Dooeun Choi (bio)
Curator, Art Center Nabi
Seoul, South Korea

Wireless future toward a human-centric communication

Dooeun Choi

Wireless technology makes us be connected anywhere and anytime. However, one node can manage only limited numbers of branch, so there should be intermediate nodes which are various in terms of quantities and qualities. In Korea, there is a community based portal site called Cyworld which has over a quarter of Korean as their members. Cy in Korean means ‘between’. What they are unique is that they have Ilchon system similar to the family system.

Through the system you can decide who can see which contents. There are contents for only Ilchon which the public cannot access. Even Ilchon has several classes which break down your openness to others more in detail. If you become an Ilchon with someone, you can also see his contents which are only for his Ilchon. We can expect that wireless future will bring much more ‘ubiquitous’ connectedness. Therefore, the next issues are to whom and what we would like to be connected. The utopia of wireless future might come if it figures out how you can relate with other valuable nodes and classify them by each ‘personal’ cases.

On the other hand, you can also be the meaningful node. In the age of new media, there are various channels where you can express yourself. Through the channels, you can be a narrowcasting ‘media’. For example, Art Center Nabi run mobile art gallery, ?gallery, which serves screen savers for mobile phone and micro-movies made by artists. However, after the camera phones came out, not many people are downloading the pushed contents. The users prefer to make their own screensavers and contents. Furthermore, they would like to cast what they make using their personal media. Moblog can be one of the examples. Wireless future will lively encourage creative players who play in their local context to create various narrowcasting. These narrowcasting will bring a rich spectrum of our lives.

If we as the creative players become more responsible to each other, I believe that the wireless future will contribute toward a human-centric communication.