From the "Be Careful What You Wish For" File: Ubiquitous Connectivity

Technophiles and U.S. policymakers have spent decades promising the public that a ubiquitously-networked society would be a people-powered-utopia filled with useful, actionable information. President Barack Obama's 2008 campaign is the most prominent example of how a group of people capitalized on this vision. Nevertheless, a thoughtless rush to make the Internet pervasive, and to connect with one another socially online could in fact poison the delicately-balanced relationships that exist in the rapidly vanishing concept of the "offline" world, warned several leading thinkers at Supernova, an annual conference on innovation on Tuesday. "We're not just communicating with people anymore with Twitter, we're communicating with urban space," argued Nokia's Adam Greenfield in an afternoon presentation on how Internet-connected embedded devices are changing the very notion of what it means to live in cities. Greenfield gave several examples of how emerging applications and the adoption of Internet protocol version 6 (ipv6) would enable everything to be connected through the Internet, and how that is starting to erode current, unquestioned assumptions underlying our everyday existence.