The Lonely Savage

The iPhone created a mass exodus into a movement that had slowly been gathering momentum. Ever since my early years in the telecommunications business at Ericsson in the late 90:s there was talk about the future of hand held devices. We would have smart phones that would be portable Internet stations, we would be able to communicate in real-time with foreign nations at the same cost as local calls and we would have information literally at our fingertips. What we’re seeing today is a big step towards that very reality; but where are we on the time line? What happens next?

The Past

I still remember the attitude I had in the late 90:s. I had just bought my first Palm Pilot and I felt on top of the world. Now I could store my information about my friends’ telephone numbers, addresses, birthdays and even a calendar of things to do and people to meet. I could even jot down notes and reminders to myself. People were already talking about how the natural evolution of these sorts of devices would be that cell phones would soon have this sort of functionality built into them. I scoffed at the thought, thinking that it would be inefficient and pointless; why would anybody want to combine these two types of devices? While you’re at it, you might as well build a Walkman or a portable CD player into the device, ha ha ha! It would be difficult to upgrade just one of them and the natural development of these devices – faster speeds on the wireless front, more storage on the storage front, faster processing on the processing front – would render these devices obsolete within a year if you try to cram too many features into them. Better to have separate devices but improve the ways that they can talk to each other and share information with each other. This was what I truly believed.

Shortly thereafter, my dreams of pan-device-communication improvement were heard. Bluetooth came and was quickly hailed as the technology that would change everything. Devices would be able to talk to each other wirelessly and exchange information with each other … wirelessly! I still remember the first time somebody sent me a contact from his iPaq to my Ericsson T28 using a Bluetooth connection. It felt like a small revolution taking place in my hand. Since both my phone and my Palm Pilot synced to my computer via handy docking stations, all I needed to do was to connect them both to my computer and click a few buttons and the information would be transferred back and forth and the Palm would be updated! It was amazing!

The Present

I must admit that my position and attitude has changed somewhat since then. Bluetooth is no longer the godsend people expected it to be. The all-in-one device market is growing and the devices are shrinking. My iPhone today is smaller than my Palm Pilot of ten years ago, but packs ten times the punch in processor power, storage, features and functionality. While I still see some small problems with the “all in one”-package that the iPhone is, it is a definite step in the right direction. With MobileMe allowing people to back up all their information in “the Cloud”; changing your device to a newer iPhone will see all the information copied right over in a few minutes.

The biggest change in my own life when I got myself an iPhone wasn’t the fact that I could play Solitaire on my way to and from work (even though this remains a very large source of joy on otherwise dreary trips). No, the difference came in applications such as Twitter, Facebook, Skype, Brightkite, WordPress and the likes. These are apps that allow me, as an individual, to connect to other individuals all around the world in ways that were previously limited to the times when I would be sitting in front of a computer. In fact, I can now connect to complete strangers based on geographical proximity at the time. Just yesterday, I was on my way home and decided to check if anything was happening on Twitter. Two of the messages that I saw were from a friend that had posted before and after pictures of his quite dramatic haircut. “Huh.” thought I and saved the ‘after’ picture into my picture folder and updated his contact on my phone. When I came home and started working on my MacBook, the contact had already been updated.

While the implications of this may seem small, they actually open up a world of possibilities. Information is becoming less and less bound to certain geographical positions. People are working from home, writing books while travelling, updating their blogs from the subway and chatting with their friends while on airplanes. This entry, which I’ve started working on in front of my computer, was also edited the day after as I sat on the train to work. I will probably proofread it tonight while in the bathtub. I almost exclusively write Twitter messages from my iPhone nowadays since it allows me to post a message when it’s relevant instead of having to remember it for when I’m sitting by a computer. I can update my blog, keep in touch with my friends, check my e-mails or write new ones, check the train schedule, look in on currency conversion tables and almost everything that previously needed me to be sitting in front of a desktop computer.

The Future

Picture Courtesy of 'In Veritas Lux' on Flickr.

What I’ve described is all just the very beginning. Take, for example, the example above of syncing contacts to my phone and connecting to “the Cloud” when I update to a new device. I foresee a future when the information in question will simply be stored in “the Cloud” all the time and the phone simply acts as one of many terminals that retrieves it when it needs to. Like I said, my MacBook Air and my iPhone already share address books and update each other on the fly without any prompting from me when changes are made on one. After all, storage space and bandwidth prices are dropping fast, so there is no reason that everything can’t be stored everywhere. The rapid development of mobile Internet solutions makes it seem almost inevitable that more and more of the actual storage space on the hand held devices (and home computers) will lie in “the Cloud”. I’m guessing we’ll see Apple’s iDisk being added as a feature to their mobile devices over the next few years.

Along with the excitement of being reachable and available at all times, new social conventions are appearing. They’re telling us when – and, more importantly, where – it is socially permissible to check your Twitter feed, write SMS Text messages, post a new blog entry, check your notifications on Facebook and so on. Is it OK to do so during a business meeting? While you’re talking to somebody else in meatspace? How about while in bed, waiting to fall asleep together with your partner?

I believe that these social conventions will become more of an issue before they become less of an issue. There will be conflicts regarding when and where people update Twitter, read news, check the blogosphere or double-check the Wikipedia entry regarding the topic being discussed. There were Facebook-related problems in workplaces not too long ago. Still, I think the first step towards solving this problem will come quite automatically when the devices become so integrated with our every day lives that we feel disconnected from our surroundings when they fail on us. I don’t think we’re too many years away from a world where we can have information scrolling where we can see it 24 hours of the day. Whether this be on a small wrist-mounted computer like we dreamed of in the 80s, a head-mounted display like the picture above or some futuristic and advanced cybernetic implant in your cerebellum remains a question of mere implementation, not a question of the inevitable function we’re moving toward.

When raising your arm to check the latest trends in the blogosphere or checking your inbox becomes as natural a motion as raising your arm to check what time it is, we’re going to be past the first hurdle on the way towards true integration between meatspace and cyberspace. When you see your contact list – like on your IM client – live on the inside of your Head-Mounted Display, with notifications in case you are within x units of distance away from one of your friends (as long as he has privacy/anonymity mode turned off) we will be bridging the gaps between the two spaces. When somebody asks you a question and you can’t be sure if the answer came from your own memory engrams or the equivalent of Wikipedia – then we’ll be fully integrated.

You might look at your iPhone or other handheld application platform and think that it’s far away from the virtual reality people were imagining in the late 90:s. There’s no immersion, no bulky VR-goggles or silly techno-gloves. Still, that’s never what virtual reality was about; the aim was to bridge cyberspace and meatspace; something that the iPhone has done better than any consumer device in the world has done before.

I, for one, cannot wait to see what happens next.