Future Now
The IFTF Blog
From always-on to always-on-you computing?
It's an article of faith among scholars in the field of science and technology studies that the design of technologies, and the ways they're evaluated and used by consumers, can be strongly influenced by regulatory regimes and business models. Via a post on Wade Roush's Continuous Computing blog, "Your World on a Flash Drive:" I recently became acquainted with the concept of always-on-you computing, a term that turns out to be a study in competing politics of technologies.
Wade's piece notes that
Programmers are creating versions of the free Linux operating system small enough to fit on -- and boot directly from -- a USB flash drive. And now several companies are marketing and developing ways to use these ultra-portable storage devices to carry all of one's data and applications -- including personalized desktop environments resembling mini-operating systems. In this way, you can have all your data with you at all times -- ready to plug into any computer you happen to be near.
The original impetus behind this work was the idea that one day PCs would be so abundant, you could take for granted that one would be wherever available wherever you needed to work. (Friends at Stanford report that there are students who are living this life: they just carry around keychain drives, confident in the knowledge that a PC with Microsoft Office will always be just around the corner. Well, it is Stanford.) Having worn a 1 GB keychain drive around my next for over a year now, on which I keep pretty much everything I've written in the last five years, I'm intrigued by this development, though I confess it's as much a totemic object as anything-- keeping my digital life close to my heart, as it were-- that happens to also comes in handy for swapping files and moving things around. (So do the other two keychain drives I keep in my backpack.)
On his blog, Wade adds a postscript that points to a nice phrase.
One person I interviewed for the story, but wasn't able to quote, was Liam Breck, director of a Boston software lab called Network Improv. Breck is working on a fascinating Wiki-based personal information management and file-sharing system that fits on a flash drive; he calls it a "mobile webspace." Liam has a great name for this whole phenomenon of portable computing environments: always-on-you computing.
Network Improv, it turns out, makes the case that always-on-you computing is a necessity as much for legal and commercial reasons as technical ones. Breck argues,
The real dystopian scenario is the one being hyped by the web 2.0 crowd: all your data will move online, and you will have to be in "good standing" with the network provider, the billing system, and the application service to use it. If your data doesn't meet their standards, it may be removed. No thanks.
The only commercially/socially viable way to achieve mass-market ubiquitous computing is through personal technology, e.g. flash drives, wi-fi handhelds, and eventually wireless pocket servers. Networks are wonderful things, but
the internet is not the PC.
Elsewhere, after his Yahoo e-mail account was suspended because of inactivity, he writes,
If you use online apps that store your data, you don't own your data. That fact has not escaped the mass market, and no volume of hype will hypnotize it to the contrary. The always-on-you web, which puts your data in your pocket, is the only suitable method for web apps that rival the desktop in the mass market.
The insistence on the self-evident superiority of the always-on-you model aside, it's striking that the appeal of the model isn't based so much on straightforward technical arguments, or claims to superior productivity of collaborative potential. Rather, it's based on having very strong, tangible control of your content (you know it's in your pocket, or around your neck), and distrusting the business or privacy policies of third parties. It assumes that the strongest statement about how much a company values privacy is weaker than your ability to carry your content around yourself, and to be able to take it offline whenever you want.
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