So I finally managed to track down a copy of “Mapping Hacks”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0596007035/002-5015477-8791243?v=glance!

!http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0596007035.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg!

I’ve only just flipped though it and read about half the introduction and preface. It’s already made one very sobering observation.

Location aware technology promises to provide content to us where ever we are. This of course means that our location is always known. We’ll never be lost again. That might sound like a good thing but sometimes we do want to be lost. What happens to serendipity when we always know what, and even who, is around the corner?

Technology can also bring us closer to terror than we’ve ever been, or needed to be, before. Someone “sent a text”:http://www.smartmobs.com/archive/2005/08/15/chilling_sms_se.html from the “plane that went down”:http://www.swissinfo.org/sen/swissinfo.html?siteSect=143&sid=6007826&cKey=1124034616000 in Greece this weekend:

“The pilot has turned blue,” a passenger said in a mobile text message to his cousin, according to Greek television. “Cousin farewell, we’re freezing.”

Technology holds so much promise but we tend to forget about the darkside of that promise….

Edit: Just spotted this on “Slashdot”:http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/14/2228204&tid=209:

“On ebay people are paying real money to buy “WoW”:http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/ gold… while some guy in Korea murdered another guy over a rare sword that existed only in an MMORPG. “This essay”:http://www.pointlesswasteoftime.com/games/wowworld.html looks at the way more and more people are failing to draw a distinction between their real and online lives and takes it to its logical, yet utterly insane, conclusion.”