Citizen Kirby for President! There were many many great moments yesterday at TEDxSydney, at Carriageworks, not the least some inspiring conversations with fellow attendees in the aftermath. I look forward to reconnecting in future having discovered such interesting intersections of social fields and ideas. My own little square in the collaborative cube was inspired by Elizabeth Churchill, Principle Research Scientist at Yahoo! Resarch, whose writing I've been following in Interactions, (the magazine for experiences-people-technology). Me (or I) is now a hybrid entity, similar to Donna Haraway's cyborg self, but in a more local and pragmatic fashion. When I make choices about my life, I automatically factor in my appliances and my applications. ME (version 3.0 to extend an old Tshirt slogan) is the sum of my embodied self and my augmented realities.
Having an iPhone vs an Android will change the ways I interact with the world in subtle ways, opening some doors and closing others. How I organise my music, my filing, my maps and all of the structure I impose on my self, and then on my interactions with others is filtered through my applications and my appliances. Someone recently said (Mark Pesce, I think) that we no longer run late for things, we lose contact instead. We assume that events and locations can get rescheduled or organised. Time and location are not fixed in our lives the way they used to be, as discrete events. So the consistency or range of our communications is of more importance.
I no longer need to wait at home for my family to return. I can't always separate work and life. Boundaries are fluid, social conventions disrupted. This might have some liberating effects, however I am put in mind of nothing more than a giant troupe of mobile bearing monkeys swinging through the urban landscape, hooting and shrieking.
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