Socially Opportunistic Devices: From Hyperlinks to Hyperties

This talk discusses the sociological impact of a shift from hyperlinks to "hyperties". A "hypertie" is a novel form of hyperlink that bridges the gap between links created in computational media and those authored in the physical world when people interact with one another and the objects around them. The hypertie is an innovation in the "interaction order" - the term the sociologist Erving Goffman coined to label the realm of face-to-face naturally occurring social interaction . Hyperties are the product of the merger of existing social practices of association with the technical affordances of mobile networked information systems and mobile location and other sensors. It could be argued that a shift in social life is occurring when the ties that bind people can be inscribed with decreasing effort into forms similar to the ways hyperlinks create connections between resources on the Internet. New mobile devices represent a novel innovation in the historically slow-to-change realm of social interaction--face-to-face encounters. The result could be a shift from a social world in which much is ephemeral to one in which even the most trivial of passings is archival.
This talk will review the technology that enables hypertie systems as well as the potential applications and implications of this emerging technology.