A Survey of Mobility

The mobile phone and text messaging have changed the world. “It’s even bigger than the printing press” supposedly. Cell phones, text messaging, and various other new up and coming phone applications, such as internet, are making it easier for the every day person to get involved in things that only people called activists would have once been involved in. Text messaging and cell phones has helped in spread the word of an uprising and demonstrations, set off bombs, and act as clues to uncovering bombers. Thus enter mobile activism. 1. Nomadic technology can expose human-rights abuses as honest citizens use technology to monitor and expose crimes and co-ordinate the response. Add still and video cameras on phones to help with this 2. Health care and poverty. Cell phones will play a big role in detecting, mapping out, and responding to epidemics. In poor countries, mobile phones are fast becoming the main communications tool, schoolbook, vaccination record, family album and many other things. 3. Environmental monitoring. People can send a text to a service asking about a food product, air quaity, or pollution of a place and get results back. Soon phones will have sensors that will be able to detect and tell us just about anything. This might suggest a coming surveillance state, people’s personal lives that used to be private become input for new services such as traffic maps, health warnings or security alerts. Or a global neighborhood watch type deal. Do you worry that, as the article suggests, cell phones will eventually be turned against us in a Big Brother sort of way?

Always-on/Always-on-me

This is a very interesting and true article. It talks about how attached we have become to our technological devices. We always have them with us and they are always on. People walk around talking to the air or with their head down text messaging. Cell phones and such make it so that we are there in reality, but our mind and our thoughts are somewhere else-checking email, talking to people in another state, or even living out an entirely different life through sites such as Second Life. It gives us a feeling of connection to everyone and anything that is going on outside what is actually going on around us. We are constantly dividing out attention with reality and the cyber world. Sometimes we even feel naked or lost without our devices, demonstrating just how attached we have become to what these devices offer us. The article suggests this feeling of anxiety when we are without our devices is due to “missing the self that is constituted in these relationships” we create through our devices. Technology enables us to be a different person through the internet, no one knows us or can see us and we can form an identity closer to the one we wish we had in reality. Or it allows us a filter to act out real situations on the internet so we can better handle them in real life. How can we tell if the people around us are dividing their attention? Work environments suffer because it becomes increasingly harder for people to focus all their attention on the task at hand. Reality is constantly being interupted by alwayson/alwaysonyou devices and we are slaves to their beckoning, unable to resist. It used to be that certain events and special places were meant to disconnect ourselves from distraction and focus on only those around us. Now we can’t even muster up the courage to turn our phones off for fear of what we might miss if we do. It is becoming harder and harder to disconnect. We are becoming too conected to machines. People are actually forming relationships with robots who are simulating a relationship with them. Is it possible that one day our relationship with the machine will destroy any relationship with actual people? Is man becoming like the machine? Are we turning machines into humans? Will machines one day rule the world? Scary thoughts. Feel freee to respond to any or all of the questions.