Archive for September, 2008

Yesterday’s tomorrows

Friday, September 5th, 2008

F. Leger's Mechanical Elements - From the cover of the Penguin edition of Brave New World

Last week I attended the RGS-IBG annual international conference, for which I convened a session and presented a paper.

Shamelessly borrowing a title from a paper by Genevieve Bell and Paul Dourish, my presentation entitled “Yesterday’s tomorrows” was concerned with the manner in which Ubiquitous Computing has been envisioned. I largely focussed upon the example of HP Labs’ ‘CoolTown’ agenda/project. This largely stemmed from some of the fascinating conversations I had with various engineers, researchers and scientists during recent fieldwork in and around Silicon Valley.

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links for 2008-09-04

Thursday, September 4th, 2008
  • Cory Doctorow writes in Nature about peta-scale (bytes/flops/watts) data centres: "The mad, inconceivable growth of computer performance and data storage is changing science, knowledge, surveillance, freedom, literacy, the arts — everything that can be represented as data, or built on those representations. And in doing so it is putting endless strain on the people and machines that store the exponentially growing wealth of data involved."

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Promises of ubicomp

Thursday, September 4th, 2008

My research seems to orbit around the future orientation of ubicomp research and development and in that wavering trajectory I encounter various modes of anticipation. In presenting a semblance of certainty (where there need not be, and perhaps is not), obligations may be construed, and promises apparently made. Promises can be thought of as a ‘giving of ground’ to a potential future, an opening of self to a responsibility, perhaps as Nietzsche suggests, to vouch for oneself as a future. Considerations of promises can be suggested as a reading of our anticipatory knowledges that retains an intention, and perhaps responsibility, for particular futures but, against a prescriptive ‘going forward‘ or technological determinism, includes an inherent potential of uncertainty.

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