Clothes Make the Network

Roland Piquepaille writes "Howard Rheingold is looking at how "wearable computers create ad-hoc wireless communities." Here is the main idea, introduced by Gerd Kortuem, a 38-year-old assistant professor, who recently moved to Lancaster University in England from the University of Oregon's Wearable Computing Lab. "As he sees it, the crowds who surround us every day constitute a huge waste of social capital. If you live in a city for instance, there are many who pass within a few yards of you each day who could give you a ride home, buy an item you're trying to sell, or consider you as dating material. Dynamic networking makes it possible to tap those resources through a momentary alliance among transient interest groups." Check this column for a summary or the full article if you have more time."

Comments

diamond age

[painehope]

reminds of me of neal stephenson's the diamond age...to a certain degree. most of the communities in this book were more formal and static, but i remember one community that was a distributed network entirely based upon trust. i.e. one person walks into a room, loads a gun and leaves, another person walks in 5 minutes later, unloads the gun and leaves, then person A walks back in, puts the gun against his/her head and pulls the trigger, trusting that person B has fulfilled their task, entirely independent of each other.
an extension, and less static organization, is the mutual interest concept. i don't believe it would be so smooth in the real world, or maybe people would give each other trust points...for example, the guy who shares his umbrella walking through the rain, you might assign him a few trust points, whereas some asshole who cuts in a line or lets a door slam in the face of an old lady, you could slag him down some points. i'm sure that it would end up fragmenting into a wide variety of smaller networks, but that's how real life is. myself, as a tattooed/pierced punk rock guy, might be viewed as a suspicious character if I offered a ride to a young lady whose car had broken down, whereas if this lady was into the tattoing/punk rock scene, she might view me as a more trustworthy individual than someone who is subculturally less familiar.
this could be very interesting in how it would make your actions have direct repurcussions (sp?), which is something that city culture has somewhat taken away. for example, you can be a total asshole to someone one night, then go out the next night and act totally different, and noone would know if you are in a different area/location. it might restore what i consider a vital part of society : accountability and personal responsibility. or it might just break down into a nightmarish chaos of retribution and personal attacks. who knows, but it would be interesting to find out.
and, yes, I know I'm somewhat off-topic, but these ideas occurred to me and I felt like sharing them.