Assignment #6 - Austin Lin (akl29)

I am lucky to own a Blackberry which has gives me the illusion that my productivity is at an all time high, all the time. My phone is at the very most 20 feet away from me at all times and has a persistent connection to email, SMS, Blackberry Messenger, RSS Feeds, Twitter, Facebook, AIM, and GTalk. For the most part I find AIM and GTalk to be overwhelming as it constantly interrupts you, so I tend not to use them unless completely necessary. I keep my phone on vibrate for the majority of the time during the day; I only use the ringer when the phone is out of my pocket at home. Getting constant access to email is great in theory but in practice there are a range of email priorities; a few emails are very important and you want to be notified immediately. The majority of emails however do not need your immediate attention. This same thing occurs for phone calls and basically any communication channel. Currently I have the choice of getting all phone calls or turning the ringer off; all or nothing.

The next generation of smartphone would work to automatically sort your data and ideally make your life easier by helping you filter all of the communication channels it gives you access to. Currently smartphones have succeeded in acting as a central channel for calendar data, contacts, all types of messages and location awareness. By intelligently sorting this data, an ideal phone would be able to recognize your schedule and set your ringer profiles and broadcast a status accordingly. If you are busy, messages and calls with high priority could result in a vibrating/ringing notification; lower priority communication would trigger a status light. A friend who needs to ask you a quick but unimportant question can check your presence and see that you are in class so they can choose to call you later or reach you through a different channel. A call from an unknown number would automatically be matched against numbers with your Facebook “phonebook”.

A huge socio-technical gap in this model is that a phone like this would require the user to be willing to input every calendar event, give the phone access to all user data in order for the phone to accurately filter messages and phone calls. Current privacy systems are heavyweight or coarse grained as Boyle would describe it all on or all off; you either have your ringer on or off. There is the need for very complex algorithms to determine the gray areas in between. For users that are sending the messages, there may be an additional mental load in that they need to decide how important their message type is.