Sunday, May 24, 2009

Untethered

Ugly and neglected fragments (Phil Gyford’s website)

Just skim reading this post on the vernacular by Phil.

I was thinking, on the bus, the other day, about the history of the move from telephones being that of addressing a space, to addressing a person. A land line number connects you with a house or building, in which space the person you want to address may or may not be coincident. Mobiles untethered the phonenumber from a place, and associated it with an individual. You call someone's number, someone's phone, with no overlay of serendipity beyond can they hoik it out of their handbag in time.

I found myself wondering - will the history of the homepage be like this, too? A move from an addressable piece of web real-estate, that may contain the recent activity of an individual; towards a model where a person leaves data trails, a stream, that isn't bound to a certain digital location, or instatiation, but is remade wherever the reader happens to aggregate it. Will the layout of a homepage be superseded by a bunch of feeds - from twitter, flickr... wherever. Are we just a sum of activity rather than publishers?

Anyway, it was a half formed thought. I suspect I may just be talking about 'everyware'.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I started thinking thoughts like that when I found out I could run a web server from my Nokia phone. I don't think it will work like that, web servers in phones are a bit too clunky, but it makes you realize that the person is the smallest unit of identity. Not the company or building.

Hey, we have to find something for all these new IP6 addresses to identify. :)

Hilary Perkins said...

on a similar train of thought myself, about the asynchronicity of socialising online & how we're trackable through time if not space. as our activity leaves a trail of data we increasingly connect with people where they were and when they were, rather than in the here and now. *disappears into own navel*

Antonio said...

I agree - this is my justification for having a rubbish design on my blog.

If you ain't coming through RSS I don't care about you.

Kind of being facetious but I do think it's all going in that direction.

A