I read an article in this weekend's Saturday Guardian titled Cyborg City, and I reckon it's worth a mention here. It looks like it's been sold into the writer James Harkin by MIT's PR people as a meet-up in central London and a chat about all the technology that surrounds us, like WiFi, mobiles, CCTV, iPods and digital cameras. It has been covered as a full pager about the MIT man's opinions on the evolution of it all. Some really interesting stuff in there, like:
In [William J Mitchell's] graduate classes at MIT, all his students bring in wireless laptops, and many of them check Google to verify and enrich what he's telling them. The result, he claims, makes lessons much more open-ended and dynamic.
How about this though:
Further up St Martin's Lane, we stop for lunch. I turn my digital voice recorder back on, and it prompts a conversation about how difficult it is to escape leaving behind a data trail. But if we remain committed to the robustness and the inviolability of public space, Mitchell says, there is no limit to what could be done in the cyborg era. We could, for example, create electronic clouds of information, gossip and graffiti and attach them to public places to be read by other passers by. He could even, he says, review this restaurant for an invisible, wireless magazine - tipping people off, for example, that "this place sucks".
Reckon something like that could ever happen? Wouldn't it be cool if you could slate the bad hair cut or food poisoning you just got by blogging about it and to have your message flash up on a bill board outside the place!
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