Having been writing away this past week, I've not been updating, but I wanted to mention this excellent piece by Cornell computer science professor Phoebe Sengers, "What I Learned on Change Islands: Reflections on IT and Pace of Life." It's a first-person account of Senger's fieldwork on a remote island in Newfoundland, Canada, and has some excellent reflections on how our information technologies encode and mirror values– particularly a belief in the need to go, and do everything, faster. (In this respect it echoes some of what Jaron Lanier argues in You Are Not a Gadget.)

Naturally, I recognize a certain amount of Senger's experience in my own time here, despite the fact that I'm anything but disconnected and the pace of life here is not really slower than in California. If anything, if you measured it just by how people walk down the streets, you'd think Cambridge was time-crazed: forget everything you imagine of lesiurely punts down the Cam, and think Mario and Luigi, jumping out of the way of bicyclists and white vans. That's what getting around here is like.

So the Sengers is well worth a read while I work on my own stuff, which I think is shaping up pretty well, though I'll start field testing it this week– I'm doing a talk at Open University, then a couple others in the next few weeks. It's going to be a very busy month.