Well, after a decade in New York City, I had to move to San Francisco to get burglarized. But more important was what they took - the Garmin Streetpilot C30 navigation unit that was mounted on the windshield of my car... I've lost my context-awareness!
The theft must have happened sometime Friday night, because I left the car in my building's locked garage (though the car was probably unlocked) in a hurry on Friday around lunchtime to meet IFTF Affiliate Harvey Leitman for a visit to the Internet Archive over in the Presidio.
As soon as I got over the theft, my wife and I had a bunch of errands to run, the majority of which involved going to a couple of strange neighborhoods and towns in the area to look at bedroom furniture. I immediately felt disoriented in a city with which I thought I'd rapidly grown familiar. Without the StreetPilot's constant spoken cues and visual map clues, I felt anxious, unsure, and even unsafe behind the wheel. The only other time I can recall feeling this way is when I lost my cell phone a few years back.
Again on Sunday, we went to Napa for my wife's company picnic, and proceeded to get lost as soon as we ventured off the 101 freeway. Without the StreetPilot to warn us immediately, we drove 15 miles up into the wrong valley (Sonoma) before doubling back.
It will take some time for me to sort out just what implications this experience has for our research on context-awareness, but I suspect that what's going on is very similar to a well-documented phenomenon among the sociologists who study mobile phone use - we very rapidly develop an emotional bond with assistive technologies, especially those that filter or interpret the outside world for us. By the time of the theft, I had already switched the StreetPilot over to speak in a British accent rather than a U.S. one, and my wife had started calling her "Fergie".
We both miss her, her wonderful context-awareness, and her helpful suggestions. This suggests to me, that context-awareness will be an enormous shaper of our daily well-being in the not-so-distant future.
There has to be a word for this in some language, "being lost in your home town". I'm sure it's the same sort of experience that people have when they come back to a place they used to know really well after a long spell of time and suddenly the landmarks have changed, some roads are different, and everything is just a little bit off.
Posted by: Edward Vielmetti | September 20, 2005 at 01:42 PM
Have you read Stross's Accelerando? A similar (but sci-fi) loss of context:
"The victim sits on the cobblestones clutching his aching temples. What happened? he wonders. The universe is a brightly colored blur of fast-moving shapes augmented by deafening noises. His ear-mounted cameras are rebooting repeatedly: They panic every eight hundred milliseconds, whenever they realize that they're alone on his personal area network without the comforting support of a hub to tell them where to send his incoming sensory feed. Two of his mobile phones are bickering moronically, disputing ownership of his grid bandwidth, and his memory ... is missing."
Posted by: Ken | September 21, 2005 at 03:49 PM
Not quite that level of narcotic-like withdrawl symptoms, but yes.... that fiction is fast becoming reality.
Posted by: Anthony Townsend | September 21, 2005 at 03:53 PM
I didn't have a bike stolen in 9 years in West Philadelphia, then had a rental stolen on the Stanford campus.
What, I wonder, are the varieties of emotional bond one develops with these devices? I don't feel exactly anxious without my iPod-- not in the same way I do without my cell phone, certainly. Some typology of emotional attachment might be worth brainstorming.
That last bit, btw, is NBA. Don't repeat it.
Posted by: Alex Soojung-Kim Pang | September 22, 2005 at 11:17 AM
A great starting point for understanding the psychology of attachment to objects is "The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self" by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton. Some psycho-babble but not too bad.
Try saying that name 5 times fast.
Posted by: Anthony Townsend | September 22, 2005 at 11:35 AM
Welcome to the club of lost without the GPS. My GPS was also stolen about two months back from my home in Mountain View. We were so lost without it that we bought a new one within one week of the theft. It is a technology that you get so dependent upon that you cannot imagine life without it.
Posted by: Mani Pande | September 23, 2005 at 01:11 PM
i believe that context-aware thefts demand a better context-aware module. If a person looses his or her context-aware mobile phone and realizes that it is stolen then a canny mobile phone will also realize that it is not with its actual owner and call the police that it is being kidnapped.
Context-awareness though very promising is still in infancy and needs to observe everyday human interactions to refine its reasoning capabilities.
Posted by: Umar | September 13, 2006 at 11:24 PM