The Age of Mobility
By Michael Swaine
More mobility. I must have maximum mobility. The yoga's helping, and of course, so are the finger-stretching exercises, but despite all of my efforts, the smaller joints are still a tad tight. The more you embrace mobility—in the form of mobile phones, portable computers, personal digital assistants, MP3 players, pagers, beepers, and other forms of pocket, lap, wrist, strap-on, wrap-around, and implanted technology—the more you need mobility in the form of flexible fingers, willing wrists, and forgiving forearms.
We are tearing headlong into a mobile-computing future while leaving our wrists behind—a tortuous image for a torturous technological trend—and that doesn't even touch on the psychic trauma. It was that highly-regarded hypermedia developer, Jacqueline Landman Gay, who first described déjà vu as a repetitive motion injury. However, I'll take credit for being the first to identify the syndrome of "psychotechnological" whiplash caused by being rear-ended by rapidly advancing technology. Mobile computing in its many forms is careening out of control. It's shaking up the PC and Web-development industries like tourists in the Space Needle during Seattle's recent quake, and provoking even more far-fetched figures of speech than these.
Mobile computing calls into question the venerable concept of the desktop PC, a concept that rests on an uneasy multibillion-dollar industry. It raises daunting questions for Web developers such as: How can I possibly design a reasonable Web page for display on a cell phone? (Let's not dwell on the fact that HTML was originally conceived to be display-size independent; it'll only make us feel bad.)
