DCRC - Digital Cultures Research Centre

Pervasive media is neither a sci-fi pipedream or an exotic research agenda in a secretive corporate research lab. Media has, for the developed (and mostly Western) world become something like pervasive by virtue of the significant expansion of the global internet infrastructure. We have come to assume the presence of this infrastructure as an unseen, and taken for granted, substrate of everyday life. The 'hipsters' in the Mission district of San Francisco 'checking in' to cafes on Foursquare simply take for granted the existance of the ecosystem of the app, the phone handests, the celular and wireless networks, the 'backhaul' that strings it together and the many people that support and maintan that system (not forgetting the natural resources from which this stuff is all made, frequently by people working in harsh conditions).

However, as Graham and Marvin pointed out in 2001, we have increasingly come to rely on such infrastructures for everyday life, there are significantly contested modes of interoperation and standards, and an ever more complex regulatory environment that surrounds these issues. The delivery of pervasive media, then, is messy. It is this 'mess' that a number of DCRC research projects explores. While the construction of this infrastructure gathered pace, a realm of research evolved to imagine possible uses for it. This research has often been labelled "ubiquitous computing".

Ubiquitous computing (or ubicomp) is the label for what Xerox PARC researcher Mark Weiser called the 'third wave' of computing, following the eras of the mainframe and the desktop PC. Ubicomp is characterised by a range of computing appliances that are worn, carried or embedded in the everyday environment. As Dourish and Bell have pointed out:

'by many accounts ubicomp has been tremendously successful. It has been a successful research endeavour. In addition to being a topic in its own right, it is also a central aspect of the research agenda of many other areas of computer science research... Furthermore, it has been successful as a technological agenda, meaning that Weiser's model of a single person making use of tens of hundreds of embedded devices networked together is a reality for many people.' (Divining a Digital Future, p. 91)

Ubiquitous or pervasive computing has been a persistent vision of a future in which people, places and things are intermediated by a range of internet connected appliances and services. In the last twenty years there have been many iterations of this vision. For example: the ubicomp work at Xerox PARC, with 'tabs, pads and boards'; the precusor work on 'Active Badges' at Olivetti; the IBM Pervasive Computing work with WAP enabled mobile phones; the 'T-Engine' embedded compution research at University of Tokyo; Hewlett Packard's 'CoolTown' work to put a web server in almost everything; and many others (see Roy Want's Introduction to Ubiquitous Computing in Krumm ed. 'Ubiquitous Computing Fundamentals').

Amongst those examples, 'CoolTown' stands out as not only a set of interesting and pragmatic investigations into providing a web presence to 'people, places and things' (see Kindberg et al. 2002) but also a vision of a technically mediated future pushed by HP's then CEO Carly Fiorina. So, while CoolTown produced a range of research outcomes, some of which were released as an open source SDK, for enabling the interconnection of many appliances, it was also an extensive marketing campaign to demonstrate that the 'scientists, engineers and other researchers at HP Labs' had a vision for what the future could offer (and how HP might deliver it). It is probably not necessary to point out that we're not buying CoolTown products now and it is quite difficult to find any trace of CoolTown, beyond the papers written by Tim Kindberg, John Barton and their colleagues. CoolTown is the principal case study for the project 'Computing Futures', for which I have been conducting fieldwork here in California.

However, regardless of the elaborate visions of the future that surround 'pervasive media' and 'ubiquitous computing' there exist concrete examples of such technology, and its use, in the everyday environment. For example, and to return to infrastructures, the San Francisco Municipal Transoprt Authority are rolling out "SF Park": a system of parking meters with associated sensors that feedback data concerning how busy particular districts are, which in turn is used to amend the price of parking and represent parking availabilty to citizens, online and via an app. SF Park represents one of many ways in which ubiquitous computing, and the pervasive media it enables, are being normalised in our everyday lives. It isn't the shiny future of the visions but it is the infrastructures that we increasingly rely upon.

Beyond the construction of everyday pervasive media and/or ubiquitous computing, the reality of these systems, the devices in which ubicomp has been realised, has become fetishised. Indivudal devices have become the focus and have been imbued with status. The broad arching visions have been reduced into a tightly controlled set of proprietary systems (there remain some projects in academia that aspire to the broader visions but they remain one-offs). Returning to Graham and Marvin's observations in 2001, the 'mess' of pervasive media is also a highly monetised range of vertically integrated systems that ensure user-consumers remain within a proprietary domain. You are tremendously free to use and consume pervasive media, as long as you do so within the limits of these systems. Infrastructures are not only socio-technical, they are socio-economic. Not only have these media been narrowly commodified into saleable nuggets but so has our capacity to pay attention to those media commodities. The 'proletarianisation' of the consumer, which the philosopher Bernard Stiegler identifies as an erosion of 'savoir vivre' into herd-like consumption which promotes anxiety that perpetuates the consumption, and the commodification of the capacity to consume is the production of an attention economy. This is a significant theme of research conducted by a number of researchers within the DCRC.