It is a matter of dependency that lends a sceptical air to the
ongoing debate about ubiquity, the question of how much is too much. Greenfield’s
“everyware” (15) and Gershenfeld’s “Internet-0” (78) both offer the potential
for a “seamless” media experience, in which such luxuries as having an episode
of Game of Thrones follow you around the house through internet-connected wallpaper
if you want to head downstairs to put on dinner while keeping tabs on how
little Jon Snow still knows become a reality. But as McCullough points out: “… we
can observe plenty of annoyance in the form of petty information pollution”
(15) – do we really need, or want, to be so seamlessly connected to everything
that customised ads will pop up on the insides of our internet-connected
glasses while walking (or, Heaven forbid, driving) past a Bluetooth-enabled
billboard?
And that’s without even considering the potential for hacking into
somebody’s internet-connected wallpaper, or kitchen sink, or duvet – the locks
on our doors could be hacked, giving new meaning to the term “keylogging”. In
the ubiquitous media future, will our clothes require antivirus protection? A
convenient ubiquitous computing future is also one that requires IT knowledge
to be widespread to navigate it safely – the user becomes responsible for
knowing far too much, and the issue of information “pollution” becomes “overload”.
Jonathan Grudin highlights some of these practical issues by
observing technology used in boardroom meetings, and the temporal difference
between transitory “face-to-face” interactions and social cues and those made
permanent and (potentially) public by recording/surveillance media. Ubiquity
offers a future in which everything is useable and everyone a user, but the
catch is that everyone is also everything – if this is Deuze’s concept of the
immersive “media life” (138), then it follows that every user can also be used,
anywhere, anytime, by anyone.
(Grudin Article: http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.auckland.ac.nz/10.1145/585597.585618)
