Thursday, May 05, 2005

Cell Phone : World Changing

I just like the title of the blog from the start, World Changing.

From World Changing.com The rise of participatory panopticon .


You may not be aware of it, but the cameraphone in your pocket is the harbinger of a massive social transformation, one already underway.

This transformation could be at least as big as the ones triggered by television and by computers, as the base technology -- mobile phones -- fills a new niche, different from both of these earlier technologies. TV is a “passive reception” medium; computers are an “active engagement” medium.

Mobile phones can be thought of as a “passive engagement” medium, available for connections and interaction without requiring user attention.

A few universities and activist groups are experimenting with applications allowing cameraphones to read bar codes, functioning like mobile networked bar code scanners. Users can snap a photo of a bar code on a product and get back information from a variety of websites on whether the product was produced sustainably, whether the company making it behaved ethically, even whether there's a better price to be had at a different store.

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