Thesis 23

Everyware has profoundly different social implications than previous information-technology paradigms.

By its very nature, a computing so pervasive and so deeply intertwined with everyday life will exert a transformative influence on our relationships with ourselves and with each other.

In fact, wherever it appears in the world, everyware is always already of social consequence. It can hardly be engaged without raising issues of trust, reputation, credibility, status, respect, and the presentation of self.

Take JAPELAS, a recent Tokushima University project that aims to establish the utility of ubiquitous technology in the classroomin this case, a Japanese-language classroom. One of the complications of learning to speak Japanese involves knowing which of the many levels of politeness is appropriate in a given context, and this is just what JAPELAS sets out to teach.

The system determines the "appropriate" expression by trying to assess the social distance between interlocutors, their relative status, and the overall context of their interaction; it then supplies the student with the chosen expression, in real time.

Context is handled straightforwardly: Is the setting a bar after class, a job interview, or a graduation ceremony? Social distance is also relatively simple to determineare these students in my class, in another class at the same school, or do they attend a different school altogether? But to gauge social status, JAPELAS assigns a rank to every person in the room, and this ordering is a function of a student's age, position, and affiliations.

The previous paragraph probably won't raise any red flags for Japanese readers. Why should it? All that JAPELAS does is encode into a technical system rules for linguistic expression that are ultimately derived from conventions about social rank that already existed in the culture. Any native speaker of Japanese makes determinations like these a hundred times a day, without ever once thinking about them: a senior outranks a freshman, a TA outranks a student, a tenured professor outranks an adjunct, and a professor at one of the great national universities outranks somebody who teaches at a smaller regional school. It's "natural" and "obvious."

But to me, it makes a difference when distinctions like these are inscribed in the unremitting logic of an information-processing system.^[*] Admittedly, JAPELAS is "just" a teaching tool, and a prototype at that, so maybe it can be forgiven a certain lack of nuance; you'd be drilled with the same rules by just about any human teacher, after all. (I sure was.) It is nevertheless disconcerting to think how easily such discriminations can be hard-coded into something seemingly neutral and unimpeachable and to consider the force they have when uttered by such a source. And where PC-based learning systems also observe such distinctions, they generally do so in their own bounded non-space, not out here in the world.

^[*] As someone nurtured on notions of egalitarianism, however hazy, the idea that affiliations have rank especially raises my hackles. I don't like the idea that the city I was born in, the school I went to, or the military unit I belonged to peg me as belonging higher (or lower) on the totem pole than anyone else. Certain Britons, Brahmins, and graduates of the Ecole Normale Supérieure may have a slightly easier time accepting the idea.

Everyware may not always reify social relations with quite the same clunky intensity that JAPELAS does, but it will invariably reflect the assumptions its designers bring to it. Just as with JAPELAS, those assumptions will result in orderingsand those orderings will be manifested pervasively, in everything from whose preferences take precedence while using a home-entertainment system to which of the injured supplicants clamoring for the attention of the er staff gets cared for first.

As if that weren't enough to chew on, there will also be other significant social consequences of everyware. among other things, the presence of an ambient informatics will severely constrain the presentation of self, even to ourselves.

This is because information that can be called upon at any time and in any place necessarily becomes part of social transactions in a way that it could not when bound to fixed and discrete devices. we already speak of Googling new acquaintanceswhether prospective hires or potential loversto learn what we can of them. But this is rarely something we do in their presence; it's something we do, rather, when we remember it, back in front of our machine, hours or days after we've actually made the contact.

What happens when the same information is pushed to us in real time, at the very moment we stand face to face with someone else? what happens when we're offered a new richness of facts about a human beingtheir credit rating, their claimed affinities, the acidity of their sweatfrom sources previously inaccessible, especially when those facts are abstracted into high-level visualizations as simple (and decisive) as a check or a cross-mark appearing next to them in the augmented view provided by our glasses?

And above all, what happens when the composite view we are offered of our own selves conflicts with the way we would want those selves to be perceived?

Erving Goffman taught us, way back in 1958, that we are all actors. we all have a collection of masks, in other words, to be swapped out as the exigencies of our transit through life require: one hour stern boss, the next anxious lover. who can maintain a custody of the self conscious and consistent enough to read as coherent throughout all the input modes everyware offers?

What we're headed for, I'm afraid, is a milieu in which sustaining different masks for all the different roles in our lives will prove to be untenable, if simply because too much information about our previous decisions will follow us around. And while certain futurists have been warning us about this for years, for the most part even they hadn't counted on the emergence of a technology capable of closing the loop between the existence of such information and its actionability in everyday life. For better or worse, everyware is that technology.

We've taken a look, now, at the ways in which everyware will differ from personal computing and seen that many of its implications are quite profound. Given the magnitude of the changes involved, and their disruptive nature, why does this paradigm shift seem so inevitable? Why have I felt so comfortable asserting that this will happen, or is happening, or even, occasionally, has happened? Especially about something that at the moment mostly seems to be manifested in prototypes and proofs of concept? you may recall that I believe the emergence of everyware is over-determinedand in the next chapter, we'll get into a good deal of depth as to why I think this is so.