oobi is love

[devi]

It's like my experiment, but in the 60s and with cute googly eyes...

muffledsqueak pointed me at the Oobi site. Oobi was a little plastic egg-shape with cartoon eyes. You put a message inside it, addressed it and left it somewhere, and the idea was that it would get carried a little way by one passer-by, then another and another, till it arrived at its destination. That was the idea. In practice, people hated it. That's actually the word they use, hated. The few that were sent vanished without trace.

I'm annoyed with the site for being so cynical and snide about the whole thing. I think it's a beautiful idea. I'd go well out of my way to transport an Oobi if I found one.

Thinking about how things like bookcrossing have caught on, and how many people have signed up for my letter stunt, it almost seems people are more open to an idea like this than they were in the 60s. Is it the Internet? Would people be more willing to release Oobis or carry them some of the way if they could come online and track them, or report having found one?

Maybe the little critter's time has come.

Comments

[wyvernfriend.livejournal.com]

are you involved in Bookcrossing?

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

Kind of - I'm on the site as devi, but I've only ever released three books, and never found any.

[wyvernfriend.livejournal.com]

Ah, I'm, well, Wyvernfriend

[wyvernfriend.livejournal.com]

And most of my found releases are bookcrossingIE pass-ons!

[mzdt.livejournal.com]

Remind me to lend you The Missing Postman at some point... ;-)

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

Somehow.. somehow it's not a friendly thing, it's not that fortuitious ratio of circles that makes a happy 'Mickey Mouse' face or a soppy Tamagochi. I think that's the problem, the presentation rather than the subject.

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

I dunno, I think it's cute. In a slightly sinister little alien way.

[hatter.livejournal.com]

I think people are more open to the idea of loosely connecting with strangers, with less involved, more transient personal relationships. Larger communities of all sorts, be it corporate, globally distributed families (and the communications to cheaply and effortlessly send them a purely habitual 'hello' every once in a while), or the more obvious online communities where we find stranger (lj and IM both spring to mind).

Similarly look at things such as flashmob, people putting in a small commitment, to be some part of a talked about phenomenon, however fleeting the fame is. And another side of the motivation, we've seen how a huge number of little contributions can really make a mark, band aid as the oldest example that springs to my mind, but a plethora followed, slickly presented, widely targetted, most people only giving a pound, yet on that alone, £50M appears for a worthy cause almost overnight.

I'm not convinced that oobis would be as successful today though, they were a commercial product, so much today can be done because either the medium is free, or any physicial side has trivial notional value (taking a letter with you somewhere, maybe spending 5 minutes on a detour, 2 minutes printing out bookcrossing details to stick in you book) If they were re-released today, I'd expect some clever, freer clone, something such as a fast food container, marked in a specific manner, to rapidly become the 'cool' alternative.


the hatter

[carbonunit.livejournal.com]

That Oobi thing offends me because of the eyes. It's too obviously trying to compell it's "host" to carry it to it's destination by using cuteness, which makes me feel like crushing it instead. I tend to react to any attempt to compell me to do something using subterfuge or camoflage or hooks into my mammalian responses in the same manner. Like scratching away a parasitic bug.

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

I presume you don't have a cat, then.

[carbonunit.livejournal.com]

We have 7.

Surely you're not implying that cats are parasites using cuteness to manipulate their human hosts responses? Why, that's absurd! I mean.. uh... cats are different.

The difference is, cats are natural, but Oobi is a commercial product. The intention of Oobi is not so much to get you to carry it, but to buy it in the first place.

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

I wanted to give you a link to a filksong about cats surviving and manipulating humans based entirely on their cuteness, but when I googled for the lyrics... oh god, I can barely say this. The only place I could find them was...

*shudder*

This deserves a post of its own, I think.

[venta.livejournal.com]

On Saturday, at a folk festival, someone I didn't know gave me a packet of photos to give to someone else I don't know.

The photographer approached my mum (on the festival's organising committee) to ask how he should get the photos to a team who attended last year's festival. The team is from Ducklington, Oxon, so mum figured giving them to me would at least get them to the right end of the country.

I'll probably hand them on to someone who lives locally and is involved in Cotswold morris dancing - and the photos will each their destination eventually.

As long as I can remember things have made their way up and down the country (and, in the case of my absent-minded uncle, back from continental Europe when he left them there) in this way. It delights me that the network works.

[pionie.livejournal.com]

This says as much about what nice people you and your mum must be as anything else :)

[venta.livejournal.com]

Well, obviously, we're lovely :)

But there are enough nice people hanging about on the UK folk music/dance scene to make it viable to hand over messages/lost property/etc to complete strangers. Which is great.

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

Oh, no, I wasn't overall annoyed - I was charmed by the idea first and foremost. The annoyance at the cynicism was incidental. And thanks for the pointer.

Congrats on getting your wallet back!