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Ubicomp, everyware, spimes and clipes
Jan. 23rd, 2007 10:45 amJournalism 2.0! It's more interactive, more participatory, more collectivist! Gone are the days when a solitary hack in a trench-coat pursued a story with perhaps just one treacherous deep-throated insider feeding him leads. Today's journalist is closer to "death of the author" theory than death threats! He's probably out there right now, Mr Journalist 2.0, brainstorming his next Wired column with a bunch of cronies on his blog! Hey, a powerful global conversation has begun!
Okay, so I want to write a column about stuff around this techno-dweeby buzz known as everyware, ubicomp or the "internet of things". Basically, it's what Bruce Sterling is talking about here and Adam Greenfield speculated about here.
We all know what a computer is. It's the object sitting in front of you, with a keyboard, a screen, a mouse, a trackpad, whatever. But we're going to be living soon in a different sort of world, a world where computers have been smashed to smithereens and scattered all around us. Computers are about to fade into -- well, everywhere, actually. Those smithereens, at least initially, will take the form of RFID chips. They're intelligent barcodes, little radio stations, radio frequency ID tags transmitting information about location, temperature, price, quantity, status, identity, you name it. As they get more intelligent and verbose, these little clipes -- these spimes -- will create an "internet of things". In other words, the real world of objects will come to resemble the internet world we know now. It will be searchable, able to be quizzed, surfed, interrogated. The privacy issues are terrifying, the military uses staggering, the artistic possibilities astounding. Ubiquitous computing will be -- already is -- a way of enhancing our senses and tying into other people's superior knowledge of any given terrain. As Greenfield puts it, "some of the most interesting ideas current in interaction design are being worked out at the scale of the city".
Ubicomp-everyware is already in operation. Walmart demands chips on all deliveries from its top suppliers. In Japan, IC chips are embedded in escalator hand rails to tell you more about products you're interested in (just swipe the little pattern), or tag the whereabouts of schoolkids. When I first came to Berlin, one place I showed everyone was the Automaten Bar in Mitte, which tracked who was there at any given point by uploading to the internet information about who had swooshed the door open with their membership card. "Hey, Jim's at Automaten (and Joe isn't), I think I'll drop by there myself!" Well, the Automaten Bar is now gone, replaced by a clothes shop. But maybe replacing a computer-laden cyber-bar full of clunky big vending machines with a clothes store is quite appropriate, really. Clothes may well be where computers are headed.
Right now a pilot project is going on in Ginza, the Tokyo Ubiquitous Technology Project, which will see little transmitters planted around key streets, sending local information which can be picked up by normal cell phones. Presumably later on we'll all have wearable computers sewn into our clothes, heads-up displays superimposing RFID information on what we see with our eyes, or brain implants. We'll be able to pass through any environment as we currently pass through the internet, gathering incredibly precise information, leaving a paperless papertrail behind us.
Later today I'm interviewing a Japanese curator who's written and made shows about the artistic uses of ubicomp. But right now I want to interview you. What do you think of this stuff, this soon-come scattering of the computer into billions of tiny radio stations, each one telling you stuff about a specific object -- your pet, your child, the toilet, a sniper, the wheelchair access ramp? Do you welcome "the internet of things"? Do you want to be able to google the world?
There really is no going back. It's already too late to stop this. It all started with language, I guess. We named things, and by naming things we labeled them. Now we're giving the labels electronic voices in the form of tiny transmitters. Is it good, is it bad? Are you happy, are you sad? What will this world be like? No more "computers", just ubiquitous internet-like information, total recall scattered everywhere. Who will hack the system, how will we make art for it? Above all, how will we write Journalism 2.0 articles about it? Your comments please, ubi-journalists!
Okay, so I want to write a column about stuff around this techno-dweeby buzz known as everyware, ubicomp or the "internet of things". Basically, it's what Bruce Sterling is talking about here and Adam Greenfield speculated about here.We all know what a computer is. It's the object sitting in front of you, with a keyboard, a screen, a mouse, a trackpad, whatever. But we're going to be living soon in a different sort of world, a world where computers have been smashed to smithereens and scattered all around us. Computers are about to fade into -- well, everywhere, actually. Those smithereens, at least initially, will take the form of RFID chips. They're intelligent barcodes, little radio stations, radio frequency ID tags transmitting information about location, temperature, price, quantity, status, identity, you name it. As they get more intelligent and verbose, these little clipes -- these spimes -- will create an "internet of things". In other words, the real world of objects will come to resemble the internet world we know now. It will be searchable, able to be quizzed, surfed, interrogated. The privacy issues are terrifying, the military uses staggering, the artistic possibilities astounding. Ubiquitous computing will be -- already is -- a way of enhancing our senses and tying into other people's superior knowledge of any given terrain. As Greenfield puts it, "some of the most interesting ideas current in interaction design are being worked out at the scale of the city".
Ubicomp-everyware is already in operation. Walmart demands chips on all deliveries from its top suppliers. In Japan, IC chips are embedded in escalator hand rails to tell you more about products you're interested in (just swipe the little pattern), or tag the whereabouts of schoolkids. When I first came to Berlin, one place I showed everyone was the Automaten Bar in Mitte, which tracked who was there at any given point by uploading to the internet information about who had swooshed the door open with their membership card. "Hey, Jim's at Automaten (and Joe isn't), I think I'll drop by there myself!" Well, the Automaten Bar is now gone, replaced by a clothes shop. But maybe replacing a computer-laden cyber-bar full of clunky big vending machines with a clothes store is quite appropriate, really. Clothes may well be where computers are headed.
Right now a pilot project is going on in Ginza, the Tokyo Ubiquitous Technology Project, which will see little transmitters planted around key streets, sending local information which can be picked up by normal cell phones. Presumably later on we'll all have wearable computers sewn into our clothes, heads-up displays superimposing RFID information on what we see with our eyes, or brain implants. We'll be able to pass through any environment as we currently pass through the internet, gathering incredibly precise information, leaving a paperless papertrail behind us.
Later today I'm interviewing a Japanese curator who's written and made shows about the artistic uses of ubicomp. But right now I want to interview you. What do you think of this stuff, this soon-come scattering of the computer into billions of tiny radio stations, each one telling you stuff about a specific object -- your pet, your child, the toilet, a sniper, the wheelchair access ramp? Do you welcome "the internet of things"? Do you want to be able to google the world?
There really is no going back. It's already too late to stop this. It all started with language, I guess. We named things, and by naming things we labeled them. Now we're giving the labels electronic voices in the form of tiny transmitters. Is it good, is it bad? Are you happy, are you sad? What will this world be like? No more "computers", just ubiquitous internet-like information, total recall scattered everywhere. Who will hack the system, how will we make art for it? Above all, how will we write Journalism 2.0 articles about it? Your comments please, ubi-journalists!