Everyware_ The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing - Adam Greenfield [69]
*For that matter, similar concerns have also been raised about producing computing on a scale sufficient to supply the rural developing world with "$100 laptops." See, e.g., worldchanging.com.
Some would say that bottom-up resistance to such technologies arises out of an almost innumerate inability to calculate risk—out of simple fear of the unknown, that is, rather than any reasoned cost-benefit analysis. There are also, without doubt, those who feel that such resistance "impedes progress." But outcomes such as these stand as testament to a certain vigor remaining in democracy: In considering the debates over fission and the SST, the clear lesson—as corny as it may seem—is that the individual voice has made a difference. And this has been the case even when groups of disconnected individuals have faced coherent, swaggeringly self-confident, and infinitely better-funded pro-technology lobbies.
So on the one hand, we have reason to trust that "the system works." At least in the United States, we have some reason to believe that the ordinary messy process of democracy functions effectively to discover those technologies whose adoption appears particularly unwise, even if it's not necessarily able to propose meaningful alternatives to them. And this may well turn out to be the case where the more deleterious aspects of ubiquitous technology are concerned.
But something tells me everyware will be different. It's a minuscule technology, one that proceeds by moments and levers its way in via whatever crevices it is afforded. It will call itself by different names, it will appear differently from one context to another, and it will almost always wear the appealing masks of safety or convenience. And as we've seen, the relevant choices will be made by a relatively large number of people each responding to their own local need—"large," anyway, as compared to the compact decision nexus involved in the production of a fission plant or a supersonic airliner.
Who, then, will get to determine the shape of the ubiquitous computing we experience?
Designers, obviously—by which I mean the entire apparatus of information-technology production, from initial conceptual framing straight through to marketing.
Regulators, too, will play a part; given everyware's clear potential to erode privacy, condition public space, and otherwise impinge on the exercise of civil liberties, there is a legitimate role for state actors here.
And markets surely will. In fact, of all of these influences, the market is likely to have the most significant impact on what kinds of everyware find their way into daily use, with self-evidently dangerous, wasteful, or pointless implementations facing the usual penalties. But let's not get carried away with enthusiasm about the power of markets to converge on wise choices—as anyone who's been involved with technology can tell you, buyers are frequently not at all the same people as end users, and there are many instances in which their interests are diametrically opposed to one another. A corporate IT department, for example, generally purchases PCs based on low bid, occasionally ease of maintenance; the user experience is rarely factored, as it properly should be, into estimates of the total cost of ownership (TCO).
Left out of these considerations, though, is the greater mass of people who will be affected by the appearance of everyware, who will find their realities shaped in countless ways by the advent of a pervasive, ubiquitous, and ambient informatics. And while there is a broad community of professionals—usability specialists, interaction designers, information architects, and others working under the umbrella of user experience—that has been able to advocate for the end user in the past, with varying degrees of effectiveness, that community's practice is still oriented primarily to the challenges of