brightly colored bouncing balls on one side of the
screen and falling raindrops on the other is a tough way to gather and act on
information. It is, of course the economic model of the Web. The admonition is
no longer, “Lend me your ears.” but rather, “How about I rent them for a while?”
We exchange our time and our attention for the daily sports scores or a timely
weather report. At some point, this becomes a bad bargain. Personal electronic
devices are an emergent technology that needs to show us a way out of this
morass.
In their biggest
numbers, personal electronic device cores are just computers. They contain a screen,
a keyboard, a microphone and a speaker phone, a central processing unit, some
forms of memory and a bunch of glue-works that hold them together, both
literally and figuratively. They function within the social infrastructure of
the day; today’s infrastructure being the world of ubiquitous computers, worldwide
networks, complex transactions and interactions and a social, legal and
economic framework that has not quite caught up to the technology. The
characteristics that make personal electronic devices distinct from earlier
computer technology are rooted in the manner in which they are constructed and
their intended use.
Personal
electronic devices aim to be unyielding, yet affordable computing platforms;
their very being is grounded in the concept of trust as we have previously
described it. They are cheap enough to achieve ubiquity yet they are capable
enough to establish a trusted platform that can launch at least our identity,
but more important our personality into the cyber-world as well as into the
physical world. They become part of our person in a physical sense and they
subsume our person in an electronic sense. They provide a place for us to store
personal information that really belongs only to us.
While not
provably immune from the problems that plague other technologies that seek to
fill many of the same functional niches, they possess characteristics that make
them arguably more appropriate to the domain than other technologies. Their
secure core is built around principles that foster the security necessary for
trust to be established in their capability to safeguard privacy. For example,
the connection of the secure core to the outside world is simple at its base
but capable of conveying complex concepts, much like the artistic channels that
we mentioned previously. This simplicity offers the prospect of defense
against, if not immunity from the diseases that infect other technologies.
The most
defining characteristic of the secure core of personal electronic devices is
their apparent monolithic structure, as compared with other computer systems.
They are quite small relative to other computers; about the size of a
match-head. At the extreme, a personal electronic device can be made of just a
private, secure core. In this case, it is typically called a chip card,
or a smart card, or an RFID (Radio-Frequency Identification) tag.
Consider for example the chip card that is used for payment in many countries
of the world; such devices number in the hundreds of millions. The plastic case
in which they are mounted, the form that we all think of as a credit card, is a
convenient vehicle for transporting them and using them; but, it is a
peripheral characteristic to the genre. In this case, the form-factor of the
card pre-dates the existence of the computer that we put inside. The existence
of the surrounding environment that could deal with that plastic card
form-factor made for a convenient entry point for this most elementary personal
electronic device.
The credit card form-factor
found its early footing in the arena of financial transactions, as an enabler
of cash-less vending in the world of multi-national and multi-cultural
economics. The size of the card is heavily based on personal ergonomics and
fashion. One of the earliest, if not the first incarnation was the Diners’ Club
card, circa 1950. The card was of a size that nicely fit into a shirt or coat
pocket, or could be more securely carried within a wallet. The working man’s
wallet, the
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