Everyware_ The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing - Adam Greenfield [18]
We shouldn't lose sight of just how profound a proposition voice-recognition represents when it is coupled to effectors deployed in the wider environment. For the first time, the greater mass of humanity can be provided with a practical mechanism by which their "perlocutionary" utterances—speech acts intended to bring about a given state—can change the shape and texture of reality.
Whatever else comes of this, though, computing equipped with tangible, gestural, and audio-channel interfaces is set free to inhabit a far larger number and variety of places in the world than can be provided for by conventional methods.
Thesis 11
Everyware appears not merely in more places than personal computing does, but in more different kinds of places, at a greater variety of scales.
In principle, at least as far as some of the more enthusiastic proponents of ubicomp are concerned, few human places exist that could not be usefully augmented by networked information processing.
Whether or not we happen to agree with this proposition ourselves, we should consider it likely that over the next few years we'll see computing appear in a very great number of places (and kinds of places) previously inaccessible to it. What would this mean in practice?
Some classic sites for the more traditional sort of personal computing are offices, libraries, dorm rooms, dens, and classrooms. (If we want to be generous, we might include static informational kiosks.)
When people started using wireless-equipped laptops, this domain expanded to include coffee houses, transit lounges, airliner seats, hotel rooms, airport concourses—basically anywhere it would be socially acceptable to sit and balance a five-pound machine on your knees, should it come to that.
The advent of a mobile computing based on smartphones and wireless PDAs opened things up still further, both technically and interpersonally. On top of the kinds of places where laptops are typically used, we can spot people happily tapping away at their mobile devices on, in, and around sidewalks, cars, waiting rooms, supermarkets, bus stops, civic plazas, commuter trains.
But extending this consideration to include ubiquitous systems is almost like dividing by zero. How do you begin to discuss the "place" of computing that subsumes all of the above situations, but also invests processing power in refrigerators, elevators, closets, toilets, pens, tollbooths, eyeglasses, utility conduits, architectural surfaces, pets, sneakers, subway turnstiles, handbags, HvAC equipment, coffee mugs, credit cards, and many other things?
The expansion not merely in the number of different places where computing can be engaged, but in the range of scales involved, is staggering. Let's look at some of them in terms of specific projects and see how everyware manifests in the world in ways and in places previous apparitions of computing could not.
Thesis 12
Everyware acts at the scale of the body.
Of all the new frontiers opening up for computation, perhaps the most startling is that of the human body. As both a rich source of information in itself and the vehicle by which we experience the world, it was probably inevitable that sooner or later somebody would think to reconsider it as just another kind of networked resource.
The motivations for wanting to do so are many: to leverage the body as a platform for mobile services; to register its position in space and time; to garner information that can be used to tailor the provision of other local services, like environmental controls; and to gain accurate and timely knowledge of the living body, in all the occult complexity of its inner workings.
It's strange, after all, to live in our bodies for as long as we do, to know them about as intimately as anything ever can be known, and to still have so little idea about how they work. The opacity of our relationship with our physical selves is particularly frustrating given