Wednesday, April 15, 2009

NIN app and attention

Nine Inch Nails has released an iPhone app that lets users browse the website and send messages either to each other or globally. One can go to access.nin.com (Google Earth plugin will be required to view map) and watch the messages pop up on a global map more or less in real time.




I wonder what the map will look like during a tour - more densely blue populated wherever NIN is playing that night, I suppose. This app will also let fans connect to each other during or before a show, opening up all sorts of possibilities.

Can each blue point be read as a point of attention? If we look at the flow of dots over time, can it be said to be a flowing attention map centered around NIN? Each dot also contains information in the form of a message, potentially altering the type of attention. Even when users are talking to each other on this app, NIN remains the hub, garnering some (most?) of the attention even of a two-way conversation between third parties.