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of the people we know. An ambient version—and such systems have been proposed—could interpose these profiles in real time, augmenting the first glimpse of an acquaintance with an overlay of their name, a list of the friends we have in common, and an indication of how warmly we regard them. The benefit qua memory augmentation is obvious, perfect for those of us who always feel more than a little guilty about forgetting someone's name. But doesn't this begin to redefine what it means to "recognize" or to "know" someone? (We'll see in the next thesis that such a degree of explicitness poses significant challenges socially as well as semantically.)

Take exercise, or play, or sexuality, all of which will surely become sites of intense mediation in a fully developed everyware milieu. Something as simple as hiking in the wilderness becomes almost unrecognizable when overlaid with GPS location, sophisticated visual pattern-recognition algorithms, and the content of networked geological, botanical, and zoological databases—you won't get lost, surely, or mistake poisonous mushrooms for the edible varieties, but it could hardly be said that you're "getting away from it all."

Even meditation is transformed into something new and different: since we know empirically that the brains of Tibetan monks in deep contemplation show regular alpha-wave patterns, it's easy to imagine environmental interventions, from light to sound to airflow to scent, designed to evoke the state of mindfulness, coupled to a body-monitor setting that helps you recognize when you've entered it.

If these scenarios present us with reason to be concerned about ubiquitous interventions, this doesn't necessarily mean we should forgo all such attempts to invest the world with computational power. It simply means that we have to be unusually careful about what we're doing, more careful certainly than we've been in the past. Because by and large, whatever frustrations our sojourns in the world present us with, we've had a long time to get used to them; to paraphrase Paul Robeson, we suits ourselves. Whatever marginal "improvement" is enacted by overlaying daily life with digital mediation has to be balanced against the risk of screwing up something that already works, however gracelessly or inelegantly.

Eliel Saarinen—Eero's father, and a professor of architecture in his own right—invariably reminded his students that they must "[a]lways design a thing by considering it in its next larger context." The implications of this line of thought for everyware are obvious: In some particularly delicate circumstances, it would probably be wisest to leave well enough alone.

Thesis 35

Everyware surfaces and makes explicit information that has always been latent in our lives, and this will frequently be incommensurate with social or psychological comfort.

Remember BodyMedia, the company responsible for the conformal, Band-Aid–sized SenseWear sensor? BodyMedia's vice president for product design, Chris Kasabach, says the company thinks of the living body as a "continuous beacon": "signals can either fall on the floor, or you can collect them and they can tell you something higher-level" about the organism in question.

Stripped of its specific referent, this is as good a one-sentence description of the data-discovery aspect of everyware as you are ever likely to come across. Everyware's mesh of enhanced objects dispersed throughout everyday life also happens to offer a way of collecting the signals already out there and making of them a gnosis of the world.

In the case of the body especially, these signals have always been there. All that's really new about SenseWear is the conjoined ambition and practical wherewithal to capture and interpret such signals—and to make use of them. This is true of many things. The world is increasingly becoming a place where any given fact is subject to both quantification and publication—and not merely those captured by the various kinds of sensors we encounter, but also ones that you or I have volunteered.

The truth of this was driven