Constant contact

I'm writing this on a plane. I can't actually post it from up here, yet. But I was able to send and receive a text message to and from my parents, who are on a canary island off the north west coast of Africa using their uk phone. It cost $1. At that price it's not inhibitive. I know that some domestic USA carriers have wifi and I believe lufthansa do too. So as I say, it's a case of 'yet' until this can actually be posted mid-air.

So we're clearly reaching a point at which available and affordable technology exists to keep in constant contact with people, even with photographs taken seconds earlier and gps geotagging of your location.

It's easy to feel sceptical about this. A friend of ours recently advised that the new biometric passports can be disabled with a quick zap in the microwave. And it's not necessarily as paranoid as it sounds. Certainly living in china you're aware that freedoms taken for granted at home do not apply there. Mostly feedoms to go about your business anonamously. Not something you can do when you have to register your location with the police everytime you move apartment or even, in theory, visit a hotel. But then in most European countries it's necessary for foreigners to register at the local police station and that's rarely presented as a civil liberties infringement, simply a means to know who is living where and how many people there are. Something which is particularly useful when developing public policy as we learned at Newcastle council when the EU enlarged and a very welcome but unknown number of Poles arrived.

The reason it feels vaguely unsettling and more tempting to subvert in china is because you don't have the same confidence that the information won't be used for more potentially sinister purposes should situations change.

And not just in china. For example it only took one, admittedly major event for the US (and I assume UK) intelligence agencies to start monitoring phone and email records. Try talking about jihad via email and see how long much vaunted free speech lasts.

So, plenty of reasons to feel a bit nervous about being plugged into a never-ceasing network. But there's also a huge amount of creative potential. Personally speaking I am at my most interesting and dare I say amusing when I remember, sometimes abstract, sometimes pertinent things that I have read or seen. Obviously it has always been possible to have an aide-memoire for such anecdotes using the high-tech solution of a notebook and pen. But I seem much more able to record the useful and interesting things if I can act on them immediately with a camera and a blog post.

So thanks to this new technology you're able to enjoy such delights as the man hanging upside down in a tree, the video bike ride and the knowledge that some Arabs like to take the opportunity of the flight home for a last cheeky beer for a while.

Not exactly earth-shattering admittedly. But it does make it a bit easier to share your life on a drip-feed basis, rather than on the slightly more pressured and therefore less revealing responses to the annual question of "so what's china like then?"

And on a more useful level, you only need to check out the news website demotix to see the way these technologies can bypass the traditional media, providing a different often directive perspective on news. This couldn't be more significant in a week when research revealed Fox News to be the most trusted network in America...

So I'll post this when we land, most likely via some free wifi in the airport, since somehow we ( read I) seem to expect most of this advanced technology to be somehow self-funding and therefore free at the point of consumption.

And you can expect more vaguely philosophical ramblings the next time we're on a late night / early morning flight and Caroline is asleep on my shoulder.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone