Everyware_ The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing - Adam Greenfield [67]
An old Taoist proverb asks whether it is wiser to pave the world in soft leather or simply find yourself a nice comfortable pair of shoes. Along similar lines, some question the wisdom of any attempt to instrument the wider world. Such unwieldy "infrastructural" approaches, they argue, amount to overkill, when all that is really desired is that people have access to services wherever they happen to go.
One such perspective is offered by Teruyasu Murakami, head of research for Nomura Research Institute and author of a doctrine Nomura calls the "ubiquitous network paradigm." In Murakami's view, the mobile phone or its immediate descendent, the Ubiquitous Communicator, will do splendidly as a mediating artifact for the delivery of services.* His point: is it really necessary to make the heavy investment required for an infrastructural approach to the delivery of services if people can take the network with them?
* Contemporary Japanese ubicomp schemes often specify the use of such "Ubiquitous Communicators" or "UCs." While the form factors and capabilities of UCs are rarely specified in detail, it can be assumed that they will follow closely on the model offered by current-generation keitai, or mobile phones.
Taking the present ubiquity of PDAs, smartphones, and mobiles as a point of departure, scenarios like Murakami's—similar schemes have in the past been promoted by the likes of Nokia and the old AT&T—imagine that the widest possible range of daily tasks will be mediated by a single device, the long-awaited "remote control for your life." If you live outside one of the places on Earth where mobile phone usage is all but universal, this may sound a little strange to you, but it happens to be a perfectly reasonable point of view (with the usual reservations) if you live in Japan. *
* The reservations are both practical and philosophical: What happens if you lose your Ubiquitous Communicator, or leave it at home? But also: Why should people have to subscribe to phone services if all they want is to avail themselves of pervasive functionality?
In the West, the development of everyware has largely proceeded along classically Weiserian lines, with the project understood very much as an infrastructural undertaking. In Japan, as has been the case so often in the past, evolution took a different fork, resulting in what the cultural anthropologist Mizuko Ito has referred to as an "alternatively technologized modernity."
With adoption rates for domestic broadband service lagging behind other advanced consumer cultures—North America, Western Europe, Korea—and a proportionally more elaborate culture emerging around keitai, it didn't make much sense for Japan to tread quite the same path to everyware as other places. The Web per se has never met with quite the same acceptance here as elsewhere; by contrast, mobile phones are inescapable, and the range of what people use them for is considerably broader. Many things North Americans or Europeans might choose to do via the Web—buy movie tickets, download music, IM a friend—are accomplished locally via the mobile Internet.
Ito argues that "the Japan mobile Internet case represents a counterweight to the notion that PC-based broadband is the current apex of
Internet access models; characteristics such as ubiquity, portability, and lightweight engagement form an alternative constellation of 'advanced' Internet access characteristics that contrast to complex functionality and stationary immersive engagement."
Indeed, in the words of a 2005 design competition sponsored by Japanese mobile market leader NTT DoCoMo, the mobile phone "has become an indispensable tool for constructing the infrastructure of everyday life." Despite the rather self-serving nature of this proposition, and its prima facie falsehood in the context