Connectedness
Wired has an interesting article today about Habitat, a project of the MIT Human Connectedness lab.
The system seems pretty limited. In essence, it provides verrrry slooow presence detection in a larger sense — does your coffee table have a cup on it? or a book? or a cigarette? or a pen? If all of this means something to someone who is close to you, if these objects have deeper, familiar meaning, then you can have an always-on sense of how things are going with the other person. The Wired article contrasts this peaceful asynchronous awareness with the interruption of a phone call.
Now, I'm sympathetic to the time zone/interruption aspects of phone calls. And I'm constantly running up against the limitations of text as a presence detection medium. The Yahoo! Messenger and AIM services convey very little beyond a happy face (”I'm Available”) and perhaps a line of text (”On Cell Phone”). That's not very reassuring to someone who is really interested in knowing how you are.
But the presence of a coffee cup — I'm just not sure. It doesn't tell you very much. It has so much indirection in it as a symbol. It could mean that you just woke up, or that you're having trouble getting through the day, or that you like the design of the cup. It could mean that you were hoping to have someone over for coffee but the person hasn't shown up yet. It's lovely, but so limited. One can imagine the two in-touch people calling up — interrupting — just to say “Just what did you mean by having that coffee cup on the table?”
Surely the combined forces of techonologists and social scientists can come up with richer, more interactive, but still asynchronous indications of mood/well-being. We've got the coffee cup, we've got the smiley-face — but maybe we need an avatar who has more meaningful asynchronous action-oriented messages for the rest of the world.
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