Everyware

I finally got around last month to reading Adam Greenfield’s Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing.

I was concerned at first when I picked it up, thinking that any book written in 2005 and published in 2006 that claims to cover ubiquitous computing would obviously be horribly out of date, and at best interesting for historical perspective, but I was wrong.

It’s a fantastic book, and as timely as ever.

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Adam Greenfield is anti Social Networking

I only recently came across this post from Adam Greenfield in which he explains why he believes that computer-mediated social networking is inherently bad: “Antisocial networking.”

It’s an important and powerful critique, though one with which I ultimately disagree. Greenfield essentially argues that:

1. Social networking applications must, necessarily, oversimplify human relationships: they couldn’t possibly represent the complex and dynamic nature of any graph connecting a pair of individuals, let alone the mesh of a whole community.
2. As a result, they inevitably create emotional distress, anguish, and pain for users (and sometimes even for non-users)
3. Therefore, we should not use them.

The problem, as Greenfield sees it, is that we’re allowing technical architectures to intrude upon the pre-technical, social space of human relationships. We’re allowing the web of human relationships as-modeled-by-software-systems to reduce, pollute, and corrupt the web of human relationship as modeled in the human psyche and history of culture.

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