Thesis 50

Everyware will appear differently in different places: that is, there is and will be no one continuum of adoption.

Remember our first thesis, that there are many ubiquitous computings? This is never truer than in the sense that everyware will prove to be different, in fundamental and important ways, in every separate cultural context in which it appears. In fact, the most basic assumptions as to what constitutes ubiquitous computing can differ from place to place.

An old Taoist proverb asks whether it is wiser to pave the world in soft leather or simply find yourself a nice comfortable pair of shoes. Along similar lines, some question the wisdom of any attempt to instrument the wider world. Such unwieldy "infrastructural" approaches, they argue, amount to overkill, when all that is really desired is that people have access to services wherever they happen to go.

One such perspective is offered by Teruyasu Murakami, head of research for Nomura Research Institute and author of a doctrine Nomura calls the "ubiquitous network paradigm." In Murakami's view, the mobile phone or its immediate descendent, the Ubiquitous Communicator, will do splendidly as a mediating artifact for the delivery of services.^[*] His point: is it really necessary to make the heavy investment required for an infrastructural approach to the delivery of services if people can take the network with them?

^[*] Contemporary Japanese ubicomp schemes often specify the use of such "Ubiquitous Communicators" or "UCs." While the form factors and capabilities of UCs are rarely specified in detail, it can be assumed that they will follow closely on the model offered by current-generation keitai, or mobile phones.

Taking the present ubiquity of PDAs, smartphones, and mobiles as a point of departure, scenarios like Murakami'ssimilar schemes have in the past been promoted by the likes of Nokia and the old AT&Timagine that the widest possible range of daily tasks will be mediated by a single device, the long-awaited "remote control for your life." If you live outside one of the places on Earth where mobile phone usage is all but universal, this may sound a little strange to you, but it happens to be a perfectly reasonable point of view (with the usual reservations) if you live in Japan. ^[*]

^[*] The reservations are both practical and philosophical: What happens if you lose your Ubiquitous Communicator, or leave it at home? But also: Why should people have to subscribe to phone services if all they want is to avail themselves of pervasive functionality?

In the West, the development of everyware has largely proceeded along classically Weiserian lines, with the project understood very much as an infrastructural undertaking. In Japan, as has been the case so often in the past, evolution took a different fork, resulting in what the cultural anthropologist Mizuko Ito has referred to as an "alternatively technologized modernity."

With adoption rates for domestic broadband service lagging behind other advanced consumer culturesNorth America, Western Europe, Koreaand a proportionally more elaborate culture emerging around keitai, it didn't make much sense for Japan to tread quite the same path to everyware as other places. The Web per se has never met with quite the same acceptance here as elsewhere; by contrast, mobile phones are inescapable, and the range of what people use them for is considerably broader. Many things North Americans or Europeans might choose to do via the Webbuy movie tickets, download music, IM a friendare accomplished locally via the mobile Internet.

Ito argues that "the Japan mobile Internet case represents a counterweight to the notion that PC-based broadband is the current apex of Internet access models; characteristics such as ubiquity, portability, and lightweight engagement form an alternative constellation of 'advanced' Internet access characteristics that contrast to complex functionality and stationary immersive engagement."

Indeed, in the words of a 2005 design competition sponsored by Japanese mobile market leader NTT DoCoMo, the mobile phone "has become an indispensable tool for constructing the infrastructure of everyday life." Despite the rather self-serving nature of this proposition, and its prima facie falsehood in the context of Western culture, it's probably something close to the truth in Japanese terms. This is a country where, more so than just about anywhere else, people plan gatherings, devise optimal commutes, and are advised of the closest retailers via the intercession of their phones.

Given the facts on the ground, Japanese developers wisely decided to concentrate on the ubiquitous delivery of services via keitaifor example, the RFID-tagged streetlamps of Shinjuku already discussed, or the QR codes we'll be getting to shortly. And as both phones themselves and the array of services available for them become more useful and easier to use, we approach something recognizable as the threshold of everyware. This is a culture that has already made the transition to a regime of ambient informaticsas long, that is, as you have a phone. As a result, it's a safe bet to predict that the greater part of Japanese efforts at designing everyware will follow the mobile model for the foreseeable future.

Rather than casting this as an example of how Japanese phone culture is "more advanced" than North America's, or, conversely, evidence that Japan "doesn't get the Web" (the latter a position I myself have been guilty of taking in the past), it is simply the case that different pressures are operating in these two advanced technological culturesdifferent tariffs on voice as opposed to data traffic, different loci of control over pricing structures, different physical circumstances resulting in different kinds of legacy networks, different notions about monopoly and price-fixingand they've predictably produced characteristically different effects. This will be true of every local context in which ideas about ubiquitous computing appear.

Many of the boundary conditions around the development of everyware will be sociocultural in nature. For example, one point of view I've heard expressed in the discussion around contemporary Korean ubicomp projects is that East Asians, as a consequence of the Confucian values their societies are at least nominally founded on, are more fatalistic about issues of privacy than Westerners would be in similar circumstances. I'm not at all sure I buy this myself, but the underlying point is sound: Different initial conditions of culture will reliably produce divergent everywares.

Is there more than one pathway to everyware? Absolutely. Individuals make choices about technology all the time, and societies do as well. I won't have a video game in the housethe last thing I need is another excuse to burn life time; I've never particularly warmed to fax machines; and I do not and will not do SMS. On a very different level, the governments of Saudi Arabia and the People's Republic of China have clearly decided that the full-on clamor of the Internet is not for themor, more properly, not for their citizens. So the nature and potential of technology only go so far in determining what is made of it. The truly vexing challenge will reside in deciding what kind of everyware is right for this place, at this time, under these circumstances.