Last week Nokia displayed a fuel cell-powered Bluetooth headset, which is now undergoing user trials (see the last slide in Yrjö Neuvo’s presentation). Sure, the increase in battery life is a major incremental improvement. However, in his blog Christian Lindholm suggests the replacement of the solid battery with a fluid tank may trigger radical innovation in the design of mobile electronics by enabling form factors that have previously been possible only in sci-fi movies. “Liquid is esentially free from form and will thus enable us to make radically different electronics. It will stimulate an era of organically shaped electronics,” he predicts. I agree. What’s exciting about fuel cells is not their capacity as a power source, it’s their potency to catalyze a new design paradigm.

Howard Rheingold addressing Stanford Communication dept. graduates:

To those engaged in cultural production: thanks to your education, I don’t have to detail what I mean about the assault on your right to innovate. The extension of copyright law at the expense of the public domain and the tradition of using culture to create culture. The use of digital rights management to protect old businesses from new means of expression. The instantiation of tight surveillance and control of innovation in the “trusted computing” technologies that are being planned for the next generations of chips and PCs. The regulation of the electromagnetic spectrum according to the laws of the 1920s and the wishes of the incumbent license holders. All these regulatory battles are not so much about protecting property as they are about controlling innovation.

The whole transcript is available on Smartmobs, Howard’s blog. Howard also spoke in April at a panel in UC Berkeley – here’s the webcast of the panel, by the Berkeley Journalism department. And here’s the MP3 recording, courtesy of Dave Winer.

Interesting talk on the complexities involved in the digitization of memories, by Jose van Dijk at the “What’s Life Got to Do with It” symposium in Lancaster. Picked up a couple of things:

– The desire to record one’s own life connects with the desire to hold back amnesia. The anxiety to forget is intertwined with the anxiety not to be forgotten. For the western audience, managing memories has become a prerequisite for maintaining control of one’s life.

– The digital secularization of funerals: displaying digital flashbacks of the deceased person’s life

– Changes in the gendered practices of remembering: In many families, the man wields the camera and operates the equipment, whereas the woman organizes the shoebox. But digital practices may alter this because the ordering and storing also now take place on machines.

– Googlization: the embedding of personal collections in global networks. In commercial visions like Microsoft’s MyLifeBits priority is often given to the image of a jukebox of personal memory artifacts. My guess is blogs, on the other hand, would emphasize the inherent connectedness of individual memory to a constantly evolving social context.

Capturing technologies shape the very nature of remembering as they become intertwined in our daily routines of our self-creation. It’s nice to see academics are paying attention.

Implanted RFIDs are a pretty startling way to discriminate the out crowd from the in crowd, both with non-humans and humans. Japan’s planning to implant foreign dogs with RFID, while a Spanish club owner offers implants to his VIP customers (via Joi Ito). I know this is an obvious thing to say, but this is not a simple good-vs-evil issue: the world of RFIDs is not black and the world without them is not white. We need knowledgeable non-fundamentalist discussion about the politics of electronic tagging, pressingly.

Back in Lancaster, working intensely now on the scraps of notes, fragmented narratives, fuzzy ideas, whatever there’s to go on in the general direction of a PhD thesis. Yet it’s June, and there’s always much happening in June: local Lancaster highlights include the Interface workshop (starting today!) and the What’s Life Got to Do with It symposium. I’m also hosting the Word in Edgeways lunch next Tuesday; I’m planning to discuss the technologies of ethnography there. I’ll miss the EVA party in Helsinki (featuring Joi Ito and Jorma Ollila among others). Steve Woolgar’s organizing an interesting workshop titled Does STS Mean Business over at Oxford later this month, which I am planning to attend. One last thing: up until now I purposefully haven’t blogged about the substance of my PhD research, but might start to experiment in that space… still need to do some thinking on that.