A brief paper on the long history of mobile ICTs

Especially over the last decade, the rapid diffusion of mobile telephones and related worn technologies left many struggling to understand how they might relate to social change. Although there can be little argument that we have seen rapid development in the technology of mobile communication and computation, at least some of our surprise must be related to a flawed overall frame for understanding technology and place. After all, these technologies seem on first blush to be very different from the kinds of communication devices we are more familiar with: technologies of the screen. When faced with technologies that are inherently displacing us, the literature tends to frame them from the perspective of dwelling and settlement, drawing on metaphors of cyberspace and virtual settlements. But mobile telephony is not as new as it first appears, and our focus on dwelling as a metaphor for all technology leads to a gap in understanding the social role of these new devices.

Understanding communication technologies and networks through the lens of the built environment is natural. The evolution of modern human society might be traced through a shift from biological to social change. Rather than adapting to our environments, we change our environments to suit our needs. No particularly acute skills are needed to discover human habitation: we build. And the creation of the built environment has been seen as key to creating physical proximity and urbanity at the core of the modern human experience. We have, however, been unable to build ourselves out of significant human ills, and in many cases the magical and spiritual nature of our built environment has been engineered away. The problems of modern society can be found most acutely in its characteristic environment: the metropolis.

But the rapid diffusion of the mobile phone both within the more and less developed world has turned this seemingly unbreakable bond between urbanity and evolution on its ear. Rich Ling, Mimi Ito, and others write about the new uses of these media to tightly control collaborative processes, particularly among the younger generation. The ability to act in coordination without being co-present, though of course always possible, is now more easily available to larger and larger populations. The favoring of these personal, ephemeral network brings the magical and spectral world back to us. These days, we all hear voices.

This article counters claims to novelty by suggesting that there are long-standing historical precedents to many of social functions of modern mobile devices, and that our tendency to think in terms of physical environments has blinded us to these long-term social uses of mobile technologies. Moreover, it is useful to understand a range of worn technologies, from sidearms to spectacles, as inherently information, communication, and control technologies. By providing an outline and taxonomy of worn technologies, it is possible to more easily distinguish dimensions along which change may be occurring, and find historical precedents to seemingly novel arrangements, like Castells’ “insurgent communities of practice.” It’s dangerous to assume that social arrangements made possible through the affordances of new technologies represent a revolution. As Robert Darnton has suggested, we tend to forget earlier technologies (like the “Tree of Cracow”) and social organization isomorphic to these modern shifts.

Within that “longue durée” of worn technologies, I suggest we can identify a set of functions for addressing and manipulating social networks, from communicating authority, to record keeping and surveillance, to command and control. While these mobile technologies are inextricably spatial, it is important to recognize that thinking of them from the perspective of geography and place represents only one way of framing the understanding of such technologies, and unfortunately such framing is often done unconsciously and relatively uncritically. What does it mean to move beyond debates of space and place, of cybernomadism and locative technologies? Does the mobile device–from quipu and ehekachichtli, to the saber and flounce, to the iPhone and pacemaker–represent a technology of binding the Bund as much as binding space or time?

See lkl for more information.

More broadly, I’ve found myself in the strange position of visiting old houses and neighborhoods in Google Earth, and on the web. I stroll down Motomachi and note a new Gap–they show up everywhere these days. As do, it seems, the Street View vans. It made sense that they would start with the large cities, but I somehow didn’t expect them to start covering my old neighborhood in Buffalo (ah, so there’s the neighbor’s new playhouse–they told us about that) or my Mom’s place in California that I’ve never visited, but sits out in a spot that is pretty remote. What happens when the Google car covers the globe? Well, they turn around and do it again, of course. That way we can also roll the clock back.

Google Earth already integrates some photos, those marked on Panoramio, but wouldn’t it be nice to integrate video from YouTube, or images from Picasa (or heck, be more open and include Flickr and Revver). As more of our multimedia becomes time stamped and geotagged, I think we can look forward to records that come close to approximating what was happening at a given time or place. Now, of course, if you are out in the middle of nowhere, the nearest tagged photo may be beyond the horizon and five years old. But in Times Square, you can see photos from last week. Is it that hard to believe that, as more and more phones and cameras include instant uploading, that images from an hour ago, or from five minutes ago, are that far off?

