The Culture of Information: Ubiquitous Computing and Representations of Reality
Paul Dourish · 2006
Weiser's original discussion of the emerging age of ubiquitous computing was formulated largely in technological terms, as an extrapolation of continuing trends in the design and capabilities of computer hardware, software, and infrastructure. Implicit in this transformation of computational platforms, though, lies a transformation of the ways in which we encounter, engage with, and experience interactive systems. As computation becomes increasingly embedded in the everyday world, our experience of systems increasingly draws upon our experience of the real world itself, in all its physical, social, and cultural manifestations. The nature of what, in my ovm work, I term embodied is not merely a physical embodiment, but an experiential embodiment that draws as much on the social as the physical in the ways in which we encounter the world and find it meaningftil. The idea at work here is that our experience of the world is richer, more natural, more nuanced and in some ways more effective than our interaction with the disembodied in conventional computer systems. So, in his classic article, Weiser (1991) makes the telling remark that there is more available to us in a walk in the woods than there is when we sit in front of a computer, our quintes sential processing system. By this, he wants to draw attention to the com plexity and clumsiness of traditional computer interfaces, and the obstacles that they put in the way of the tasks that they are designed to support. However, his analogy raises a separate question, which he does not explore but I wish to here: why should we think of a walk in the woods as an exercise, and what happens when we do? The use of as a mass noun is a relatively new phenomenon (Day 2001). Information had previously referred to the process or activity of informing or of being informed; to receive information was to participate in a process, much as one