This is a follow-up to a pre­vi­ous post where I picked up on Char­lie Schick’s notion of mobile devices’ fore­ground and back­ground oper­a­tion. I men­tioned that “the notion of back­ground should be extended to include the auto­mated func­tions, ie. the work, that you del­e­gate to your lap­top or mobile phone while you’re off doing some­thing else. For instance, down­load­ing pod­casts, down­load­ing tor­rents, dis­trib­uted com­put­ing, track­ing RSS feeds, pres­ence on IM, log­ging IRC chan­nels, and arguably your blog (vir­tual self) are some of the “work” that can occur in the back­ground.”

Debi, aka “Mobile Jones”, makes a great point in her post about Web and Mobile Frag­mented as Thought Pris­on­ers of Jar­gon 

“If lan­guage can shape thought, then this may explain why so many web cen­tric ser­vices, appli­ca­tions and stan­dards neglect mobil­ity in their devel­op­ment and why mobile oper­a­tors don’t grasp the lessons learned on the web over the past decade.  What some have labeled will­ful dis­re­gard may sim­ply be a func­tion of two dif­fer­ent spheres of jargon.”

Whether you believe there’s a rela­tion­ship between lan­guage and thought — or not — pro­fes­sion­als in dif­fer­ent fields develop a jar­gon to describe the objects, tastes, tex­tures and activ­i­ties related to their domain. For instance, enol­ogy has its own lan­guage for describ­ing wine­mak­ing tools and processes and the taste of wine. Sim­i­larly, lawyers, doc­tors, engi­neers, car­pen­ters, fire­fight­ers, the clergy and so on have all devel­oped their own vocab­u­lary around their exper­tise. In his book Blink, Mal­colm Glad­well talks of the “Gift of exper­tise” (pg. 176), show­ing how pro­fes­sional food­tasters pre­cisely describe their reac­tions to spe­cific foods along six dimen­sions of appear­ance, ten dimen­sions of tex­ture and four­teen dimen­sions of flavor.

How­ever, expert jar­gon becomes a “prob­lem” when the lan­guage strips mean­ing from human con­text and usage. As  Debi fur­ther points out (see also Janne Jalka­nen):

From the mobile uni­verse, WAP 2.0 (xHTML), J2ME, MIDP, WAP push, SyncML, transcod­ing and IMS (IP Mul­ti­me­dia   Sub­sys­tem) are exam­ples of its jar­gon. The web uni­verse is focused on AJAX,   Web 2.0, CSS, xHTML, RSS, Atom as exam­ples of its jar­gon. Sharp eyes will see some com­mon­al­i­ties between these tech­nolo­gies regard­less of their dif­fer­ent ter­mi­nol­ogy.

Indeed. Janne fur­ther spec­u­lates that “[peo­ple will] be want­ing things on their com­put­ers that work like their mobile phones … If you’re now think­ing about your cell phone as an infe­rior lap­top — try look­ing it another way: maybe your lap­top is an infe­rior, bulky ver­sion of your cell phone.” (Char­lie Schick calls it the “mobile tail wag­ging the web dog”).

Visual rep­re­sen­ta­tion is one way of mov­ing beyond the con­fines of lan­guage. Another is under­stand­ing objects by per­son­i­fy­ing them (see anthro­po­mor­phism). For instance, soci­ol­o­gist and philoso­pher Bruno Latour describes a self-closing door in human terms :

“On a freez­ing day this Feb­ru­ary, posted   on the door of La Halle aux Cuirs at La Vil­lette, in Paris … could be seen,   a small hand-written notice: “The groom is on strike, for God’s sake, keep the   door closed” (groom is Freng­lish for an auto­mated door-closer or but­ler). This   fusion of labor rela­tions, reli­gion, adver­tise­ment, and tech­nique in one   sin­gle insignif­i­cant fact, is exactly the sort of thing I want to describe in order to dis­cover the miss­ing masses of our soci­ety.”

With the many func­tions that can be devel­oped for mobile devices, we can per­son­ify the mobile phone and list some pos­si­ble roles for it. Some roles are bet­ter done on a lap­top than on a mobile, and vice versa, but the expe­ri­ence should be seam­less and you should be able to pick up on one where you left off on the other. With the advent and rise of web ser­vices, online stor­age and wi-fi access, we will essen­tially be able to per­form the same func­tions and access the same infor­ma­tion through a mobile device, as through a laptop.

So, here’s a quick and incom­plete list of the var­i­ous roles your mobile device can play, in no par­tic­u­lar order and per­haps with some overlap.

1. But­ler, your head ser­vant for domes­tic chores 
2. Her­ald, to announce your arrival or actions 
3. Copi­lot, to help you nav­i­gate by inter­pret­ing maps and loca­tion 
4. Shop­ping assis­tant: bring­ing you rel­e­vant addresses, rec­om­men­da­tions and coupons 
5. Librar­ian or research assis­tant: bring­ing you the right infor­ma­tion 
6. Oppo­nent or buddy, to chal­lenge you or to help you play 
7. Match­maker or host, help­ing you meet the right peo­ple at par­ties or con­fer­ences 
8. News anchor, keep­ing you cur­rent on what you need to know 
9. Record keeper or log­ger, keep­ing track of your activ­i­ties 
10. Life­saver, help­ing you in case of emer­gen­cies 
11. DJ or enter­tainer, play­ing your music and dis­tract­ing you 
12. Usher, stream­ing your movies 
13. Per­sonal trainer, help­ing you work out 
14. Sec­re­tary, remind­ing you of your appoint­ments 
15. Pho­tog­ra­pher, help­ing you cap­ture spe­cial moments 
16. Post­man, deliv­er­ing your mes­sages 
17. Oper­a­tor, help­ing you call and communicate

Here are some non-human del­e­gated roles:

1. Dog, your loyal agent that fetches what you need and that keeps you com­pany (and which you take care of and feed, ie.recharge) 
2. Bea­con or marker, to sig­nal or broad­cast your pres­ence, loca­tion, speed and/or direc­tion 
3. Wal­let, stor­ing your impor­tant id num­bers and help­ing you pay for stuff 
4. Sta­tus sym­bol, sig­nal­ing oth­ers through your phone model and the way you use it

These var­i­ous roles cre­ate an aug­mented pres­ence for peo­ple as they move around, with an invis­i­ble del­e­gated flurry of activ­ity going on. This activ­ity may be long range through per­sis­tent cen­tral searches, agents and pres­ence, for instance, and some of this activ­ity may be proximity-based, affect­ing your per­sonal area net­work. For instance, you might set your smart­phone to con­tin­u­ally search for and con­nect with Blue­tooth devices around you, thus herald­ing your pres­ence, iden­tity and wish to socialize.

What func­tions or roles will you del­e­gate to your mobile device? And what will you del­e­gate to your laptop?