The geo-everything trend continues to make inroads in our lives. A few different types of technology have been around for some time now whose purpose is to help us to keep track of our children. Everything from embedded GPS chips in mobile telephones to subcutaneous RFID chips (this latter makes me more than a little queasy) might be used by parents to keep a distant eye on our children's movements or even to set up geo-fences in which alarms ring and lights flash when our offspring stray beyond prescribed coordinates. Now the latest entry in this market is trendy GPS-embedded sportswear -- the BladeRunner Jacket.
I'm not completely opposed to these kinds of uses for geo-coding technology, but I'm not sure they necessarily help us in the way that we might expect them to. First, any child older than 4 who wants to 'slip the lead' is going to do so in a hurry (except for those embedded chips -- ouch!). In fact, I'm sure there's a human rights argument to be made that if they can't do so, we shouldn't be strapping them into the things in the first place. Second, I think that the perceived risks of simply letting our children wander outside are inflated, and the real risks are far outweighed by the benefits of giving our kids unencumbered access to the big wide world from as young an age as can be managed. If this technology moves the perceived risks downward so that they're more in synch with the real ones, then this makes me happy. It gets kids out the front door and into real space.
What interests me is the idea that what matters most is where my child's body is located. This is all that we can track with GPS. But my children's minds, while they surf the Internet, thumb text messages to their friends, talk on the telephone, or even watch television, are so completely detached from the locations of their bodies that being able to read out the latitude and longitude of their actual brain tissue can't tell me much about what kind of trouble they might be in. At the same time our technology helps us to vacate real space by moving minds and messages at light speed, we find ourselves trying to use it to strap ourselves back to the planet. Are we just being old-fashioned, or is something else going on?
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