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In an article on wearable computers or body(nets) Ana Viseu writes that:

Lifestyle applications are believed to be the ‘killer app’ that will turn wearable computers into everyday apparel…. [and later on cites Barfield and Caudell from their article “Basic Concepts in Wearable Computers and Augmented Reality”] “[the networked] computers [on our body] will monitor our physiological state, perform the duties of a secretary and butler in managing our everyday life, and protect us from physical harm”.

This made me think that in the future we will all become as helpless as rock stars. People around rock stars often describe how they lose the ability to perform the most mundane duties as shopping, buying a ticket and so on. And since a lot of people perform in reality music shows, there seems to be an opportunity of becoming just as helpless and stupid as your favorite rock star.

One bigger problem is though that Barfield and Caudell seems to believe that because we can do something it inevitable means that we will do it. This is not at all obvious, but something that technologist (of the utopian kind) often believes; I think this uncritical belief in the dissemination and uptake of new technology stems from the fact that they view technology as only a means to an end (as a tool that is), and not as something generative or even promiscuous as Latour would say it.

mosaic of four o’clock hunger

Originally uploaded by stilleben.

In The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility Walter Benjamin writes on the film camera that “with the close up space expands, with slow motion movement is extended. The enlargement….reveals entirely new structural formations. So, too, slow motion not only presents familiar qualities of movement but reveals in them entirely unknown ones.” Once again it seems reasonable to pull out Benjamin, and use his essay to interpret something new - as have been done so many times before - perhaps to many times, but so be it.
What the film camera were for moving images and art, I would say that the camera phone is for everyday life. Everyday life – if we ignore the structural parts – is just as slippery as water, almost impossible to grasp in its mundane nitty-grittiness. But with the ubiquity of camera phones in everyday life and practices of moblogging, we now have a technology to expand the space and time of mundane situations. What this technology and the relations it, without a doubt creates, will come to mean for the structure and situational character of everyday life we will have to see.