It's way past three in the morning and I still can't go to sleep for some reason. Maybe I'm suffering from an onset of insomnia? I do certainly feel rather tired, so why won't my brain stop spinning thoughts and go to sleep? I'm getting worried. I have early day tomorrow.
Anyway, might as well make the best of the waking time I have. Read an interesting article pointed through Doctorow's twitter post. It was an article about science fiction and abundance of practicable facts. I want to share an interesting quote I found in that article.
""
Or, more succinctly, in order to get the marketplace off its ass to solve the impossible, you have to just pull off the highly improbable and make sure everybody knows about it. Show it can be done, show how you did it, and watch the "marketplace" attack because you've made the "premise" "plausible."
""
Hopefully my blackberry-to-email-to-blog scheme is working out here, I'd hate to have the whole page messed up like some other times before.
I love that quote. Maybe it would have been better if I could find something cleaner and concise, but hey this is a post being written on a handset while waiting to fall asleep.
The best way to make people what you want to do, is to do the improbable. The best way to teach a subject to a person might also be to show them the possibility of the impossible. Between students who've witnessed first hand the possibility of an improbable exercise-composing working genetic circuit on blackboard through abstraction symbols-and students who think those things are still within the realms of science fiction or upscale laboratories, it is obvious who would be more enthusiastic about learning. Of course, when you get into it there's the whole issue of the student possessing certain degree of curiosity in the first place, but I won't get into it here and now.
I love the idea of always-on network access and unlimited internet on mobile devices. I can definitely understand how many Japanese people almost exclusively use their handsets for their online presence and blogging/photo sharing needs. Makes sense. If all you need to do is write up informal blogposts and post pictures of your favorite moments in life & keep digital connection with friends why bother getting even a laptop? All that is possible with your handset and it has added benefit of allowing you to compose your works while on the move. It means you can use that wasted times for something a little more productive. The modern society at large, despite its rapid pace, is surprisingly wasteful in terms of time management. Many people waste hours per day just to get where they need to be, and classes waste hours per day waiting for kids to sit down. Mobile technology offers people a chance at using those wasted moments to do something creative, whether it be writing a keitei novel, taking and posting interesting pictures and videos, or just plain reading... The apparent lack of interest in mobile technologies by large corporation in United States (at least before the iPhone came out) is difficult to understand, and just goes to show how complascent those people can get.
Now that I think about it, are current generation bluetooth-ready cellphones have the capability to connect to a printer? Now that would be awesome. The cellphone os can provide the basic framework for setting up a page and the user would simply type in their mobile, printing their product directly from the printer, whether it be a short story, important email, or pictures taken on the way you want in paper format for whatever the reason. It would certainly be possible to do lighter homeworks on mobiles.
If there is a problem with the mobile oriented internet society, it would be difficulty of content creation inherent to the platform. You can certainly write and compose/draw using the tools the corporations give you, but most often you can't go beyond that. Japanese keitei culture, while impressive, is also one of the most oppressive I can think of in terms of software/hardware freedom (what makes it even more impressive is that the contents generated by the harshly locked-in culture is even more impressive than supposedly 'freer' U.S. market. What does that imply?). It's more or less out of the question to be able to run scripts or program things on your mobile. Most often applications available for purchase for your mobile is locked in by carrier with no opportunity for transfer, and all the rights to the application is owned by the carrier. It would be preposterous to demand sourcecode to anything. It's almost as if the customers of the carrier companies are spending machines that print money for the corporations within tightly controlled ecosystem (don't be too hard on those Japanese carriers though. U.S. Carriers are more or less the same, and some others are even worse, it runs like communism with cellphone carriers sitting at the center). Cory Doctorow once tweeted that such locked-down nature of mobiles make it unlikely to be a suitable communication/computing platform in third world nations. It's a good point.
And that is precisely why we need to work toward open specification open cellphone systems. Google's Android is a good first step, integrating relative platform freedom with user ability to write and run scripts like python/lua on their own machines. Yet I believe it would be unrealistic to count on developing nations getting their hands on those multi-hundreds of dollars gadgets that need to be recharged every day. In realistic terms, deploying current android based handsets in developing nations would be forcing many families to choose between a half-year's schooling for their kids and a fancy handset. At least OLPC was an education platform. A mobile is something that might go beyond that. Any realistic deployment of mobile must be based on commercial viability of the nation's people to afford that piece of technology, even should the telecommunications infrastructure for the mobile is subsidized by their local governments.
It means that we need a new strategy for future-proof mobile deployment in developing worlds. Something simple. Something that DOESN'T HAVE TOUCH SCREEN. It might not even need touch screen, just something monochrome that can be visible during the night. Something that does not need PC sync. Something that last for days on a single charge like any decent business phone. Something cheap with flexible enough OS that user with enough technical knowledge can program/script it from within. Something cheap and reliable and DRM free so people all over the world can knock off their own versions like they did with AK-47 from old Soviet Union, except that these handsets save lives and businesses instead of ruining them.
That would be the mobile to bring the rest (read:majority) of the world into the wired future. It might even be the basic framework to build our own future on. iPhones and Google Ions, remarkable devices they are, just don't cut it when we begin talking about the future.
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T
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