Saturday, November 10, 2007

Ubiquity: RXDXT's post about William Gibson's thoughts about ubiquitous computing...

I came across this post on rxdxt’s blog, I couldn't put it any better:

UBIQUITY

There's a great interview in Rolling Stone with one of my favourite authors of all time, William Gibson (Neuromancer, coiner of the term Cyberspace and his newest Spook Country (which I'm reading now). Here's a quote:

"Ubiquitous computing?

Totally ubiquitous computing. One of the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we distinguish the digital from the real, the virtual from the real. In the future, that will become literally impossible. The distinction between cyberspace and that which isn't cyberspace is going to be unimaginable. When I wrote Neuromancer in 1984, cyberspace already existed for some people, but they didn't spend all their time there. So cyberspace was there, and we were here. Now cyberspace is here for a lot of us, and there has become any state of relative nonconnectivity. There is where they don't have Wi-Fi.

In a world of superubiquitous computing, you're not gonna know when you're on or when you're off. You're always going to be on, in some sort of blended-reality state. You only think about it when something goes wrong and it goes off. And then it's a drag."

This made me think. When I become a grandmother, will I find myself among other grandparents, physically miles away, attending my grandchild's science fair, musical recital, or high school drama performance in SecondLife?

1 comment:

R. Titus said...

Thanks for the support!