Everyware_ The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing - Adam Greenfield [3]
If we make wise choices about the terms on which we accept it, we can extend the utility and convenience of ubiquitous computing to billions of lives, addressing dissatisfactions as old as human history. Or we can watch passively as the world fills up with ubiquitous systems not designed with our interests at heart—at best presenting us with moments of hassle, disruption, and frustration beyond number, and at worst laying the groundwork for the kind of repression the despots of the twentieth century could only dream about.
The stakes, this time, are unusually high. A mobile phone is something that can be switched off or left at home. A computer is something that can be shut down, unplugged, walked away from. But the technology we're discussing here—ambient, ubiquitous, capable of insinuating itself into all the apertures everyday life affords it—will form our environment in a way neither of those technologies can. There should be little doubt that its advent will profoundly shape both the world and our experience of it in the years ahead.
As to whether we come to regard that advent as boon, burden, or blunder, that is very much up to us and the decisions we make now.
A NOTE ON Everyware
Every argument in this book is, at root, predicated on the continuing existence and vitality of our highly energy-intensive technological civilization. This book should not be construed as a statement of belief that our current way of life is in fact sustainable.
Section 1.
What is Everyware?
Ever more pervasive, ever harder to perceive, computing has leapt off the desktop and insinuated itself into everyday life. Such ubiquitous information technology—"everyware"—will appear in many different contexts and take a wide variety of forms, but it will affect almost every one of us, whether we're aware of it or not.
What is everyware? How can we recognize it when we encounter it? And how can we expect it to show up in our lives?
Thesis 01
There are many ubiquitous computings.
Almost twenty years ago, a researcher at the legendary Xerox Palo Alto Research Center wrote an article—a sketch, really—setting forth the outlines of what computing would look like in a post-PC world.
The researcher's name was Mark Weiser, and his thoughts were summarized in a brief burst simply entitled "Ubiquitous Computing #1." In it, as in the series of seminal papers and articles that followed, Weiser developed the idea of an "invisible" computing, a computing that "does not live on a personal device of any sort, but is in the woodwork everywhere."
What Weiser was describing would be nothing less than computing without computers. In his telling, desktop machines per se would largely disappear, as the tiny, cheap microprocessors that powered them faded into the built environment. But computation would flourish, becoming intimately intertwined with the stuff of everyday life.
In this context, "ubiquitous" meant not merely "in every place," but also "in every thing." Ordinary objects, from coffee cups to raincoats to the paint on the walls, would be reconsidered as sites for the sensing and processing of information, and would wind up endowed with surprising new properties. Best of all, people would interact with these systems fluently and naturally, barely noticing the powerful informatics they were engaging. The innumerable hassles presented by personal computing would fade into history.
Even for an institution already famed for paradigm-shattering innovations—the creation of the graphical user interface and the Ethernet networking protocol notable among them—Weiser's "ubicomp" stood out as an unusually bold vision. But while the line of thought he developed at PARC may have offered the first explicit, technically articulated formulation of a ubiquitous