Everyware_ The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing - Adam Greenfield [35]
Everyware may not always reify social relations with quite the same clunky intensity that JAPELAS does, but it will invariably reflect the assumptions its designers bring to it. Just as with JAPELAS, those assumptions will result in orderings—and those orderings will be manifested pervasively, in everything from whose preferences take precedence while using a home-entertainment system to which of the injured supplicants clamoring for the attention of the er staff gets cared for first.
As if that weren't enough to chew on, there will also be other significant social consequences of everyware. among other things, the presence of an ambient informatics will severely constrain the presentation of self, even to ourselves.
This is because information that can be called upon at any time and in any place necessarily becomes part of social transactions in a way that it could not when bound to fixed and discrete devices. we already speak of Googling new acquaintances—whether prospective hires or potential lovers—to learn what we can of them. But this is rarely something we do in their presence; it's something we do, rather, when we remember it, back in front of our machine, hours or days after we've actually made the contact.
What happens when the same information is pushed to us in real time, at the very moment we stand face to face with someone else? what happens when we're offered a new richness of facts about a human being—their credit rating, their claimed affinities, the acidity of their sweat—from sources previously inaccessible, especially when those facts are abstracted into high-level visualizations as simple (and decisive) as a check or a cross-mark appearing next to them in the augmented view provided by our glasses?
And above all, what happens when the composite view we are offered of our own selves conflicts with the way we would want those selves to be perceived?
Erving Goffman taught us, way back in 1958, that we are all actors. we all have a collection of masks, in other words, to be swapped out as the exigencies of our transit through life require: one hour stern boss, the next anxious lover. who can maintain a custody of the self conscious and consistent enough to read as coherent throughout all the input modes everyware offers?
What we're headed for, I'm afraid, is a milieu in which sustaining different masks for all the different roles in our lives will prove to be untenable, if simply because too much information about our previous decisions will follow us around. And while certain futurists have been warning us about this for years, for the most part even they hadn't counted on the emergence of a technology capable of closing the loop between the existence of such information and its actionability in everyday life. For better or worse, everyware is that technology.
We've taken a look, now, at the ways in which everyware will differ from personal computing and seen that many of its implications are quite profound. Given the magnitude of the changes involved, and their disruptive nature, why does this paradigm shift seem so inevitable? Why have I felt so comfortable asserting that this will happen, or is happening, or even, occasionally, has happened? Especially about something that at the moment mostly seems to be manifested in prototypes and proofs of concept? you may recall that I believe the emergence of everyware is over-determined—and in the next section, we'll get into a good deal of depth as to why I think this is so.
Section 3.
What's Driving the Emergence of Everyware?
Section 2 explored why the transition from personal computing to a technology of ubiquitous networked devices is truly a "paradigm shift." Why does the emergence of such a radical and potentially disruptive technology seem so ineluctable? What are some of the converging trends that support its emergence?
Thesis 24
Everyware, or something very much like it, is effectively