Thesis 35

Everyware surfaces and makes explicit information that has always been latent in our lives, and this will frequently be incommensurate with social or psychological comfort.

Remember BodyMedia, the company responsible for the conformal, Band-Aidsized SenseWear sensor? BodyMedia's vice president for product design, Chris Kasabach, says the company thinks of the living body as a "continuous beacon": "signals can either fall on the floor, or you can collect them and they can tell you something higher-level" about the organism in question.

Stripped of its specific referent, this is as good a one-sentence description of the data-discovery aspect of everyware as you are ever likely to come across. Everyware's mesh of enhanced objects dispersed throughout everyday life also happens to offer a way of collecting the signals already out there and making of them a gnosis of the world.

In the case of the body especially, these signals have always been there. All that's really new about SenseWear is the conjoined ambition and practical wherewithal to capture and interpret such signalsand to make use of them. This is true of many things. The world is increasingly becoming a place where any given fact is subject to both quantification and publicationand not merely those captured by the various kinds of sensors we encounter, but also ones that you or I have volunteered.

The truth of this was driven home by the first online social-networking sites. Those of us who used early versions of Friendster, Orkut, or LinkedIn will understand what I mean when I say they occasionally made uncomfortably explicit certain aspects of our social relationships that we generally prefer to keep shrouded in ambiguity: I like her better than him; she thinks I'm highly reliable and even very cool, but not at all sexy; I want to be seen and understood as an associate of yours, but not of his.

Even services with other primary objectives observe such social differentiation these days. The Flickr photo-sharing service, for example, recognizes a gradient of affinity, inscribing distinctions between a user's "family," "friends," "contacts," and everyone elsewith the result that there's plenty of room for people who know me on Flickr to wonder why (and potentially be hurt by the fact that) I consider them a "contact" and not a "friend."

What if every fact about which we generally try to dissemble, in our crafting of a mask to show the world, was instead made readily and transparently available? I'm not just talking about obvious privacy issueshistories of various sorts of irresponsibility, or of unpopular political, religious, or sexual predilectionsbut about subtler and seemingly harmless things as well: who you've chosen to befriend in your life, say, or what kinds of intimacy you choose to share with them, but not others.

This is exactly what is implied by a global information processing system with inputs and outputs scattered all over the place. With everyware, all that information about you or me going into the network implies that it comes out again somewhere elsea "somewhere" that is difficult or impossible to specify ahead of timeand this has real consequences for how we go about constructing a social self. When these private and unspoken arrangements are drawn out into the open, are made public and explicit, embarrassment, discomfort, even resentment can follow for all parties involved.

These are events that Gary T. Marx, the MIT professor emeritus of sociology whose theories of technology and social control we discussed in Thesis 30, refers to as border crossings: irruptions of information in an unexpected (and generally problematic) context. Marx identifies several distinct types of crossingnatural, social, spatial/temporal, and ephemeralbut they all share a common nature: in each case, something happens to violate "the expectation by people that parts of their lives can exist in isolation from other parts." you see something compromising through a hole in your neighbor's fence, for example, or a mother sneaks into her daughter's room and reads her "secret" diary.

The Web is a generator par excellence of such crossings, from the ludicrous to the terrifying. We've all seen a momentary slip of the tongue recorded on high-fidelity video and uploaded for all the world to see (and mock). There's an entire genre of humor revolving around the sundry Jedi Knight fantasies and wardrobe malfunctions that shall now live for all time, mirrored on dozens or hundreds of servers around the globe. And much of the annoyance of spam, for many of us, is the appearance of sexually explicit language and/or imagery in times and places we've devoted to other activities.

But this is all a foretaste of what we can see coming. Where everyware is concerned, we can no longer expect anything to exist in isolation from anything else. It comprises a "global mnemotechnical system," in the words of French philosopher Bernard Stieglera mesh of computational awareness, operating in a great many places and on a great many channels, fused to techniques that permit the relational or semantic cross-referencing of the facts thus garnered, and an almost limitless variety of modes and opportunities for output. It brings along with it the certainty that if a fact once enters the gridany fact, of any sort, from your Aunt Helga's blood pressure at noon last Sunday to the way you currently feel about your most recent ex-boyfriendit will acquire a strange kind of immortality.

Unable, apparently, to bear the idea that our signals might "fall on the floor," we've arranged to capture them for all time, uploading them to a net where they will bounce from one node, to another, to anotherfor as long as there remains a network to hold them.

One trouble with this is that we've historically built our notions of reputation such that they rely on exformationon certain kinds of information leaving the world, disappearing from accessibility. But with such mnemo-technical systems in place, information never does leave the world. It just keeps accumulating, simultaneously more explicit, more available, and more persistent than anything we or our societies have yet reckoned with.