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We've now moved on to the next keynote, by Nina Wakeford from INCITE at the University of Surrey; I saw her keynote at ISEA2004, of course, but I think this one is on a different topic. I also just ran in to fibreculture's own David Teh - good to see another familiar face!

Nina considers how we might think about ubiquity - through developments of ubicomp, and through analogous social and cultural activities; also, how might we intervene in already existing ubiquity work? A guiding example is the 'gaydar', a new technology for gay men to find one another through mobile devices. What exactly is it that ubiquitous computing promises, what technologies may it replace?

The View from My Room, Complete with CowsI'm starting to get a bit frustrated with my lack of connectivity here. Not only is there no wireless, but there's also no way to plug into the cable-based network; I ended up buying a phone card for £3 in order to be able to connect via dial-up, but that didn't work either… And to make matters worse, now my mobile is on the blink too, and locks up every time I try to do anything. Argh!

We're now starting the second keynote session with Sara Kiesler from Carnegie Mellon University. Her topic is the question of 'given ubiquity, what is the real world?' She starts out by discussing the topic of ubiquity in itself - this could mean ubiquity of access across society (and then access to what types of services - dial-up, broadband; email, Web, etc.?) or personal ubiquity (use of the Net in virtually aspects of everyday life, for a wide variety of purposes; in fact, people now equate 'computer use' with 'Internet use'). Sara's hypothesis, then, is that the online world is so intertwined with the real world that we cannot any more study the Internet as a unique entity.

Ted NelsonAfter all of this, the first keynote of this conference will be delivered by hypertext veteran Ted Nelson. He basically begins by saying the present computer world is appalling - it is based on techie misunderstandings of human life and human thought, hidden behind flash user interfaces. The GUI (or for him PUI - park user interface) presents a cosmology which categorises all computer tasks into paper-based tasks. WYSIWYG, too, remains paper-based, of course - what you see is what you get when you print it out. (Developed, of course, by Xerox - what a surprise.)

The view from my hotel room, complete with collapsed pier.Well, I'm in Brighton now - staying right now at a hotel just on the famous beach before I transfer to the University of Sussex for the Association of Internet Researchers conference today. Lots of noise last night, though, which isn't what you want when you're sleeping off your jetlag, so I've decided to make the best of it and get up early for a bit of a walk along the beachside.