Good Reads: “Everyware”

In the first of a series of recaps of the excellent, excellent reading material I covered in my final year at SI, I present Adam Greenfield’s Everyware: the dawning age of ubiquitous computing (New Riders, 2006).

Everyware is a multipart manifesto — brash at times with its self-assured tone, modest by intervals with its delicate forecasting of the trends it follows. The first portion of the work is given over to grappling with the intellectually thorny question of what exactly ubicomp (Ubiquitous Computing) is, precisely. While detailing the contours of this question, it also attempts to persuade the reader that regardless of your particular definition of ubicomp, it is happening. There is, insists Greenfield, some unique, powerful, and compelling at the intersection of micro-scale computing hardware, globally available high bandwidth connectivity, and multimodal interfaces that is and will continue to change the world we live in. At least in the affluent “west,” that is. The remainder of the not-enormous pagecount (268pp) is dedicated to exploring the many contours and faces of this technological revolution.

This is the heart of the matter, and Greenfield bravely plunges into discussion: “What does ubicomp/everyware mean for us? For those left behind, technologically speaking? What are the ethics?” In other words, Everyware is not just about what this technology is and what is possible to do with it, but also the critical (from this author’s perspective as an information scientist) question of what it means for society, what it affords, what it trends to, and what we can and should be thinking about as we respond to it. I thought, given the initial sections of the book, that I would absolutely hate the remainder of it, but in this I am happy to report that I did not. Greenfield’s discussion is articulate, forceful, and wise.