I once was lost, but now I’m found
An obvious feature of the Personal Flight Recorder (PFR) will be full-time geopositioning. This transforms our reality by eliminating a significant source of social frustration: showing up on time and knowing that you will. Isn’t that the real cause of concern when one is “lost”? It always happens when you’re on a schedule – meeting friends somewhere you’ve not been, arriving for the start of the game/concert/film/dinner reservation, etc., invariably a cause for social, not personal, frustration.
(My purpose here is not another tiresome Popular Science-type “tech in 50 years” treatment, but rather to identify significant imminent ubiquitous personal technologies that will affect our culture in meaningful ways.)
Navigating uncertainly to a scheduled appointment carries a disproportionate anxiety level, and all of that will disappear with ubiquitous geopositioning. By knowing where we are, where we’re going and when we’ll be there, we can release this significant guilt/conflict over social requirements. Let’s review the particularly American kind of social guilt phenomenon.
We Americans hail from families of immigrants newly arrived, seeking approval from better-established immigrants deposited by the previous boat. Even the best adjusted of us have inherited a message of social inferiority from generations of moms telling generations of kids to fit in better, speak English better, display better manners, etc. I suggest that this heritage weighs on us more than we want to acknowledge at levels we don’t want to address. Any mechanisms that help relieve social insecurities are meaningful.
Takeaway: We’ll be capturing the video stream we witness while knowing where we are, where going, how to get there and when. The third leg of this empowerment stool is the logistical equivalent of blogging. Where we are and what we’re seeing will be selectively available, in real time, to anyone we care to share it with. Thereby, our social involvements will escape physical restraints, and moblogging rises to a third dimension.
That is the promise of the PFR equipped with personal geopositioning.
10:10:01 AM  |
Escapable Logic 