Future Now
The IFTF Blog
What to Do When Someone Jacks Your Navigation System
Well, after a decade in New York City, I had to move to San Francisco to get burglarized. But more important was what they took - the Garmin Streetpilot C30 navigation unit that was mounted on the windshield of my car... I've lost my context-awareness!
The theft must have happened sometime Friday night, because I left the car in my building's locked garage (though the car was probably unlocked) in a hurry on Friday around lunchtime to meet IFTF Affiliate Harvey Leitman for a visit to the Internet Archive over in the Presidio.
As soon as I got over the theft, my wife and I had a bunch of errands to run, the majority of which involved going to a couple of strange neighborhoods and towns in the area to look at bedroom furniture. I immediately felt disoriented in a city with which I thought I'd rapidly grown familiar. Without the StreetPilot's constant spoken cues and visual map clues, I felt anxious, unsure, and even unsafe behind the wheel. The only other time I can recall feeling this way is when I lost my cell phone a few years back.
Again on Sunday, we went to Napa for my wife's company picnic, and proceeded to get lost as soon as we ventured off the 101 freeway. Without the StreetPilot to warn us immediately, we drove 15 miles up into the wrong valley (Sonoma) before doubling back.
It will take some time for me to sort out just what implications this experience has for our research on context-awareness, but I suspect that what's going on is very similar to a well-documented phenomenon among the sociologists who study mobile phone use - we very rapidly develop an emotional bond with assistive technologies, especially those that filter or interpret the outside world for us. By the time of the theft, I had already switched the StreetPilot over to speak in a British accent rather than a U.S. one, and my wife had started calling her "Fergie".
We both miss her, her wonderful context-awareness, and her helpful suggestions. This suggests to me, that context-awareness will be an enormous shaper of our daily well-being in the not-so-distant future.
COMMENT:marina GorbisEMAIL: IP: 212.135.90.98URL: "