This isn’t some huge leap in technology, this is just charting the current trajectory. What happens when you want to know where your friend is standing and can pull up five views of 82nd and Broadway from your mobile?

My partner’s white shoe firm is one of several known for forgoing the white shoes and encouraging “dress casual,” and now the UN building in New York is encouraging staff to forgo dark wool so that they can raise the temperature in the building and save power and the emissions that go with it. This makes a lot of sense in a walking city like New York, where the shift from inside hits the sinuses and the wardrobe alike.

Of course, at the same time there is a push back to 3-piece suits in men’s fashion; as seems always to be the case during economic downturns, there is a swing to the conservative. Hints of Victorian formality are pushing though as well, not least thanks to the influence of goth fashion in various forms.

I doubt we’ll see a sudden influx of Bermuda shorts or more extreme above-the-knee fashions for men, but if you don’t already have some linen, cotton, and bamboo to balance out the wool in your closet, it might be time to think about it.

But what makes it interesting is that it is plausible. After all, people choose to have Lasik eye surgery, and there are stories about having toes removed or shaved down so as to fit better into high heels. As body modifications go, adding something for efficiency just doesn’t seem that strange.

Right now, bionics are really meant to replace or supplement failing parts, like Cheney’s implanted defibrillator. But an increasingly common cosmetic surgery in China severs the bones in the leg in order to add boosters, and increase the overall height. Pitchers have been having surgeries that allow for more strength in their pitching arm for some time. I have a congenital problem with a pair of teeth, and at some point will have them replaced with titanium implants. My dentist assures me that because these are screwed into the skull directly, they will be considerably more resilient than “real” teeth. Were it not for the expense, risk, and pain, I can see having major joints–particularly a shoulder injured in a motorcycle accident many years ago–replaced with titanium, just to give me a slight everyday edge.

And I haven’t even touched the chemical alterations. Sure, we all know that steroids are bad for us, but there are a host of drugs, from HGH (did you know it is used for weight loss?) to Provigil, that are being used for body hacking. And need I mention the little blue pill and its cousins? A lot of people on the drugs front, not surprisingly, are amateur hackers, in the tradition of Prof. Leary.

I suspect it won’t be too long before we start to see amateurs willing to do surgery. It will start light, like self-chipping (inserting subdermal RFIDs and other subdermal devices), and move on to other small implants. As do many, I suspect that this will be a major source of medical tourism in the next few years, though perhaps the destination will not be Chiba. Although bioDiY is heating up, I suspect it will be a while before we see self-surgery as getting its own magazine (Make, Craft, and Cut?).

Update (8/11): As Jeremy notes below, body modification has been going on for cosmetic reasons for as long as humans have been around. This includes things like tattoos, scarification, piercings, implanting foreign objects, and the like. (Actually, dental implants into the skull have a much longer history than just the recent titanium versions.) There has also been a rise in DiY and self-inflicted cosmetic surgery, especially among those with various body dysmorphic disorders. Although I am interested in body modification for form, I am more interested in function. I think that this is relatively new, on the amateur side. I also expect that because the expertise is difficult to develop, most of the experimentation on this front will happen in places like India, which is already developing a strong medical tourism industry. Of course, some of it will also come from those in the body modification culture, who already have some practical experience in amateur surgery.

Kevin is playing with using his new helmet-cam to record his everyday experience. I did this a few years ago, trying to record an entire day, using a webcam and my laptop. Mine was, by necessity, shoulder-mounted, rather than head-mounted, which has its own advantages and disadvantages.

The idea runs back to Mann’s sousveillance or Brin’s reciprocal transparency, though I have to say that the term only gets at a slice of what I think this starts to get at. Really, it remains surveillance, and but with you as the “surveillor” and gateway to other people looking in. That is, the camera is naturally a panoptic device, a one-way mirror, and as such you have to wonder who is or will be observing you. When I did this, I wore a label next to the camera saying “You are being recorded,” and this resulted in a lot of discussions like the one Kevin has in this clip.

