Everyware_ The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing - Adam Greenfield [68]
Given the facts on the ground, Japanese developers wisely decided to concentrate on the ubiquitous delivery of services via keitai—for example, the RFID-tagged streetlamps of Shinjuku already discussed, or the QR codes we'll be getting to shortly. And as both phones themselves and the array of services available for them become more useful and easier to use, we approach something recognizable as the threshold of everyware. This is a culture that has already made the transition to a regime of ambient informatics—as long, that is, as you have a phone. As a result, it's a safe bet to predict that the greater part of Japanese efforts at designing everyware will follow the mobile model for the foreseeable future.
Rather than casting this as an example of how Japanese phone culture is "more advanced" than North America's, or, conversely, evidence that Japan "doesn't get the Web" (the latter a position I myself have been guilty of taking in the past), it is simply the case that different pressures are operating in these two advanced technological cultures—different tariffs on voice as opposed to data traffic, different loci of control over pricing structures, different physical circumstances resulting in different kinds of legacy networks, different notions about monopoly and price-fixing—and they've predictably produced characteristically different effects. This will be true of every local context in which ideas about ubiquitous computing appear.
Many of the boundary conditions around the development of everyware will be sociocultural in nature. For example, one point of view I've heard expressed in the discussion around contemporary Korean ubicomp projects is that East Asians, as a consequence of the Confucian values their societies are at least nominally founded on, are more fatalistic about issues of privacy than Westerners would be in similar circumstances. I'm not at all sure I buy this myself, but the underlying point is sound: Different initial conditions of culture will reliably produce divergent everywares.
Is there more than one pathway to everyware? Absolutely. Individuals make choices about technology all the time, and societies do as well. I won't have a video game in the house—the last thing I need is another excuse to burn life time; I've never particularly warmed to fax machines; and I do not and will not do SMS. On a very different level, the governments of Saudi Arabia and the People's Republic of China have clearly decided that the full-on clamor of the Internet is not for them—or, more properly, not for their citizens. So the nature and potential of technology only go so far in determining what is made of it. The truly vexing challenge will reside in deciding what kind of everyware is right for this place, at this time, under these circumstances.
Thesis 51
The precise shape of everyware is contingent on the decisions made by designers, regulators, and markets of empowered buyers. The greater mass of people exposed to such systems are likely to have relatively little say in their composition.
If societies are afforded some leeway in choosing just how a particular technology appears, what does history tell us about how this process has played out in the recent past?
Societies, as it happens, turn their backs on technologies all the time, even some that seem to be at the very cusp of their accession to prominence. Citizen initiatives have significantly shaped the emergence—and the commercial viability—of biotechnology and genetically modified foods planetwide; concerns both ethical and environmental continue to be raised about cloning and nanotechnology.* Nor are Americans any exception to the general rule, however happy we are to be seen (and to portray ourselves) as a nation of can-do techno-optimists: In the past twenty years,