Everyware_ The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing - Adam Greenfield [64]
But who, really, is this mysterious "we" I keep talking about? Up until this point, I've spoken as though responsibility for determining the shape of the ubiquitous future is general in the world and in the audience for these words as well—but surely not everyone reading this book will be able to exert an identical amount of influence on that shape. As we head into the next section, then, we'll consider these questions with a greater degree of rigor: Who gets to speak for users? And just who will decide what kind of everyware we're to be furnished with?
Section 5.
Who Gets to Determine the Shape of Everyware?
Beyond the purely technical, there are powerful social, cultural, and economic forces that will act as boundary constraints on the kind of everyware that comes into being. What are these forces? What sorts of influences will they bring to bear on the ubiquitous technology we encounter in daily life? And especially, who has the power to decide these issues?
Thesis 47
The practice of technological development is tending to become more decentralized.
Sometime in early 2002—in an agnÈs b. store in Shibuya, of all places—I heard the full-throated sound of the new century for the first time. The track thumping from the store's sound system bent the familiar surge of Iggy and the Stooges' "No Fun" to the insistent beat of "Push It" by Salt'n'Pepa, and it was just as the old commercials promised: These truly were two great tastes that tasted great together. Rarely, in fact, had any music sent such an instant thrill of glee and profound rightness through me. The next track smashed the velvet Underground classic "I'm Waiting For The Man" into some gormless eighties hit, and that was almost as tasty; I found myself literally pogo-dancing around the store.
I had caught the mashup virus. A mashup is just about what it sounds like: the result of a DJ taking two unrelated songs and—by speeding, slowing, or otherwise manipulating one or both of them—hybridizing them into something entirely new. Anyone can do it, really, but the genius of a truly clever mashup is finding some note of deep complementarity in two source texts that seemingly could not possibly have less to do with one another. After all, until this particular gang of provocateurs—a Belgian duo calling themselves 2 Many DJs—came along, who ever would have thought that a prime slab of Motor City protopunk circa 1969 would have worked so well against a sassily righteous hip-hop single of the mid-1980s?
I was hooked, all right. What I didn't understand at the time, though, was that I had also been given a first glimpse of one of the most important ideas to hit software development since object-oriented programming achieved widespread acceptance in the mid-1980s. The cultural logic of the mashup, in which amateurs pick up pieces already at hand and plug them into each other in unexpected and interesting ways, turns out to be perfectly suited to an age of open and distributed computational resources—the "small pieces loosely joined" that make up the contemporary World Wide Web, in essayist David Weinberger's evocative phrasing.
In the case of the Web, the ingredients of a mashup are not songs, but services provided by sites such as Google and yahoo! and the community site Craigslist, each of which generates enormous quantities of data on a daily basis. Services like these have at their core an extensive database that is more or less richly tagged with metadata—information about information, such as where and when a picture was taken, or the ZIP code of an apartment listing. When millions of pieces of such self-describing data are made available—tossed on the table like so many Lego bricks, as it were—it's easy for third-party applications to pick them up and plug them into one another.
And so we see mashups from HousingMaps, which combines apartment listings from Craigslist with Google Maps to produce a searchable map