Anyone that goes to a bar even semi-regularily will have at one point noticed the man in the corner with his Blackberry. He sits there, without a companion with a beer in his right hand, and his Blackberry in his left.
It can be a lonely sight, but is it actually? Isn't he having a conversation, at that moment, with his entire social sphere, through that device?
Seeing as how phones exist to allow us to communicate with others it is perhaps little surprise that most their functions, and many of today's most popular services and apps revolve around facilitating or enhancing communication with the people in our lives.
Human beings all crave socializing, we want to share and communicate with others, and so many of our most important technologies have been created as an extension of this deepest of human desires. From the printing press to the internet, much technology has been created to allow for greater depth and range of communication with our fellow human beings, and it has in return changed the way our social worlds exist and function.
Cellphones allowed conversations to go on indefinitely, opening us to our social worlds 24 hours a day. With the explosion of smartphones capable of extending social networking services to every moment of our lives, we can only wait and watch the ways in which this new technology will again change our lives.
Whats happening now?
These services allow for realtime tracking of your friends status and locations. Extends the physicality of other's presence and transfers it to a new medium.
Citysense, based and used in SF, uses cellphone users as sensors, tracking general population movements to determine city hot spots throughout the day.
Broadcast video live from your phone, our lives become the live content for the world. iPhone reporting?
Leave "notes", tied to location, independent of time or who is where. Creates a conversation based on a real space but beyond the constraints of time.
Life-gaming, Social gaming. Creates an interactive, game like social world on top of your physical day to day life.
Online profile is linked to your physical identity through your cellphone. If others within a certain range have similar interests it recommends conversation with them.
So What?
Mobile technology allows for the complete disconnect between a conversation and the physicality usually associated with it. It takes all spheres of our lives (eg. work, friends, school) and merges them into a single, ongoing experience. All conversation is essentially endless, and by the ever tightening linking of our online identities to our real ones, all conversations real or "online" achieve the same sort of "legitimacy" or importance.
Over the next year, I expect technologies to come into existence that allow for seamless integration of online and offline life and conversation. As our online identities become solidly connected to our real life personas, our social spheres might begin to take on the nature of our online conversations.
What if all of life was an endless conversation, with every event open to comment, to sharing and remixing?
Whats happening now?
Convergence of Services
Services will begin to incorporate more medias, no longer remaining exclusive to a particular type of usage. For example, Facebook now integrates with email, and Google Realtime search harnesses the ever changing nature of the internet with its realtime searches of blog and Twitter posts. The HTC Sense interface, on the newest HTC Hero phone, integrates all aspects of a persons social identity, and your conversations with that identity, into a single unified Contact.
Simultaneity
Services will begin to exist in real-time, offering an endless, realtime conversation. Examples include the real-time nature of Google Wave. A project at Penn State University is developing real-time collaborative browsing for mobile technologies.
Empathy
Obviously talking through a phone by any means lacks certain human things otherwise found in natural conversation. How might this change if devices could sense, react to and communicate our emotions?
Korean telecom KTF offers a "Love Detector" that analyses calls voices for signs of "love". Results can be paid for by SMS. Gimmicky but interesting.
Philips VIBE is a research project from Philips Design, developing devices that can sense and react to our emotions. At the same time, researchers at Intel are developing technology that would allow users to control their devices and communicate with their thoughts.
Whatever happens, what is obvious is that these new technologies will change forever the way we understand our social worlds. What new behaviors might arise when we give freedom to the desire of every human being to share, love and express?
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