Tuesday, January 25, 2011

The future of Cyberspace

Two weeks ago, I bought a Samsung Galaxy tablet phone. And then everything changed.

I don't mean to sound dramatic, but it's actually quite true. Life with a tablet pc really is different from life with a lumbering desktop, or a heavy laptop that keeps overheating (or running out of battery time?) or even your everyday smartphone, with the micro-sized screen and the teenie meenie keys which can be so hard to press sometimes.

It's true that the galaxy tab is a great product; I've never been quite as happy with any purchase in my life. I would even imagine that there's some prestige to owning a tablet pc, because they're new, they're trendy and only so many people have them (about 10 million or so?).

But that's not what makes it I 'life-changing'. In fact, its not even the galaxy tab.

It's the new cyberspace that these devices are giving birth to. And its a revolution in progress.

Why do I think so? Well, consider the way you use a tablet pc, or a smart phone for that matter. The first thing I saw when I turned on my device was a bunch of icons representing 'apps'. At first there was nothing special about them. They were just like your usual icons in windows. You press one and it takes you to YouTube. Another lets you access Facebook. Even your mailbox requires an app to access.

I fell so in love with the absolute simplicity and convenience of using apps that I just forgot to use my laptop. I didn't turn my pc on for a week (except to download content for my new tab ;) ). In fact, I stopped using the internet completely, even at work. It was just so much easier to use an app.

And then it hit me.

The app had officially become the gateway for me to access the internet. I could download as many as I wanted for free, but at a price - some apps asked for access to my phone records and location whereas others could change the contents of my phone's memory.

This apparent trade-off between free-content and information on the user is interesting, but not altogether unfamiliar. Websites depend upon this information to generate advertising revenues. To a considerable extent, Google and Facebook's business models capitalize on user-base information.

But so do government's, for taxation of course. In fact, when the French revolution took place, people fundamentally made a trade-off by gaining civil liberties in exchange for the consent to be governed, and taxed. Of course, to put this into practice, the state needed to know who each and every citizen was.

Maybe I'm taking a big leap here in making this parallel. But maybe not. Maybe tomorrow, some trans-national corporation with revenues exceeding the entire GDP's of countries will determine how we interact in cyberspace by holding the keys to the doors, the very apps we have come to love.

Here's what's interesting about an app. It is digitally signed, which means that you know who the developer is and that it can't be modified. It is designed for a specific OS, which in my case is Android, and which also incidentally determines how much you can do with it. It is content-rich but also content-specific, in that you can only use a Facebook app to access Facebook, period. And finally, it can access information which you agree to let it (voluntary disenfranchisement? :-$ ).

Essentially, in a world where everyone exclusively uses apps, you would have this mass of consumer information. It could help companies understand markets better. It could increase efficiency overall by helping them design products better, and bring them to consumers more quickly. But one things for certain, this information will bring about a transformational culmination to the globalization of information.

What does the future hold? The new cyber-space could be a lot more consolidated, and app makers could hold the keys to unlocking precious information on who's who, what they think, do, like or dislike. It could dominated by a few firms striving to implement their vision of the perfect world (like Standard Oil and the Seven Sisters?).

Or perhaps a world full of diversity and choice. In either case, i'm quite excited to find out!
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Sunday, January 23, 2011

A trip to downtown Saddar

This week i took a trip to the electronics market downtown to get my mobile phone fixed.

It was a black Nokia E51 executive handset. Undoubtedly a good phone, a special phone; in some respects, I prized it as a kind of family heritage, because my father had given it to me. Of course, electronic goods can hardly be passed down from generation to generation, because they become obsolete almost instantly after that are introduced. So call it lack of rationality if you will, but this PARTICULAR phone was my phone, and I really wanted to look after it.

Of course, I hadn't ever 'looked after' a very many items before in my life, and this phone was no exception. It was literally falling apart. It needed a new battery, a new display, a new keypad, and a new cover.

It was no small joy, therefore, to realize that I could easily procure inexpensive spare parts from the market and restore my phone to its former glory. With that in mind, I did some homework on prices and finally paid a visit to a phone vendor situated in the thick of Sadar's electronics market this week.

I don't know if it was the way I spoke and dressed, or the silly, expectant look on my face ('Can you fix it?? :'( ), but that dude had me figured out. He asked for 500 bucks to fix the display ('the circuit needs a new IC' - whatever that was) and 900 bucks for a new casing ('You want the original thing, right?'). By my estimates, based on prior experience with mobile vendors, the whole affair shouldn't have cost more than 500 bucks. But then again, 1500 bucks was not that unreasonable a price to restore an artifact to the heyday of its existence, right?

So we reached an agreement on price, and he got started. As I watched in utter vexation, the dude pulled a small chip off a broken handset and soldered it into my phone to fix the display ('The IC is expensive and hard to get' he had told me). It took him barely a minute. Ten minutes later, his assistant brought back the 'original' casing ('it was really hard to find; i had to call in a special favor from this wholesaler i know') and in another thirty seconds it was applied to my phone.

I was horrified. My phone was being taken for a ride. I was being taken for a ride.

The casing didn't feel right. Nothing felt right. I took a trip with the assistant to the 'wholesaler' to check the price. He gave me a similar number. But other vendors in the market didn't. They were quoting one third the price I was being offered.

I immediately had my phone returned to its previous condition and 'over' paid the vendor for the labour work. I used my charm to convince the vendor that he should return the unused phone casing to the shop it was procured from. At first he told me it could not be returned. Then he insisted that I go with him and speak to the guy he bought the cover from. Finally, he insisted that I should pay 200 bucks for the cost of the keypad which had been spoiled when the new casing was applied to my phone. I declined.

Five minutes later, i purchased the same casing for my phone from another shop for 300 bucks. Apparently, my 'charm' had been laid to waste by the fact that someone had made a fool out of me.

I didn't know whether to feel horrified (at how far this dude was willing to go for a thousand bucks), insulted (why me? Of all the people who drop by, he picked me to swindle? :-( ) or pitiful (i might probably have done the same if i were in his position, right?). The reality was that this dude probably stole mobile phones off the street as a side-business, swindled a whole bunch of customers for as much as he could, and came from a background where there was lack of opportunity. Maybe he was just another black sheep.

All things considered, I still wanted to go over to his shop and give him a piece of my mind. Instead I turned back, wondering what turned people into thieves. It's a product of greed, upbringing, inequality and desperation perhaps; my guess is as good as any since I haven't stood in those shoes. But surely, people such as myself also have some blame to shoulder, if at all, for perpetuating the inequality that does exist. Maybe I was turning back from my responsibility by accepting and ignoring this behaviour.

I nearly (well, almost) got taken for a ride, because someone realized how much I valued my phone and how little I knew about it. And here I am blogging about something I value, because I think I belong to a different world.

The reality is that I AM different. And I'm also a fool. :-/
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