Week 4 / Ubiquitous Computing

Topic 8

"This week's two topics are, in a way, two aspects of the same phenomenon."(1)

It´s another aspect of penetration of IT into the society. According the wiki: "Ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) integrates computation into the environment,..." So ubicomp is a process of shift from view on IT as a type of second (unreal) life to the actual distinction real world to "out of keyboard"/"on the keyboard".

if your country had outlined similar scenarios, what could they have been?


There are National strategic plans of development Czech republic, for example special plat for country side. but I don´t find Conception of development of Internet. There is also academic prognosis, but most of them is about social cohesion, economical pro/degrees, safety, government... so nothing special focused on e-society.

For example according the NSP of development countryside for 2007-13, there was just 1,5% of countryside population with access to Internet throw DSL (to the whole population). And the plan is to achieve 30% penetration till the end of 2013. (source-CZ)

How important do you deem the social cohesiveness (or caring) in reaching ubicomp?

In the case, that i understand the concept of ubicomp correctly, the digital divide is not opposition of ubicomp. Therefore the social cohesiveness is not necessary in reaching ubicomp, even its even threaten by ubicomp. It should be possible to have pretty ubicomp society with big part of country covered by wifi broadband, but with huge digital divide between majoritarian population and excluded minority, which would´not have enough money even for own desktop computers (it is possible to solve by available public terminals) or even worse woud´not be able to fully make use of Internet (wold be able just write emails, browse porn sites,...etc.). In this case ubicomp will deepen the existing digital divide. It will give many new opportunities to ubicomp population and magnify the distinctions...between the lucky and unlucky people.

But there is also another more optimistic consequence of ubicomp. The cellphones throw which is possible to connect to the Internet will be cheaper then desktop, and the Internet connection via mobile/satellite system will be more accessible then weired distribution. I read somewhere, that in Africa start this more optimistic process.