This made for good viewing. Very thought provoking. It really comes down to this — we all know what’s coming generically — pervasive computing, the internet everywhere, ubicomp, however you want to label it.

The question is, in whose name will this all be built? To what ends? Who will own it?

Ray Kurzweil’s The Invisible Computer or Michael
Dertouzos’ What Will Be: How the New World of Information Will Change Our Lives both address the inevitability of man, machine and environment all merging, and the social and economic implications of that.

Will our immersion within this web lead to a utopia where man and environment merge, or a dystopia of some Foucauldian Panopticon / surveillance state?

That’s rather up to us, and the answer to that question will be different depending on where you are, that is how oppressive your government happens to be, and how much access the citizenry will have to the data collected, as Adam points out.

Adam argues that the city has been the place where people have gone historically to reinvent themselves, a place of comfortable anonymity. Now he fears that with the pervasiveness of those digital traces we leave everyday, that there will be no escaping our selves in all its moments, and that we will be thus forever stigmatized, labeled, unable to hide from what we’ve been.

Rather than a stigma, though, this will lead to new definitions of identity, self. Like the urban experience that Adam would want to preserve, these are historical constructs. Did people think of their life as a progressive narrative before the novel? When families lived together in one room in the Middle Ages and had no last names (except where they came from) did they think about reinventing the self? It took a Shakespeare to help invent the modern self.

Maybe it’s a post modern self that needs to be invented. Maybe that is what is happening among the youth of Facebook, Twitter, where literally life is an open book.

Adam offers the example of someone at a white shoe law firm finding an embarrassing digital tidbit on a prospective hire that leads to their passing on the candidate. Maybe the problem here is with the traditional normative assumptions as to what is normal and proper.

We have in the last days found just how quickly the web can unravel well constructed public personae. It happens every day, and the more carefully constructed the artifice, the louder the sound when it comes crashing down.

But to Adam’s point — we have to make sure that the mountain of data that our environment will be collecting on us should be made available to us.

For that, I would suggest not leaving everything to some central authority – the state, your ISP — when it comes to the gathering and dispensing of data. We need community intranets, walled gardens within urban spaces.

Whatever happens, human activity will be rather confined within the five square blocks around them. What happens when you map social networking on all that, localize it? It depends. Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs makes this abundantly clear. Depending on where, people will have different social uses for technology, will have different understandings of one’s social space.

While we are increasingly an urban species, as Adam notes, Lagos will be different from Sao Paolo and New York, etc. There will definitely be places you don’t want to live, especially where pervasive computing will be used for political purposes.

We need information technology to be a democratizing force, where the information itself is being generated and processed bottom up as opposed to being passively gathered for the purposes of the few above.