gear, changed my cadence, but tried to keep the cadence up. Usually my cadence is about 85 when I’m riding alone but in this race, as I tried to keep up it reached an average of 105 strokes per minute. Over the duration of the race I was generating about 2.61 watts per kilo.
I didn’t know what to expect from the other racers so my goal was simply not to be dropped into last position. After that and as I got closer to the end my goal was to be within the top one hundred so although my body wanted me to slow down I kept working at it. I was pushing at over 200 watts for 14:45 in this race.
I spent hours and days training on Zwift before I felt ready to try a race. I trained for multiple sessions and those sessions got me used to pushing beyond my comfort levels for minutes at a time and it paid off in this race. If I continue training I can aim for better positioning. Today I was in 6th place in D category out of over 40 riders and 99th out of 180+ riders. So half of the racers have trained more than me. I can continue training and see where I come up next time.
What I like about the race, that I don’t have except for sprints is information on how far it is to the end of the race. If I know for how many more kilometres I have to make an effort then psychologically I can push harder. This was just a short race at 15km and I would struggle on a longer race and I would struggle on the flat.
I want to participate in more races and I need to choose which training course to attempt next. It’s nice to race virtual cyclists rather than real cars, e-bikes or people on lighter bikes than the one I ride in the physical world. In the virtual world today I was riding a trek emonda. This might be geeky but it’s pushing me to be fitter so fewer people can object.
“The pathology of social media is all about loneliness”
Social media professionals take the weekend off. Twitter users use hashtags so that their content can be found without being followed. Everything is turned towards discoverability rather than commitment and conversation.
Social media practitioners know that people aren’t listening attentively so they repeat and repeat in the hope of a click or two. Hashtags are just a way of pretending that a conversation has had an audience. It doesn’t measure the number of comments and responses. It doesn’t measure how long threads lasted before they stopped.
There was a time when people like me would read every tweet from people we followed and we would converse daily. It created a lot of friendships and led to a lot of face to face meetings.
In today’s social media landscape I do see loneliness rather than socialising. I see on twitter that people are actively posting only once or twice a day. On Facebook I have seen such a serious decline in participation that there is little reason to stick around. My generation were active in social media for a short amount of time and now they have retreated to “normal” life.
Whilst some people have hundreds of likes on their instagram images I have half a dozen to a dozen. Almost every like on Instagram is a person that I have conversed with online for years. There is a chance that I can tell you how long we’ve been chatting online, whether we’ve met in person and at what event and which networks we have shared. Twitter friends were trusted enough to become facebook friends. Facebook and twitter friends followed on instagram etc.
Facebook was a very active and social place when we were all at university and having the same social life. Twitter was a very social network when I was looking for work and meeting the London Social Media crowd, the French social media crowd and the Swiss social media individuals.
Ingress has presented me with a large group of Swiss people whom I have met many times recently as an active player of Ingress. Many of them are around my age. Â We use Google hangouts to talk and plan missions and are in constant communication.
Glocals was good for finding people to explore new activities and locations with but the connection lasted only as long as the activities. There was little to no follow up socialising online. The Glocals Scuba diving group is the one I got along with best and the group with which I did the most activities. It’s a shame that this was an activity for people a decade older than me.
When I think of the social journey both online and offline I see that loneliness is not the pathology of social media. I joined Twitter because I love to try new things. Facebook was a network of university friends whom I saw every day. Seesmic was a network of people whom I developed strong friendships with that last to this day and Glocals was probably the only network I joined out of solitude and a need to do things on weekends. I like the irony that the network I joined to avoid solitude is the one that resulted in the deepest feeling of it. Eventually every social network becomes lonely but we would say the same about the city from which our friends have gone, of the bars and more.
Geneva is referred to as an airport hub. People come to the city for a year or two and then leave. As a result the refreshing of friendships is very high and it takes a certain personality to cope. Modern transportation; planes, cars, and trains create a pathology of loneliness and social media are part of the solution for as long as the social networks are frequented.
Once again I was out in the rain walking around a city. Once again I was looking downwards and then up. I was also looking around and navigating through a city I have been to before but only for a meal and on my way to another place. I went there for a blogobar event many months ago. More recently I went through the city on my way to a Via Ferrata near La Chaux De Fond. This time was different. I was meeting people who stare at their mobile phones when walking around city. To many of you this describes what you think is wrong with society. Too many people withdrawing from society, not interacting. This isn’t the case.
These people who met from 10am on a saturday until 1145 before a group picture was taken are ingress players. Ingress as you know from previous posts is a muntiplayer augmented reality game that people play by walking around in the real world. They walk towards buildings, monuments, statues and other sights of interest. As a group, as I wrote about yesterday we had three missions as a group. I only did two of these with the group. One of them required a physical walk up to the castle of Neuchatel and back down the slope. As we walked we saw parts of the city which I had yet to see. The second walk was from the train station down towards the lake side.
This is relevant for two reasons. The first of these is that I am a hiker and in summer I spend my weekends in the mountains. The second is that I have walked around more cities than I can remember. The best way to get to know a city is by walking. You gain a sense of scale. You understand it’s geography and you also see what points of interest are where and how they are connected. Rome is a city which I visited many times alone. I love the city because I love the life style contrast between Geneva and Rome. I also love the city because of it’s history. Where else do you park a car in a basement next to some Roman walls. Where else do you have two Millenia of history so visible?
Ingress today offered me an opportunity to meet with strangers and do activities with them, to see parts of a new city and to have company. So often mobile phones are associated with solitude and isolation. Through this account you may understand that mobile phones and especially smartphones can be inclusive. The conversations that we had through social media have faded as the noise has gone up and this is where social augmented reality games can pick up. They can provide a new opportunity for people to connect.
Next month I plan on going to Firenze for another event. So far over 600 people have signed up. They will come from around Europe and around the world to meet in a beautiful city with a rich cultural history. This will be the backdrop for the game. I look forward to visiting the city once again and meeting new people precisely because of smartphones rather than despite of them.
Forget the term new media, it’s passed, it’s gone. Today’s key word is social media. What this term means is the following. Any medium that encourages conversations via new technologies, whether twitter, blogs and podcasts or forums is a social media.
It is the idea that authority has disappeared. Rather than be talked to by the content producers a dialogue is formed. Liana Lehua of Girls gone geek.tv for example started following me just as I was listening to her talk on another podcast than your own.
There is no need for the tabloid press to tell us what the “rockstars” are doing, rather they tell us themselves. Look at Leo Laporte’s blog. Look at Documentally’s two websites. Look at Loudmouthman, Jeff Pulver and others. These people all create content for us to enjoy.
Each of these people is taking advantage of the social media to create a profile for their activities both as podcasts and textual content. Those who are new to the media, who have yet to create a name for themselves have a great opportunity. If you’re a sociable individual then take some time to learn about the social media movement and participate.
Participation is a key concept. We are all publishers, we all have a website. We have moo cards and they’re social media bookmarks. They’re just a quick way of sharing contact information. As soon as we get to our computers we add those we meet and keep up to date with what we’re doing. It creates a great sense of unity.
They’re also taking advantage of the new social media landscape. It’s a shame that most people are limited to zombie biting, vampires and other wastes of time rather than sharing their creative output. I wish more people would write about what’s important to them and share it via twitter, blogs and of course aggregate the content according to the various social media tools like Plaxo Pulse, Lijit and Tumblr.
This is a call for more people to take proper advantage of the current social media trends and participate more actively. Don’t just join a social network and post photographs. Write and produce content as well.
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