Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Security and Personal Risk Management/Mobility, USA, Altanta, "Karyn" 12/15/08 (in progress)
Karyn is a 25 year old young professional living with a friend in Midtown central but pleasant. (She, like all of the other people under 30 who we interviewed or talked to, does not go "OTP- outside the perimeter of hwy 238). She is currently engaged in a "sabbatical"—she saved up money to be able to not work for a period of several months, now drawing to a close. In this time she has been conducting a canvas of all of the social service provision non-profit organizations in the city of Atlanta, with an emphasis on financial literacy and micro financing services. Her parents live in Northern Georgia, and she visiths them occasionally. Her siblings are scattered, and they will occasionally travel together as a family. Her father and siblings are techies and
they share technological devices and expertise.
Karyn’s technology ecology is part of what is unusual about her as a young professional in the U.S.: she owns a cell phone (at the moment), but does not own a personal computer. She maintains a blog, several dozen private, shared and public google calendars, and several websites; she does so however exclusively on public access terminals and borrowed laptops.
Karyn's ability to conduct her work safely and securely on distributed, free and borrowed resources hinges on a few strategies that we heard from her in several contexts. She has a network of people she relies on to help her access the devices and media she needs at any given point in time: her roomate, her father and her siblings emerged as the foremost members of this network. She consolidates the things that she needs into a single account: she uses Google services for everything she needs, and keeps up with their new offerings. She has a detailed mental, and often Google-map assisted map of resources around her: payphones and free phones, free wifi, secured wifi, censored and monitored networks, and quiet places. And, she keeps a physical backup of everything she does: she makes notes and keeps contacts by hand, there is nothing in her blog or on her calendars that are not in her notebooks.
Here's an example of a typical sabbadical day to show how she uses all of these things.
Using Google, she'll find a service providing non-profit in the metro area she's bounded. She'll call their number with her cell phone, figure out who she should be talking to about their services and operations and experience at work, and set up and appointment. She'll schedule two to five of these appointments in a day. She'll plot a bike route between them using google maps, and print it at a cafe if she can. If she loses the printout or gets lost, she can call her dad from the road, since she shares her maps with him. He can open up the map and give her directions verbally. She goes to the interview, and takes short notes in her notebook. She'll expand on them in her notebook later, and then go to a free wifi node--one of the local cafes or Whole Foods--with either her roommate's laptop or one borrowed from her father when it works. She'll stay there for a period of 40 minutes to 3 hours and add short notes to the google map of services, and an entry in her blog with who she talked to and the highlights of what she learned. On her way back she might have noticed something on a flier on a telephone poll, made a mental note, made a physical note to look it up, and while at the cafe, add it to one of the google calendars she maintains. She might check her event feeds and send an interesting event via Google Calendar invite or email to a friend who might be interested in it. She'll check email and respond to prospective interviewees. She'll read news or watch news slideshows (Wall Street Journal, BBC, local and neighborhood news outlets), and listen to streaming NPR. If there is time in the day she might go running with some friends, on one of the routes they've plotted on Google Earth.
Borrowed devices: Karyn is part of the "Simple Life" movement. She believes in material simplicity and sustainability. She shuns owning things for status, and really hates the upgrade treadmill. She gave the example of a dinner party: rather than buying cheap shairs for 16 people, she would borrow the extra chairs she needed. She got a cell phone only from extreme pressure from her peers: before she had an answering machine and used pay phones, other peoples’ home and cell phones to make and return calls. She does not own a laptop of her own, a digital camera, a scanner, an mp3 player, a CD player. If she needs any of these things, she borrows them from her friends or her parents. Much of her ability to do this is contingent on those around her possessing a surplus of devices in varying states of obsolescence.
Single accounts: All of her digital resources are either in hardcopy backup or in the cloud. Most all of her digital presence is on google: she uses Gmail, Google Calendar (30 some calendars!), Google docs for shared research and lists, Google pages for presentations and custom web pages, Blogger for her service canvass and political blogs, Google maps for navigation and spatially representing her research, Google Earth for exercise planning, Google reader for (some) news feeds. She keeps yahoo and school accounts which she checks “once in a blue moon” mainly as spam catchments: by using yahoo accounts for all transactions she keeps all risks of spam and most of phishing next to zero on her google account. This both keeps her whole digital footprint portable, and protects her primary account from unwanted messaging.
Mental Maps: Karyn likes knowing where things are. The location and distribution of resources, all kinds of resources, is a valuable knowledge to her. She reminisced about how nice it was to not have a cell phone because she knew where all the phones were. She gets the same excitement from learning where secure wifi connections are. She manages all of her bills through email and web services as well, but goes to the houses of friends and uses secure LAN and secure WIFI connections to access these sensitive sites. She knows not to send sensitive emails in city hall where they are read.
Physical backups: I cannot believe the detail.