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any book written in 2005 and published in 2006 that claims to cover ubiquitous computing would obviously be horribly out of date, and at best interesting for historical perspective, but I was wrong.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

It’s not a “how-to” guide (more of a “how-not-to guide” in fact) or a technical reference to the hardware and software of ubicomp, but an extended essay, delivered as a set of 81 theses, all but the last of which is followed by a brief explication.

The theses themselves are broken down into sections:

1. What is everyware? (Theses 1-8)
2. How is everyware different from what we’re used to? (Theses 9-23)
3. What’s driving the emergence of everyware? (Theses 24-33)
4. What are the issues we need to be aware of? (Theses 34-46)
5. Who gets to determine the shapre of everyware? (Theses 47-51)
6. When do we need to begin preparing for everyware? (Theses 52-69)
7. How might we safeguard our prerogatives in an everyware world? (Theses 70-81)

Greenfield’s writing is masterful: this is the kind of book I would like to have written. He’s neither technophile nor luddite: not falling into technical determinism but also not oblivious to the impact technologies can have on the societies which make them. He’s careful not to claim to have all the answers, yet still establishes by iteration a clear way of understanding the changes and challenges that make up ubiquitous / pervasive computing in all its possibilities and threats. It’s a theoretical book, to be sure, but never feels far from practice, and is clearly rooted in a strong understanding of how things actually get designed and made (and sold, and resold, and imitated, and used for unintended purposes . . . ).

The theses-based approached can come across at times as a bit too mystical for me – as though they’re trying to be modern-day Zen koans. For example, the concluding thesis (81):

These principles are necessary but not sufficient: they constitute not an end but a beginning.

The reality though is that throughout the primary text of the book the thesis have a kind of epigrammatic relationship to the chapters they announce, and are simple and clear: telegraphing meaning, not obscuring it. A few other examples:

Thesis 01: There are many ubiquitous computings.

Thesis 34: Everyware insinuates itself into transactions never before subject to technical intervention.

Thesis 48: Those developing everyware may have little idea that this is in fact what they are doing.

In the end Greenfield stakes a claim that in essence ubiquitous computing / pervasive computing necessitates a design intervention: that if we’re not careful about how we design and develop pervasive computing systems we’ll end up taking everything bad about desktop computing and making it ubiquitous, making systems that get in our way as much as (or more than) they help us. Pervasive computing will force re-evaluation and reconsideration of notions of privacy and appropriate behavior even more than the internet has, as everyware essentially drives the ongoing blending of the digital into everyday life.

(Citation Stacks for Everyware - photo by Adam Greenfield, cc-by-nc-sa license)

As I said at the beginning, it’s a masterful book, densely packed with careful but suggestive ways of understanding a process that is simultaneously just getting started and (perhaps) already too far along. I don’t consider myself a ubiquitous computing or pervasive computing person – I’m generally focused on digital strategy, content management, and open source software in the web world – but I’d highly recommend everyware to anyone involved in any kind of software development, design, digital strategy, architecture, sociology, urban studies, space planning, etc. In fact I’m hard pressed to imagine a discipline or practice that wouldn’t benefit from a close reading of this book.

Further reading:

• Adam Greenfield on Everyware (UX Podcast)
• Everyware (Fabien Girardin)
• Hiding in Plain Sight (Boxes and Arrows – where I think I first heard of Everyware)
• Speedbird (Adam Greenfield’s blog)
• The Introduction to Everyware published on A List Apart
• Designing for Everyware: An Interview with Adam Greenfield (AIGA)
• Everyware: Interview with Adam Greenfield, Part I (ReadWriteWeb)
• Why the iPad May Save the Internet Fridge (Part II of the Inverview at ReadWriteWeb)
• Greenfield’s current venture: Urbanscale, and their project PERRY
• Urban Computing and Its Discontents (PDF, by Adam Greenfield and Mark Shephard, from the Situated Technologies series)>

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.

Here’s one of the critical paragraphs of the piece, though you should read it (and the comments to it) in full:

What these commentators do not or cannot admit, though, is that the whole milieu in which these concerns of openness and portability are contained is broken – and not just a little broken, but badly so. All social-networking systems, as currently designed, demonstrably create social awkwardnesses that did not, and could not, exist before. All social-networking systems constrain, by design and intention, any expression of the full band of human relationship types to a very few crude options – and those static! A wiser response to them would be to recognize that, in the words of the old movie, “the only way to win is not to play.”

Greenfield takes apart the XFN standard, noting that it prohibits, by design, “negative relationships,” and goes on to assert that negative relations are critical to the social fabric. However, it is important to be able to keep some of those feelings (and their dynamic nature) to yourself:

social comfort and coherence require that by far the majority of actual feelings regarding the people in our lives not be made explicit. In my experience, any degree of smooth and compassionate human concourse absolutely requires plausible deniability, and a certain degree of dissembling regarding your actual, operative feelings for the people you’re engaged with, however much you love them.

Finally, Greenfield concludes:

I believe that technically-mediated social networking at any level beyond very simple, local applications is fundamentally, and probably persistently, a bad idea. From where I stand, the only sane response is to keep our conceptions of friendship and affinity from being polluted by technical metaphors and constraints to begin with.

It’s almost enough to make me shutter my Facebook account, but then it’s my move in Scrabulous.

My issue with Greenfield’s account, however, is that he assumes that simply not playing is a viable answer. Like Bartleby‘s “I would prefer not to,” Greenfield’s renunciation of all software-modeled relationships risks a slippery slope which ends in renouncing all online participation.

After all, doesn’t blogging software also create social discomfort and awkwardness which didn’t exist before? (Didn’t you read my blog post on X? I can’t believe the comment Y left on Z’s blog!)

It is vitally important to remember that there is (and will always be) a reduction inherent in transforming the complex and dynamic mesh that is human relationships down to a “social network” as understood by Facebook, LinkedIn, and the like – but I have to disagree that the only appropriate response to that reduction is to take my ball and go home.

Where social networking applications cause emotional pain we need greater education and contextualization. I don’t know about your teen years, but I was certainly familiar with artifical indicators of popularity and mechanisms of exclusion in mine.

This is not to say the mechanism of bullying, exclusion, and oneupmanship aren’t different in an online social networking world, but that we need to learn to understand, explain, and mediate those differences, not ignore the social networks and hope they go away.