Throughout this semester we've talked about all the ways in which technology will connect us and change the way society works, plays and learns. Left untouched has been the topic of fashion.

So, to complete the picture, take a look at Electrowear: optical fibers connected to colorful LEDs and interwoven with other fabrics. Flip the switch and you'll light up any room. Something to look forward to.

You know you've always wanted one, and now they're real: the Star Trek communicator badge is available for purchase. Simply say the name of the person you want to speak with and the built-in voice recognition system figures it out and patches you through.

Of course with every mammal in the developed world already carrying a cell phone, this doesn't really add a new communication channel. By making the connections quick and transparent, though, it seems that this becomes something qualitatively different from a phone call. Will we all be linked this way in a few years?

See the videos and documentation.

Vodaphone's view of the future, not surprisingly, folds together wearable computers and pervasive connectivity. As they see it, all aspects of daily life will be enhanced by instant, seamless communication. What do you think?

Now that some of you are thinking about the future for Project 3, Future Hi - Celebrating the Rebirth of Psychedelic Futurism is a blog that you might want to bookmark. It reminds me a lot of the kind of wild imagining that was everywhere in the late 60s and early 70s before Watergate and OPEC put a damper on optimism.

It's comforting to think that there might be another creative, idealistic and positive era lying just ahead. You ICTers are the ones to make it so.

"You've seen them. Maybe you're one of them. They're the zombies of the New Media Era: the unthinking, the unseeing, the undead. They are all around us.

• The man who sits on the subway, his headphones obscuring his hearing, so closed off from the people next to him that he starts singing out loud.
  
• The woman talking on her cell phone walking down the street, her eyes half shut, her thoughts miles away until she sinks up to her ankles in a puddle of melting snow.
  
• The man in the coffee shop who has his laptop screen up more to shield himself from having to engage in conversation with amiable strangers than to get any work done.
  
• The person driving home from work who gets so wrapped up in the chatter of talk radio that he doesn't notice when he drives past his exit.
  

One of the few remaining things that makes computers big is the keyboard. Thumbable keyboards on PDA's are OK, but what we really need is a transparent way to interact with the net-enabled technology we'll be wearing within this decade. Speech-based interaction is transparent, but the world would get pretty noisy if we're all talking to ourselves as we walk (and surf) down the street. The solution: subvocal input. It's not ready yet, but it's clearly on the way:

"In preliminary experiments, NASA scientists found that small, button-sized sensors, stuck under the chin and on either side of the 'Adam's apple,' could gather nerve signals, and send them to a processor and then to a computer program that translates them into words. Eventually, such 'subvocal speech' systems could be used in spacesuits, in noisy places like airport towers to capture air-traffic controller commands, or even in traditional voice-recognition programs to increase accuracy, according to NASA scientists.

'What is analyzed is silent, or subauditory, speech, such as when a person silently reads or talks to himself,' said Chuck Jorgensen, a scientist whose team is developing silent, subvocal speech recognition at NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. 'Biological signals arise when reading or speaking to oneself with or without actual lip or facial movement,' Jorgensen explained.

Today's BBC News has an article about how earphones and iPods are changing the way people interact with their environment and each other. It's based on research by Dr. Michael Bull of the University of Sussex.

"Donning a pair of earbuds also grants a certain amount of licence. They let listeners become witnesses without the risk of getting too involved. The earphones absolve them of some responsibility.

Music players put you in control

Some women use earphones to deflect unwanted attention, finding it easier to avoid responding because they look already occupied.

In the same way, removing earphones when talking to someone sends a strong message about how interested one is in what is being said. It pays the speaker a compliment.

Digital players in general and the iPod in particular are having a dramatic effect on the way people behave, he says. He has interviews lined up with hundreds more users to see what further lessons can be learnt and what possible impact the technology might have on people's lives as it develops further."

Wired Magazine has also done an interview with Dr. Bull on the topic.

This article from MIT's Technology Review contains animated explanation of RFID.

"Radio frequency identification technology is finally coming into its own. Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest retailer, has asked suppliers to attach RFID tags to product shipment pallets by 2005 to automate tracking. EPCGlobal, an international organization helping to drive and implement the technology, is building a network in which every consumer item will have a tag and an electronic product code, or EPC. But drawbacks to RFID technology, including its high cost and concerns about consumer privacy, must be overcome before it finds widespread use. Here’s how tracking with RFID tags is expected to work in the supply chain."

This is a technology you'll be hearing a lot about over the next few years. It goes beyond just tagging shirts for sale. Some have proposed putting RFID tags on school kids and the elderly so that their whereabouts will always be known. Will we as a society decide that the potential threat to privacy is outweighed by the economic and practical benefits?

Is there a technological fix for the social problems created by cell phone use? Those at MIT working on the The Context Aware Cell Phone Project think there is. Imagine a cell phone that knows where you are and behaves accordingly. If you're in a theater (or EDTEC 296) it doesn't ring. If you're driving, it works hands-free. Like many MIT Media Lab projects, this one is a bit too far ahead of its time to be immediately useful, but it points in an interesting direction.

If you're looking for an example of how much impact a young person can have, consider Evan Williams. A few years ago Ev was living in Nebraska and California dreaming. He moved to San Francisco, co-founded a small company called Pyra, and as part of a larger product that never got finished, he created a way to make it easy for people to publish their writing just by filling in fields in a browser. That turned out to be the real product and when they named it Blogger they established the verb that defines what I'm doing as I write this. Pyra suffered after the dot-com meltdown and shrank until Ev was its only employee. He got an infusion of enough money to hang on, improved the software, and early in 2003 hit the jackpot: he sold the company to Google and became one of its most widely known employees.

You can follow the whole saga by reading Ev's blog, Evhead. The archives go all the way to 1999 and they're like a time capsule of the rise and fall and rise again of this new world.

He's still in his 20s.

Information overload is one of the most interesting issues at the intersection of learning, technology and society. We have unfettered access to terabytes of information these days, and staying on top of things even within a narrow domain is a challenge.

So how will we grapple with overload? Some are working on software agents that will scan the net for new information for us, following specifications about what we're interested in. Others are working in tools that discern the underlying structure and interrelationships among data and present them to us in user-friendly, dynamic ways.

A preliminary example of that last approach is musicplasma: the music visual search engine. Type in the name of a group or singer you like and musicplasma will show you similar groups you may not be aware of. Links pop up to Amazon that let you hear snippets of the songs and, of course, buy them.

Interesting questions emerge. How does musicplasma determine what's close to what? Who decided? How do you know you can trust their judgment? What would it take to create a similar tool for books, movies, food, colleges, friends, lovers....?

It's a very interesting glimpse of the future.

It was a pleasure to meet you all this afternoon. As I mentioned while taking your picture with my phone, new technologies often enable new ways to behave that are illegal, immoral or at least impolite. PCWorld has an article, and there are reports of new laws being proposed to protect locker rooms in Montana, Louisville and New Jersey, among other places.

We'll revisit this technology/society impact a few weeks from now.