Toys for work - or work for toys?

As one of my friends (who should perhaps remain anonymous to preserve family harmony) said "you don't buy tech toys to work, you work to buy tech toys". So since he got an XDA combined mobile phone and PDA I had to catch up with a Treo 600. It is pretty amazing - and I think I can justify the 200 or so spent on upgrading from my previous mobile phone.
First the Treo provides the ability to do all the usual PDA calendar, contacts, and text stuff and link that seamlessly to my Mac via iSync or Palm Hotsync - while also providing fast email and web browsing combined with the usual mobile phone functions. There's a camera too.
Second, it brings insights and reality to all the talk about networked individuals, and the way we'll increasingly have our communications tools on our person rather than our desktop.... one of the topics of this blog.

First the practical stuff. In the past I had a choice of just taking a mobile phone (Sony Ericsson T68) on its own and being able to get contacts and (tiny) calendar, or having to add a laptop with Bluetooth connection to get usable email, web and other applications. Sometimes the connection would work, sometimes I would have to go through pairing the devices and lots of other clicking around two keypads.
Now I can just take the Treo and get the email and (small screen) web, and do some writing as well. The small keypad is a bit fiddly, but I'm assuming I can clip on a bigger keyboard as with other PDAs.
There is one problem - I can't use the Treo to get Internet to my Mac laptop because the Treo doesn't have Bluetooth and there aren't, I'm told by Orange, yet any drivers that would allow me to make the connection via the USB cable. So I have taken out a pay-as-you-go account for my T68 and will be able to use that. Hmmm - three things to carry. I'll be searching for a solution.
On the wider front, mobile phones are now becoming pretty universal, with I hear people on lower incomes often preferring pay-as-you-go to landlines because of no standing charges and controlled payment. If we continue to see this generation business tech tools becoming tomorrow's consumer tools, combined PDA-phones will also become pervasive.
There's lots of links and more profound thoughts I should add here, but I have to do some work to pay for the toys, so I'll return to this later and hope for comments. (PS - now coming in)
Ahhh - just thought of one other problem. I now have three months free trial on BT Openzone WiFi hotspots, so I'll end up carrying my laptop around in case I run into one of those.
What I need now is a really good bag with neat compartments for the laptop, T68, Treo, digital camera where the phone camera isn't good enough, cables, chargers etc.
Now if someone came up with an all-in-one charger that would be really cool...

Comments

[Kevin Harris]

David, all I can suggest is that maybe you might have spent the £200 on a cheap mountain bike and taken it out on some muddy trails in the sunshine with a couple friends and had a storming time!
k

[David Wilcox]

Undoubtedly a healthier toy in theory... though not quite an 'instant on' connection to the countryside from my home in central London. I promise to take my Treo for a good walk in Regents Park though.

[Kevin Harris]

David, can’t resist the allusion to Regent’s Park, which might be regarded as symbolic as far as social interaction is concerned. Richard Sennett claimed Regent’s Park and Regent Street were historically very significant in that by design they diffused traffic and ‘privileged the individual moving body’ against the possibility of urban crowds forming, of people gathering and listening to a speech for instance. (Flesh and stone, 1994, p328). So it’s very symbolic as a way of dealing with the social dangers of congregation, from the point of view of the ruling class, predating Haussmann’s redesign of Paris. I guess Sennett is saying that it completely changed the implications of the urban environment as a context for social interaction. As do the toys in question, perhaps, and you did raise the point that they bring ‘insights and reality to all the talk about networked individuals’.

Back in the summer we had the ‘inexplicable mobs’ in New York, presumably elsewhere also – using the net to set up apparently purposeless and very ephemeral gatherings, oddly orchestrated congregation. (They may become classics of the impulse for f2f…if they’re not already classics of the obscure military impulse to command other people to do something… I thought they sounded a bit like square dancing in that respect). Incidentally I think the notion of ‘purposelessness’ is important as a fading ingredient in urban behaviour – maybe the technologies, sorry toys, are implicated in that, and maybe by going for a walk or bike ride in Regent’s Park without your Treo you’d be striking faintly against the trend.

So anyway, now we’ve created this image of the highly-connected blogger on his mountain-bike, armed with the toy(s) to respond to this comment perhaps, and to create other connections, myriad connections, while pedalling in Regent’s Park past sundry pedestrians (and not greeting them of course, we stopped doing that, Sennett seems to suggest, around the 1840s)… what does it tell us? (He is the gendered cybernaut because the image started with the notion of David taking his toy for a walk; but this thread, sorry category, could do with an exploration of the notion of toys for the girls also.) One thought is that when David calls for an all-in-one charger, (referring to a power device, not the bike) presumably this should be generated by a dynamo on the front wheel.

I was in Amsterdam earlier this year and noticed two phenomena on several occasions: people readily cycle in groups with one of them temporarily chatting on their mobile; and an individual or group of cyclists would often encounter others – a pedestrian or cyclist – and stop for a chat. Ostensibly, these technologies (mobile and bike) seem not to be constraining social interaction but increasing it. So if we’ve lost something since Nash designed Regent’s Park, what is it that we’ve lost?

A couple points to throw into this – first, ‘hanging out’ still happens, for instance kids have a street life and congregate. And we hound them because so often even a small group is perceived as threatening, and we tend to deny them anywhere they might be welcome. Secondly, hanging out is not just for young people – the number of people living in single-person households in the UK is set to increase sharply in the next couple decades, and home space likely to decrease. This may mean more people will want somewhere just to go out for a bit, somewhere that is non-threatening, pleasurable, reasonably accessible… More pressure to design public space properly. It doesn’t necessarily mean they will want social interaction in their neighbourhood – they may want peace and quiet in a park, or in a wifi café. But of course we have here an impulse for ‘community’ that can be supported by the toys. Watch how young people use their mobiles to find out who’s in town after school and to gather outside a certain burger bar, the name of which escapes me at the moment.

Of course the toys David wrote about with such shameless delight have to find their place in the kaleidoscope of urban movement, and they seem to extend this tradition of comfort and convenience that encourages networked individualism while re-enforcing apparent mutual indifference in the non-crowd. Personally, I don’t think that’s at the expense of people’s sense of ‘connectedness’ to others; on the contrary. But of course it may be at the expense of the availability of a support network at local level, in time of need, when we’re older and housebound, and that’s another theme…