Murmur

Class runs late, ok so half an hour to eat and get back to class, great.

Oh wait, even less time as our instructor reminds us there is a speaker we should see presenting in the auditorium hallway. My classmate and I grab some bad chinese food from the cafeteria.

There we are standing in hallway trying to eat slippery noodles and take in a speech in the fifteen to twenty minutes left of our lunch hour.

The presenter is a young man (younger than me anyhow) named Dave Sonny a graduate student from centennial. The subject he is presenting is a project he participated in called ‘Murmur’ (I’ll explain shortly). Unfortunately for Dave it seems public speaking is not his forte’ and he probably should have let one of his taskmates do the speech. It was fairly obvious that Dave was uncomfortable speaking in public and spent most of the time ‘umming’ and staring down at his notes, not engaging the audience…..etc.

Ok, I’ll stop picking in Dave and get to the subject he presented.

Despite the bad speaking (whoops slipped) the subject of ‘Murmur’ was quite interesting. The premise behind the project was to put stations in various cities (Toronto and Dublin to name a couple) at various points of interest with a phone number to call using a cellphone.

Callers would be linked via an entry code to information pertaining to that particular site they were calling from. Kinda neat huh? Ok.. kinda museum info kiosk as well, but here’s the catch. Listeners at each station are also encouraged to leave a message regarding their experience at that site which can also be accessed by future callers. Now it’s interactive!

I can see this being a great way to bring interest to sections of a city that tourists (or even adventurous locals). And help revive points of interest that would otherwise be overlooked because they aren’t near a major tourist trap. Perhaps it will generate more of a sense of community pride for the areas surrounding the sites. Any reaction like that is always a good thing.

More information can be gleaned at www.wirelesstoronto.ca

~ by cparmstrong on December 12, 2007.