11th
Patterns, refraction, and pods ✪
Ben (@neb) Cerveny describes himself in his Twitter bio, awesomely, as:
a pattern moving through the biomass, refracting memes
Change a few words and you have a great description of life in a networked city: “a pattern moving through the network, refracting data.”
I dimly remember reading, years ago, an aside about the name “iPod”: the “pod” of the title was not the white object with your music in it. The pod was the personalised, private aesthetic environment the object created for you.
Thinking about it in these terms, the ability of the iPod to create this kind of “pod” is nothing next to its full realisation in the form of the iPhone—or smartphones more generally. Yes, the modern smartphone lets you interact with the networks based on your physical location and context, but more importantly, it turns you into a location-independent node of your own personal network.
(Every networked communications device has this capability, of course, but it has taken us until the last few years to develop it to a level where it is pocketable and relatively inexpensive, and build and adopt the tools like Facebook, Foursquare, and Twitter that make a personal network information-rich enough to be interesting.)
The most astonishing consequence of this is that it completely inverts your interaction with data. Instead of you refracting data from the networks around your physical location, the place where you are becomes a lens refracting your own personal network.
