In addition to the post of 26^th May 2007, there is a Firefox add-on called "Mobile Barcoder" that:

generates 2D barcodes (called QR Codes) of the URL of the current page being viewed. You can then use a mobile phone to read the URL from the screen to save you typing the long URL using the phone keypad. (https://addons.mozilla.org)

Here we are, the MA in Digital Culture and Technology at King's College London has finally started! I am going to study part-time (as even with the most welcomed AHRC Award, I cannot afford to live in London simply as a student and I need to work to bring home the bacon! This first year I'll be reading the core course in Digital Culture and Technology and the course in Material Culture. I'll try and post here as much as possible about this new adventure I have embarked myself into, also to try and keep track of ideas and progress notes.

This is rather cool! If you own a camera mobile and have a barcode reader software try it out!

You can create your own barcodes at the Nokia Mobile codes website! There are also many other web sites that are able to generate bar codes, either linear or 2D. You can just Google them.

When I first got my new Nokia N95 a month ago I was a bit puzzled by the "Barcode Reader", but I must admit it is rather cool... useless but cool! Apparently 2D barcodes are very popular in South Korea and Japan where they are used to extract urls, phone numbers, short text adverts, etc., from codes on boxes and in magazines.

I got a bit curious as to how these worked actually. Barcodes were first invented back in 1948 - the year my father was born! - and not surprisingly they are based on the digital code, i.e. they are just another way of representing strings of 1s and 0s made optically machine-readable.

According to the Wikipedia entry:

A barcode (also bar code) is a machine-readable (using dark ink on white substrate to create high and low reflectance which is converted to 1s and 0s) representation of information in a visual format on a surface. Originally barcodes stored data in the widths and spacings of printed parallel lines, but today they also come in patterns of dots, concentric circles, and hidden within images. Barcodes can be read by optical scanners called barcode readers or scanned from an image by special software. Barcodes are widely used to implement Auto ID Data Capture (AIDC) systems that improve the speed and accuracy of computer data entry.

The slogan Nokia is using to promote its new handset N95 "It's what computers have become" and the definition that is commonly used throughout the WEB to refer to this new generation mobile phone multimedia computer caght my attention when I first started reading about the handset. My contract was coming to an end and I was due for an upgrade. I can honestly say I am very happy about my new phone, but this is not the point I am here today to make. If you are thinking to buy one though there are many blogs and reviews around that can fulfill all your curiosities and doubts! As I mentioned before the slogan caught my attention because brought immediately to my mind an article I read a few months ago while I was forced in bed by a nasty pneumonia and a conversation about "Convergence" I had a couple of months ago with a PhD student in Digital art.

The article was brought to my attention by a program I listened to on the Italian radio station "RAI RADIO 3". UBIQUITOUS COMPUTING According to theoretical and philosophical ideas regarding the future of computing technologies, there are three steps, or waves, in the development of computing.

First were mainframes, each shared by lots of people. Now we are in the personal computing era, person and machine staring uneasily at each other across the desktop. Next comes ubiquitous computing, or the age of calm technology, when technology recedes into the background of our lives. Alan Kay of Apple calls this "Third Paradigm" computing.

What is exactly this calm technology then?

Ubiquitous Computing has roots in many aspects of computing. In its current form, it was first articulated by Mark Weiser in 1988 at the Computer Science Lab at Xerox PARC. He describes it like this:

Inspired by the social scientists, philosophers, and anthropologists at PARC, we have been trying to take a radical look at what computing and networking ought to be like. We believe that people live through their practices and tacit knowledge so that the most powerful things are those that are effectively invisible in use. This is a challenge that affects all of computer science. Our preliminary approach: Activate the world. Provide hundreds of wireless computing devices per person per office, of all scales (from 1" displays to wall sized). This has required new work in operating systems, user interfaces, networks, wireless, displays, and many other areas. We call our work "ubiquitous computing". This is different from PDA's, dynabooks, or information at your fingertips. It is invisible, everywhere computing that does not live on a personal device of any sort, but is in the woodwork everywhere.

For thirty years most interface design, and most computer design, has been headed down the path of the "dramatic" machine. Its highest ideal is to make a computer so exciting, so wonderful, so interesting, that we never want to be without it. A less-traveled path I call the "invisible"; its highest ideal is to make a computer so imbedded, so fitting, so natural, that we use it without even thinking about it. (I have also called this notion "Ubiquitous Computing", and have placed its origins in post-modernism.) I believe that in the next twenty years the second path will come to dominate. But this will not be easy; very little of our current systems infrastructure will survive. We have been building versions of the infrastructure-to-come at PARC for the past four years, in the form of inch-, foot-, and yard-sized computers we call Tabs, Pads, and Boards. Our prototypes have sometimes succeeded, but more often failed to be invisible. From what we have learned, we are now explorting some new directions for ubicomp, including the famous "dangling string" display.

When I first read about this I thought, forgive my being naive, about sci-fi technologies and the likes of Star Trek fancy gadgets like the "holodeck", while I could not really see how computing technology could really be that "invisible" for us not to perceive it as a technology. During those same days forced in the hospital bed recovering, I read (re-read to be precise, this time in English as opposed to the Italian translation!) "Orality and Literacy, The Technologizing of the Word", by Professor Walter J. Ong.

In his fourth chapter Ong states that "writing is a technology"[ibid., p. 80] and compares our perception of the technology of writing to that of Plato.

"Plato was thinking of writing as an external, alien technology, as many people today think of the computer. Because we have by today so deeply interiorized writing, made it so much a part of ouselves, as Plato's age had not yet made it fully a part of itself (Havelock, Eric A., 'Preface to Plato', Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University, Belknap Press, 1963)" we find it difficult to consider writing to be a technology as we commonly assume printing and the computer to be. Yet writing [...] is a technology, calling for the use of tools and other equipment. [...] By contrast with natural, oral speech, writing is completely artificial. There is no way to write "naturally". [...] To say writing is artificial is not to condemn it but to praise it. [...] Technologies are not mere exterior aids, but also interior transformations of consciousness, and never more than when they affect the word. [...] Technologies are artificial, but [...] artificiality is natural to human beings. Technology, properly interiorized, does not degrade human life but on the contrary enhances it. [ibid., p. 80-2]

(See also this reference web site for more info on the matter).

Writing is then a technology so deeply rooted in our consciousness that we don't even perceive it as technology altogether, and the same kind of transformation should happen to the computing technology in order to become a calm, invisible one.

Ubiquitous computing though is "different from PDA's, dynabooks, or information at your fingertips", but I believe that the first step of this transformation has to be linked to the phenomenon of technological convergence. People tend not to see a mobile as a computer. Even if they can use it in the same way they would use their desktop computer in the office, a new generation cellphone remains somewhere in between traditional telephones and computers/PDA's. It might be related to the fact that not many people would ask themselves exactly how their mobile works, but there is still something more, somenthing that has changed deeper in the consciousness of the user: the same people that still feel computers are the enemy that dwells on their desktops, would use without thinking twice a mobile phone and would be surprised if they were made aware that, really, inside a mobile there is a computer. People are aware (only too well!) of the risk of their desktop computer being affected by a virus, but are surprised when they are told that the same could happen to their mobile phone.

Is "Convergence" the first step towards a deeper rooting of computing technology into our consciousness?

Is "Convergence" the first step towards the third wave of "Ubiquitous computing"?

Digital 'inter-'culture & Solidarity

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