Everyware_ The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing - Adam Greenfield [101]
Even where the application of ubiquitous technology would clearly be useful, I know enough about how informatic systems are built and brought to market to be very skeptical about its chances of bringing wholesale improvement to the quality of my life.
Sure, I'd love to know when my friend Jamie is within a few blocks of my present location and available for a few pints of Guinness. I'd surely appreciate a little help finding the variety of tools and important documents I've stashed somewhere around the house and immediately forgotten. And I would not at all mind if my daily excursions and transactions were eased by the near-universal adoption of something along the lines of Hong Kong's Octopus system.
But I have a hard time buying into the notion that such ubiquitous interventions in the world can be had without significant cost. I see how readily the infrastructure that gets us these amenities also lends itself to repression, exclusion and the reinscription of class and other sorts of privilege. Above all, I see it occasioning hassle...unending hassle. I can't see that we'll derive much net improvement in quality of life from these and the other things everyware promises us—not unless we are exceedingly careful in devising and implementing the technology that under-girds them.
Nor do I see any reason to follow Teruyasu Murakami of Nomura Research in asking how the users of ubiquitous systems can "change their basic value systems to adapt to the new situation." Not only do I think this is a very, very bad idea, but it's also likely to be a painfully drawn-out exercise in futility.
We are who we are, in other words, in all the infuriating and delightful lineaments of our humanity. No matter how "convenient" it would be for us to learn to think and act in ways that accord with the technology we use, I very much doubt whether such a thing is practically achievable. Besides, we've seen what happens when we attempt to forge a New Man: the results are not pretty, to very large values of "not."
So maybe it would be wiser to develop an everyware that suits us, as opposed to the other way around—not that this will be very much easier. In fact, if you get nothing else from this book, I hope you at least come away from it with an understanding of how richly nuanced everyday life turns out to be and how difficult it will be to design ubiquitous systems sophisticated enough to capture those nuances.
We seem to have a hard time with the notion that some aspects of life are simply too important, too meaningful, and too delicate to subject to the rather clumsy interventions of our present information technology. Moreover, anyone venturing to question the wisdom of such interventions risks being branded a neo-Luddite, or worse. In his 1999 e-topia, MIT Media Lab professor William Mitchell rather blithely mocked "dogmatic and deterministic Chicken Little" perspectives on technology, dismissing out of hand "those now-familiar glum assertions that the digital revolution must inevitably reinscribe the nastier existing patterns of power and privilege, while trampling on treasured traditions as it does so."
Frankly, I find Mitchell's disdainful tone unjustified, even bizarre. While I don't believe anything in the world is engraved in stone, I do think that each technology we invent contains certain inherent potentials for use. I also think we're foolish if we do not at least consider these potentials and where they lead to undesirable outcomes, take pains to circumvent them.
What seems lost on Mitchell, and on the many others holding similar views,