A few months ago, my father announced to our nuclear family that he'd discovered Find My Friends. Isn't it cool, he remarked, that you can track the movements of the people you care about? Why take your daughters at their word that they're only five minutes away when you can see for yourself that it'll be at least 10? He'd shared his location with each of us, and my mother and sister readily returned the favor. It became a minor talking point that I did not. Location sharing is a matter of personal preference, I told him when prodded. Since when did it become natural to know where everyone is all the time?
"Simply put, location changes everything," Mathew Honan wrote in 2009. "This one input—our coordinates—has the potential to change all the outputs. Where we shop, who we talk to, what we read, what we search for, where we go—they all change once we merge location and the Web." At the time he wrote this, the iPhone 3G had come out less than a year prior. A person's sense of what it meant to be plugged in was shifting rapidly. "The location-aware future—good, bad, and sleazy—is here," he observed with an apparent mix of trepidation and wonder.
Honan's article for WIRED, I Am Here: One Man's Experiment With the Location-Aware Lifestyle, hinges on a simple premise: For a few weeks, he resolved to share his location at every possible opportunity. He would log it on GPS-enabled social apps when arriving in a new place. He would record any runs, bike rides, and drives. He would find people to spend time with based on who was close to him. "I would become the most location-aware person on the Internets!" he proclaimed.
I won't spoil the outcome of Honan's experiment for you (though, as a teaser, I'll share that it involves Lil Wayne and a close call with a jade-colored Prius). But I'd encourage you to read his piece, if only because it's worth remembering a time when sharing your location actually felt like a choice, not the default. Not that being location-aware is uniformly sleazy and bad! It has its perks, too. Where do you come down on all this? What're the pros and cons here? Do you think much about sharing your location data—with friends, with corporations—at all? Let me know what you think in the comments below the story.
See you next week!
Eve
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حبيبي ليس يعدله حبيب *** ولا لسواه في قلبي نصيب حبيب غاب عن بصري وسمعي *** ولكن في فؤادي ما يغيب يا حبيب ...
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