Everyware_ The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing - Adam Greenfield [2]
It is coming—and as yet, the people who will be most affected by it, the overwhelming majority of whom are nontechnical, nonspecialist, ordinary citizens of the developed world, barely know it even exists.
This is not due to any inherent obscurity or lack of interest in the field; to date, there have been some seven annual Ubicomp conferences, three Pervasives, and a wide scatter of smaller but otherwise similar colloquia. These are established events, in academic terms: well-attended, underwritten by companies such as Intel, Sony, Nokia and Samsung. There are at least three peer-reviewed professional journals exclusively dedicated to ubiquitous or pervasive computing. There has been no dearth of discussion of everyware...but little of this discussion, and virtually none that might offer enough information on which to build meaningful choices, has reached the mainstream.
There is a window of time before the issues we've touched upon become urgent daily realities for most of us, but it is narrowing by the day. As of this writing, "u-" for "ubiquitous" has already joined "e-" and "i-" in the parade of content-free buzz-prefixes used by the marketers of technology to connote trendiness; not a day goes by without the appearance of some relevant news item.
We hear about RFID tags being integrated into employee ID cards, a new modular sensor grid on the architectural market, a networking scheme proposing to use the body's own electrical field to carry information—and this in the general press, not the specialist journals. There's already a steady stream of prototype everyware emerging from the research labs and the more advanced corporate design studios, no matter whether they're answers to questions nobody's much asked.
With actual, consumer-facing applications (and implications) starting to appear, it's time for discussions about everyware's potential for risk and reward to leave the tight orbit of academic journals and conferences behind. If everyware hasn't yet reached its Betamax vs. VHS stage—that stage in the adoption of any new technology where the standards that will determine the particulars of its eventual shape are ironed out—we can see that it's not so terribly far off. It's time for the people who have the most at stake in the emergence of this technology to take their rightful place at the table. The challenge now is to begin thinking about how we can mold that emergence to suit our older prerogatives of personal agency, civil liberty, and simple sanity.
4.
I'm afraid that readers looking for a technical explanation of RFID tag readers, gestural interfaces, or operating systems capable of juggling the multiple, distributed events of ubiquitous environments will be sorely disappointed in this book. My intention here is simply to describe what ubiquitous computing is; establish that it is a very real concern for all of us, and in the relatively near term; explore some of the less-obvious implications of its spread as a paradigm; and finally, develop some ideas about how we might improve it.
How can we deliver the promise of everyware while forestalling some of the pitfalls that are already apparent? How can we, as users and consumers, hope to influence something that is already in the process of unfolding?
The pages to come will frame an answer to these questions. In the balance of this book, we'll explore what the emergence of robust, real-world everyware will mean, in terms useful to the designers and developers of such systems, to the marketers tasked with selling them, and to the policymakers charged with bringing them into conformance with our other agreements about the world. We'll consider some of the deeper context in which notions of everyware arise, in the hope that if we stand back far enough, we can see how all its