Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing

Thesis 43

Everyware produces a wide belt of circumstances where human agency, judgment, and will are progressively supplanted by compliance with external, frequently algorithmically-applied, standards and norms.

One of the most attractive prospects of an ambient informatics is that information itself becomes freely available, at any place and any time. We can almost literally pull facts right out of the air, as and when needed, performing feats of knowledge and recall that people of any other era would rightly have regarded as prodigious.

But we're also likely to trade away some things we already know how to do. As Marshall McLuhan taught us, ...