Your phone might put you in touch with the rest of the world, but you still need to know what part of the world you want to call - and what their number is, and whether they’ll want to talk to you. The latest generation of GPS-enabled phones is fixing that: drawing an invisible layer of data over everything and everywhere, enabling the tech-connected to use the world more effectively than ever before.
It’s indestructible information: if a bar sucks, you can’t graffiti the walls (at least not for long), but with new geo-tagging services you can leave an indelible message than anyone equipped with the same hardware can access. And since that hardware is a phone, that’s everyone. The true power of tagging won’t engage until after the usual new-tech shakedown, where one service beats or eats all the others and gets a solid service running, but then it’ll be impossible for anywhere to work on the business principle of “the suckers won’t be coming back anyway.”
It’s effective use of urban environments: a long-pondered question is “How can someone be lonely in a city of ten million people?” The answer is, of course, “Extremely easily” because everyone has developed anti-other-people defense mechanisms. But social scanning apps like Loopt let you stay aware of where all your friends are, while others can scan the city for people with similar interests and habits to you. Why wait to bump into someone at the Blues section of the second-hand vinyl store, when Google can tell you about everyone in ten square miles who appreciates the sound? Why not take control of such chance meetings?
Of course there are massive security risks in advertising your location and interests, and we’ll have to learn to defend ourselves from those hazards. But every step since we first squidged out of a pond has been an arms race against danger, and every single advance has made our lives unequivocally better. Think about it: we used to struggle against actual no-screwing-around Death By Tiger when we left the cave to hunt food, and now we’re worried about credit card fraud when we order custom Guatamalan coffee to be couriered to our door.
Never mind the scaremongers - life is always getting better and information is the method. Augmented reality is coming. We can’t wait.
Dual Perspectives http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=218101872
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