mobileinternet
No Blackberry for you, Mr. Obama
According to the New York Times, Barack Obama will be giving up his Blackberry and e-mail when he moves into the Oval Office.
Sorry, Mr. President. Please surrender your BlackBerry.
Those are seven words President-elect Barack Obama is dreading but expecting to hear, friends and advisers say, when he takes office in 65 days.
For years, like legions of other professionals, Mr. Obama has been all but addicted to his BlackBerry. The device has rarely been far from his side — on most days, it was fastened to his belt — to provide a singular conduit to the outside world as the bubble around him grew tighter and tighter throughout his campaign.
At issue here is the Presidential Records Act, a law that makes all communication done by a sitting President part of the public record. It’s not clear For all the perquisites and power afforded the president, the chief executive of the United States is essentially deprived by law and by culture of some of the very tools that other chief executives depend on to survive and to thrive.
One wonders how long this will go on. As mobile devices and mobile network connectivity become increasingly ubiquitous and necessary for daily existence, how insulated from them can politicians be kept?
Blended reality, and moving online offline
I recently stumbled across Semapedia, a service that generates QR codes from Wikipedia links, letting people paste “physical hyperlinks” that can then be read by people with the right software on their phones. This is a first step, of course — geotagged information linked to GPS-enabled phones, and RFID-equipped physical artifacts, will allow for an even greater penetration of rich, networked data into the real world.
How will we view the world when layers of information are available for everything around us? At what point will we start disabling the automatic retrieval of such data in order to preserve some of the world’s mystery for ourselves to discover?
There are a few applications I can think of in a learning context:
- History and background of local buildings, important people, etc.
- Products that tell you their names (in a foreign language context, this would be a killer app)
- An extension of Amazon’s “people that liked this also liked that” functionality to everything once products and places are all mappable and queryable
There are millions of possibilities, and many of them will undoubtedly change the way we live. How will online moving into the offline world, and being accessible anywhere through persistent, mobile network connections, affect your life?