IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

meet the needs on their behalf.’’ The input for proactive computing applications
is real-world data gathered by wireless sensors. According to its website,
Intel Research Berkeley is developing tiny sensors or ‘‘motes’’ that can
be used ‘‘to gather both behavioral and biological data for customized proactive
health applications.’’ Such proactive systems, the website continues,
‘‘will also enable adult children to assess the health and well-being of their
aging parents remotely through private, secure Internet connections.’’ 33
While Intel figures out how to immerse old people in sensors and motes,
the Center for Aging Service Technologies (CAST) is focusing on the development
of business models to pay for it all. CAST is developing strategies to
‘‘evangelize the potential of technology to transform aging services and the
experience of growing older.’’ 34
Treating old people as a passive market for technology-based products
and services is well-intended but short-sighted. A smarter approach treats
elders as a knowledge asset to be exploited. Elders have and embody knowledge
and insights that cannot be learned from a textbook, website, or business
school. Søren Kierkegaard once reflected wistfully that he wished he
had known at age twenty what it had taken him until the age of seventy
to understand. Without being naïve about the demand among twentysomethings
for advice from oldies, the fact remains that older people who
know a great deal can make excellent mentors on a wide array of subjects.
‘‘My child has red spots. What do I do?’’ The design question here—how
best to access the time and tacit knowledge of older people—connects
with another question: how to enable older people to be more ‘‘present’’
in their communities. Social contact is more important for people of all
ages, not just elders, than first-aid systems and fancy wireless distress-call
systems.
Life as a Spot
Conviviality 123
As I argued in chapters 2, 3, and 4, social fragmentation and personal isolation
are among the more damaging consequences of the ways we organize
modern time. Social capital and conviviality are also damaged by the
ways we design our work. During the 1990s, the enticing rhetorics of a new
economy promised us a rosy future in which, rather than salaried men and
women, or wage slaves, we would be self-employed ‘‘portfolio workers.’’
We would be actors, builders, jugglers, and stage managers of our own lives.