The Mobile Wave - a book recommendation
Thursday, January 17, 2013 at 06:00AM 
Have you started to feel like your smartphone is you external brain and if you forget it at home you are in trouble? According to Michael Saylor, you ain't seen nothing yet.
In his book, The Mobile Wave: How Mobile Intelligence will Change Everything, he speculates on how small mobile devices are replacing computers, paper, TVs and videogames, wallets and paper money, and a host of other everyday functions.
He provides succinct mini-histories of things like newspapers and paper currency that put this digital transition into context. He describes how mobile technologies may have a huge positive financial impact on society. For example, if cash is eliminated, so is counterfeiting, robbery, and illegal transactions that require the anonymity of cash.
Sayer's book supports my prediction:
Technology as an extension of our mental abilities will be increasingly the norm, not the new. These extended brains will be more powerful, more biologically integrated, and more personal. Families, not schools, will provide these tools. Memorizing anything will be seen as archaic with information literacy and problem-solving reigning as the vital skills.
Learning to manage and maximize the use of devices that provide portable, ubiquitous access to information should be at the top of every educator's professional growth plan. Period. The Mobile Wave's overview is a great place to start. I'd loan you my copy but it's an ebook on my phone.
Now to get back to scanning my hotel and car rental loyalty cards into my iPhone's Passbook app...
Oh, for another peek at a future of mobile devices, read Scott (Dolbert) Adams's challenging blog post, Digital Hats:
My prediction is that smartphone technology will migrate into hats, and at that point we will start to see technology that allows your phone to communicate directly with your brain. For example, you might have seen reports that scientists can produce grainy pictures of your dreams by reading your brain with external sensors. When that technology becomes portable and built into your hat, all you need to do is think about calling someone and your phone will start dialing. At some point I predict the hat will be able to apply small electrical stimulation to different parts of the brain to create different effects. That's when the hat becomes responsible for your actions more than whatever is left of "you."
Would you trade your illusion of free will for a life of continuous satisfaction?
Reader Comments (2)
The next step is documented in the novel FEED by M. T. Anderson (2001)
The "hat" evolves to a feed directly implanted in our brains.
Who controls the information pushed out to our feeds? The implications are fascinating and nightmarish.
Thanks, Bonnie. I read Feed several years ago and you've spurred me to re-read it. Thanks for the recommendation. Good science fiction tells us more about the present than it does the future!
Doug