Friday, February 8, 2013

Why I've Been Away

I'm in the midst of writing a white paper on enterprise mobility and it's been taking up most of the free time I typically devote to the blog. It's a great project and touches on some of themes I've covered here about the impact of technology on culture and identity. Here's a brief excerpt from a draft of the introduction:
We tend to think of smartphones and tablets as merely smaller and more mobile version of the computers we use to check email, surf the web and post to social networks. But mobile devices don’t merely extend the capabilities of phones and computers. They transform both the substance and meaning of what we communicate, create and consume. Being pervasively connected to the “Global Village” changes the context through which we live our lives and  experience ourselves.
The meat of the paper will be a lot less high-concept and focus on more pragmatic matters such as mobile strategy, enterprise architecture, agile software development, change management, etc. But I'm excited to inject some McLuhanism into the conversation. I'm likely to continue posting less frequently until I get the paper finished, but will try to pop in at least a couple of times a week.

6 comments:

Kikas Babenco said...

I'm really interested on the theme, will human beings become more like avatars? Think like avatars?

Cecil Hirvi said...

All media (including mobile) exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.

Botgirl Questi said...

Kikas: Interesting. In what ways do you think human being might become more like avatars? How do avatars think?

Cecil. Nice McLuhan probe! Any media-mediated perception is artificial in that it engages our senses in a different way than our "natural" state. The context they create overshadows the content they transmit. For instance, having an iPhone in my pocket that connects me 24/7 is much more consequential than any particular content I read, watch or create. The changes to society that emerge from a technology are another aspect of the "medium is the message" idea.

I also agree that there are implicit values in each medium. McLuhan wrote about the relationship between books and individualism, for instance. I'm still puzzling out the values of mobile technology. It seems to me that pervasive connectivity is a key part of it.

Burhop said...

enterprise mobility? I was thinking this was how to get a job someplace else in your organization.

If you are going to write about cell phones, I think we need more posts about how we need a bigger screen on my blackberry.

Botgirl Questi said...

Blackberry. A great example of a company that owned a market and lost it. Time for a trade in?

Barbara Teixeira said...

As an avatar we don't think. We are a projection of what someone wants to be.
As real life persons we are becoming the projection of what the media (controled by the system) wants us to be