Blog

And we're on to the last session of the day, which continues the blogging theme. I should probably note that not all papers at this conference are concerned with blogs - there are some eight or nine sessions running simultaneously here, themed around many other topics; as always, the topics I cover here are only the ones I was most interested in and do not necessarily represent the overall intellectual thrust of the conference accurately. (I'm sure the other bloggers here will present a very different version of AoIR 2004 in their blogs, even if admittedly many of them have also attended most of the blogging-related sessions…)

We've now moved on to the next keynote, by Nina Wakeford from INCITE at the University of Surrey; I saw her keynote at ISEA2004, of course, but I think this one is on a different topic. I also just ran in to fibreculture's own David Teh - good to see another familiar face!

Nina considers how we might think about ubiquity - through developments of ubicomp, and through analogous social and cultural activities; also, how might we intervene in already existing ubiquity work? A guiding example is the 'gaydar', a new technology for gay men to find one another through mobile devices. What exactly is it that ubiquitous computing promises, what technologies may it replace?

The View from My Room, Complete with CowsI'm starting to get a bit frustrated with my lack of connectivity here. Not only is there no wireless, but there's also no way to plug into the cable-based network; I ended up buying a phone card for £3 in order to be able to connect via dial-up, but that didn't work either… And to make matters worse, now my mobile is on the blink too, and locks up every time I try to do anything. Argh!

We're now starting the second keynote session with Sara Kiesler from Carnegie Mellon University. Her topic is the question of 'given ubiquity, what is the real world?' She starts out by discussing the topic of ubiquity in itself - this could mean ubiquity of access across society (and then access to what types of services - dial-up, broadband; email, Web, etc.?) or personal ubiquity (use of the Net in virtually aspects of everyday life, for a wide variety of purposes; in fact, people now equate 'computer use' with 'Internet use'). Sara's hypothesis, then, is that the online world is so intertwined with the real world that we cannot any more study the Internet as a unique entity.

Ted NelsonAfter all of this, the first keynote of this conference will be delivered by hypertext veteran Ted Nelson. He basically begins by saying the present computer world is appalling - it is based on techie misunderstandings of human life and human thought, hidden behind flash user interfaces. The GUI (or for him PUI - park user interface) presents a cosmology which categorises all computer tasks into paper-based tasks. WYSIWYG, too, remains paper-based, of course - what you see is what you get when you print it out. (Developed, of course, by Xerox - what a surprise.)