Everyware_ The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing - Adam Greenfield [54]
As computing technology becomes less overt and less conspicuous, it gets harder to see that devices are designed, manufactured, and marketed by some specific institution, that network and interface standards are specified by some body, and so on. A laptop is clearly made by Toshiba or Dell or Apple, but what about a situation?
This is the flipside of the seeming inevitability we've considered, the argument against technodeterminism. Despite the attributes that appear to inhere in technologies even at the very moment that they come into being, there is always human agency involved—always. So if RFID "wants" to be everywhere and part of everything, if IPv6 "wants" to transform everything in the world into a node, we should remember to ask: Who designed them to be that way? Who specified a networking protocol or an address space with these features, and why did they make these decisions and not others?
Historically, its opacity to the nonspecialist has lent technological development an entirely undeserved aura of inevitability, which in turn has tended to obscure questions of agency and accountability. This is only exacerbated in the case of a technology that is also literally bordering on the imperceptible.
Most difficult of all is the case when we cease to think of some tool as being "technology" at all—as studies in Japan and Norway indicate is currently true of mobile phones, at least in those places. Under such circumstances, the technology's governing metaphors and assumptions have an easier time infiltrating the other decisions we make about the world. Their effects come to seem more normal, more natural, simply the way things are done, while gestures of refusal become that much harder to make or to justify. And that is something that should give us pause, at the cusp of our embrace of something as insinuative and as hard to see as everyware.
Thesis 40
The discourse of seamlessness effaces or elides meaningful distinctions between systems.
Closely related to the question of everyware's imperceptibility is its seamlessness. This is the idea that both the inner workings of a given system and its junctures with others should be imperceptible to the user, and it's been extraordinarily influential in ubicomp circles over the last eight or ten years. In fact, seamless has become one of those words that one rarely hears except in the context of phrases like "seamless interaction," "seamless integration," "seamless interconnection," or "seamless interfaces."
The notion inarguably has a pedigree in the field; the term itself goes straight back to the ubiquitous Mark Weiser. Ironically enough, though, given its later widespread currency, Weiser regarded seamlessness as an undesirable and fundamentally homogenizing attribute in a ubiquitous system.
Without seams, after all, it's hard to tell where one thing ends and something else begins—points of difference and distinction tend to be smoothed over or flattened out. very much alive to this danger, Weiser advocated the alternative concept of "seamfulness, with beautiful seams," in which users are helped to understand the systems they encounter, how they work, and what happens at their junctures with one another by the design of the systems themselves.
However rewarding, properly providing the user with seamful experiences is obviously a rather time-consuming and difficult way to go about doing things. Maybe this is why Matthew Chalmers and Ian MacColl, then of the University of Glasgow, found in 2003 that Weiser's musings had been oddly inverted in the process of their reification. Phrases invoking seam-lessness positively peppered the ubicomp literature they surveyed, from IBM's pervasive computing Web site to the EU's prospectus for its Disappearing Computer