Have you ever stared into a computer screen and felt lost? Have you ever wandered through a grocery store aisle and felt watched?
In ‘Ambient Findability,’ Moreville notes that evolution has incited a change in human behavior by creating “wayfinding” tools that allow people to navigate from one place to the next. The author notes the transfer of this human propensity to the digital world, and Moreville describes the step into digital wayfinding as “the intersection of local awareness and ubiquitous computing.”
Image credit: Nationaal Archief / Spaarnestad Photo, SFA003008498.
Moreville addresses each of the five senses in wayfinding behavior, from dolphins to bees, and draws association between members of the animal kingdom and natural human instincts. Earliest humans depended on all of their available senses for survival, although Moreville states that the largest part of that power has been lost. The author illustrates the connection between wayfinding and problem solving over the course of human history, stating that “unique environments produce unique solutions.”
Another gem forwarded in ‘Ambient Findability’– “Conspicuous consumption is hip.” The rate at which technology is advancing has created a reality in which consumers are nearly attached to their technology, and use it for more than was thought possible only a few years before. Moreville describes the various uses for technology, saying that modern technological tools allow users to do everything, including “read, write, buy, sell, talk, listen, work, play, attack and defend.”
In David Perry’s ‘Ubiquitous Surveillance,’ the text outlines the way modern technology has allowed the perpetual surveillance of 21st century citizens. The prevanlence of security cameras interconnected with the web allows a level of intimacy with everything going on in a given space that has never before been possible.
One of the more disturbing elements of human surveillance noted by the author is the panopticon, a type of prison precisely constructed so that the prisoner can be viewed from nearly anywhere, but cannot perceive his viewers. Video surveillance is tantamount to a modern-day panopticon without the need for imprisonment; those being watched do not see their watchers.
In “What Google Knows: Privacy and Internet Search Engines,” the authors analyze search engine privacy in the context of what users search. The question of where privacy comes into play between what users search and the private institutions and individuals that are searched, and the idea that the things users search are identifying factors in who they are constitutes a re-evaluation in the ways in which search engines such as Google affect the integrity of identity. As the author states, “One’s search history eerily resembles a metaphorical X-ray photo of one’s thoughts, beliefs, fears, and hopes.”