Thursday, April 20, 2006

Ubiquitous computing is Everyware

In a recent discussion of ubiquitous computing, the Well's Inkwell Conference, which is open to the public, features a discussion with Adam Greenfield, author of Everyware, an excellent new book about the implications of ubicomp:

Computing devices shrink ever smaller and become invisible, while at the same time we interact with them and they communicate with one another. Rather than carrying phones and PDAs, our desks, rooms, and clothing, our food and our sex toys converge, interconnect, and interact. Their connectedness is hidden from us, we don't control the information they record, and there's no "Undo" key.
"Great, another loopy novelist in the Inkwell, extrapolating from a random headline in a trade journal," you say."

Thanks to Smartmobs

It's not loopy fiction, according to Adam Greenfield. Instead, it's the form computing will take in the next few years, and it behooves us to think it through in advance, in order both to understand it and humanize it. That's the subject of "Everyware: The dawning age of ubiquitous computing."

See also Bruce Sterling's ideas on SPIME in relation to this, as well as the discussions on 'Blogjets'

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