Pervasive data here and now

Dan Hill has posted an excellent piece called the street as a platform. Taking a ‘here-and-now’ view, Hill describes just how pervasive data networks already are in the urban environment – and raises  substantive governance and legislative questions that are present in the contemporary street.

Having been one of those people that have talked about the pace of changefor some years now, Hill’s narrative led me to reflect on how much ‘change’ is actually here and now.  To paraphrase William Gibson, it’s like the future is already here… and it is becoming evenly distributed. In what Hill calls “a twitching, pulsing cloud of data”, we have (a by no means a comprehensive list):

• online games, newsfeed reader software, video reviews, Google Maps, WiFi and GPS enabled connectivity on mobile devices
• sensor networks indicating the level of ambient daylight on the street
• networked high-resolution display screens used in public places for a variety of purposes such as real-time coverage of sporting events, and semantic connections across complex databases (such as library data and movie clips)
• street infrastructure to support wireless connectivity, geographic information systems, sensor networks and collaborative research projects.

Together with:

• the digital divide and variable digital literacies 
• consumers not being aware of pricing differentials
• online fraud and hacking
• variable network reliability
• a mixture of data that is proprietary, enclosed and privately managed, and other data that is open, collaborative and public.

The governance and legislative issues to deal with go to levels of openness, responsibility, privacy, security, interaction, user awareness and social inclusion/exclusion. The message here is, it’s time to act on these issues now.

Hill goes on to invite us to imagine what the street will be like over the next few years from the deployment of more ubiquitous and pervasive computing…and to consider the challenges involved in identifying, understanding and acting in response to the continual state of flux and change.