The emergence, however, of YouTube and similar services changes the nature of the video camera. In the past, there was always the possibility that something captured on a camcorder could be shown to others, and–if interesting enough–sold to the evening news. Now, however, at least in certain circles, there is the assumption that some form of the video is likely to find its way out onto the web. This makes the camera a different kind of device, and our cultural assumptions and public policy will change as this shift becomes complete.

On the one hand, someone taking pictures of a birthday party at a restaurant has become a common thing to see. But when those photos are likely to be published publicly, and facial recognition (either computer-driven or human-driven, as on FaceBook) becomes the norm, that camera takes on a new intrusiveness. One could even see restaurants outlawing cameras; which, of course, also means outlawing camera phones. Already, this is an issue for those going to courts where camera phones are not allowed. Imagine what happens when camera phones are not allowed in a quarter of the restaurants you visit.

I’m glad Kevin has done this. I’ve been planning on retrying my shoulder-mounted cam (in much lower resolution than Kevin’s new camera!) and do a “day in the life” or “week in the life.” While these kinds of experiments have been going on for a long time now within relatively limited groups (mostly wearables researchers), it will be interesting to see the degree to which amateur panveillance becomes more common in the coming months and years.

It’s an exciting proposition, I think, because it suggests the idea of typing at the speed of thought. Of course, it turns out that we have a really nicely designed thoroughfare to the brain in our hands, and it shouldn’t be surprising that bypassing the hands to go through the skull makes things more, rather than less, complicated. I don’t expect that we will be bypassing physical manipulation any time soon, but I can dream of a day when my clumsy hands don’t get in the way of a quick blog entry.

But it does raise some interesting issues. Do they go to jail with gems in their teeth? Clearly, there are things they will let you go to jail with: pacemakers, replacement joints, tattoos, etc. And then there are things you are not allowed to take with you to jail: wedding bands, piercings, brass knuckles. So where do you draw the line? If I have a computer or cell phone implanted–yes, I know it sounds a little strange, but well within the bounds of reason–would the state require that this be surgically removed, either as a condition of incarceration or as a property seizure?

I don’t know how many of the current MI students read my blog (I suspect very few), but if you do, this should trigger some ideas if you haven’t yet settled on a capstone. A lot of creative possibilities to combine GPS and Google Maps. I know a few of you are doing things with GPS and wireless (through Paul’s class or in other courses), and this would be a natural kind of extension. Also might allow for some interesting combinations when glued together: think Google Maps + Facebook or other services. Neat stuff.

There are two choices. One is the patented Neurotrophic Electrode, whereby the electrode tip is implanted 5mm under the surface of the brain and the outer end is attached to amplifiers and FM transmitters located on the skull, under the scalp. No wires or batteries are used. Power is provided by a power induction system similar to your toothbrush holder that charges the toothbrush overnight. This implantation requires major surgery lasting about 10 hours. The neural signals are transmitted to and processed by a computer to activate a switch or drive a cursor and hence provide communication.

The other option is to implant a patented conductive skull screw that does not enter the brain. It records from local field potentials over the surface of the cortex, rather like a very precise EEG (electroencephalogram). These signals can be used to activate a switch and hence provide communication.

These two technologies are available from Neural Signals, Inc., and if I understand correctly, make use of a neurotrophic electrode to recognize neural signals within a very narrow target area.

An alternative called BrainGate is offered by Cyberkinetics who have recently implanted a device that connects up with 100 neurons in the brain. Though clearly in its very early stages, the idea is that disabled individuals (followed, I assume, by augmentation freaks) can “think” their email. The device already allows a young man to talk and turn his head while changing the TV channel with his brain. Where do I sign up?

Makes you wonder what other sorts of POV videos are likely to be forthcoming, especially given the diffusion of video-enabled cell phones. It seems like the hundreds of helmet-mounted cameras being worn by DHS agents during the Republican Convention might yield an interesting “in situ” experience of the event. While many are focused on making wearable computing more wearable, it can’t be long before 360 views, high resolution, and 3d sound recording setups are more common.