Everyware_ The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing - Adam Greenfield [34]
Relationality has its limits. We know that a change anywhere in a tightly-coupled system ripples and cascades through everything connected to it, under the right (or wrong) circumstances rendering the whole mesh exquisitely vulnerable to disruption. Nevertheless, it's hard to imagine that a world so richly provisioned with sources of information, so interwoven with the means to connect them, would not eventually provoke someone to take maximum advantage of their joining.
Thesis 23
Everyware has profoundly different social implications than previous information-technology paradigms.
By its very nature, a computing so pervasive and so deeply intertwined with everyday life will exert a transformative influence on our relationships with ourselves and with each other.
In fact, wherever it appears in the world, everyware is always already of social consequence. It can hardly be engaged without raising issues of trust, reputation, credibility, status, respect, and the presentation of self.
Take JAPELAS, a recent Tokushima University project that aims to establish the utility of ubiquitous technology in the classroom—in this case, a Japanese-language classroom. One of the complications of learning to speak Japanese involves knowing which of the many levels of politeness is appropriate in a given context, and this is just what JAPELAS sets out to teach.
The system determines the "appropriate" expression by trying to assess the social distance between interlocutors, their relative status, and the overall context of their interaction; it then supplies the student with the chosen expression, in real time.
Context is handled straightforwardly: Is the setting a bar after class, a job interview, or a graduation ceremony? Social distance is also relatively simple to determine—are these students in my class, in another class at the same school, or do they attend a different school altogether? But to gauge social status, JAPELAS assigns a rank to every person in the room, and this ordering is a function of a student's age, position, and affiliations.
The previous paragraph probably won't raise any red flags for Japanese readers. Why should it? All that JAPELAS does is encode into a technical system rules for linguistic expression that are ultimately derived from conventions about social rank that already existed in the culture. Any native speaker of Japanese makes determinations like these a hundred times a day, without ever once thinking about them: a senior outranks a freshman, a TA outranks a student, a tenured professor outranks an adjunct, and a professor at one of the great national universities outranks somebody who teaches at a smaller regional school. It's "natural" and "obvious."
But to me, it makes a difference when distinctions like these are inscribed in the unremitting logic of an information-processing system.* Admittedly, JAPELAS is "just" a teaching tool, and a prototype at that, so maybe it can be forgiven a certain lack of nuance; you'd be drilled with the same rules by just about any human teacher, after all. (I sure was.) It is nevertheless disconcerting to think how easily such discriminations can be hard-coded into something seemingly neutral and unimpeachable and to consider the force they have when uttered by such a source. And where PC-based learning systems also observe such distinctions, they generally do so in their own bounded non-space, not out here in the world.
* As someone nurtured on notions of egalitarianism, however hazy, the idea that affiliations have rank especially raises my hackles. I don't like the idea that the city I was born in, the school I went to, or the military unit I belonged to peg me as belonging higher (or lower) on the totem