While doing research for my thesis on cell phones, I came across a report prepared by Anthropologist Sadie Plant called “On the Mobile”. It was extremely well written, and very enjoyable to read. [You can download a .pdf of it from Motorola here] But recently, I found this video of another lecture on cell phones at MIT.

In the past, people lived in zones: you live at home, do other stuff at work, or while traveling. That’s changing now. Things are continuous. There’s no difference between work, home and travel. You want to have the same things with you. We believe people don’t live in categories anymore. As we’re moving around, we want seamless transitions to occur in life.

We’re living as low tech cyborgs now. It is only going to get more interesting in the future.

I’m posting this video to get everyone into the mindset for CyborgCamp this weekend [Dec 6th, 2008 at Cubespace from 9-6 Pm [Get a Ticket] [Preparty at Vidoop, 8:30 Pm Dec 5th, 2008 [RSVP] ]. The world around us is changing, but I’ll let Padmasree Warrior, now CTO at Cisco (and @padmarsee on Twitter [thanks, @nelking] tell you her story:

Nancy King / nelking

Warrior describes how thousands of Motorola engineers are trying to create a transparent network so that individuals can take their music, video, pictures —virtually any kind of data with them — wherever they go. “Mobile devices have become the remote control for life. Let us do things we have not thought about before,” says Warrior. For 75 years, Motorola has specialized in what Warrior describes as “preemptive innovation.” This means not just enabling new ways to communicate (for example, creating the two-way radio and cell phone), but giving customers new reasons to communicate. Within technological view are cars that can download information about a driver’s preferences, from seat height to mirror settings, and homes that can broadcast a favorite radio show from room to room, so the listener misses nothing.

Thanks to MITWorld for the video.
April 27, 2004
Running Time: 46:22

About the Speaker

Padmasree Warrior
Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer,
Motorola Incorporated

Padmasree Warrior has worked at Motorola since 1984. She currently leads a global team of 4,600 technologists, guiding creative research from innovation through the first stages of marketing. She also serves as a technology advisor to the office of the chairman and to the board’s technology and design steering committee.

Before assuming her current role in January 2003, Warrior was corporate vice president and general manager of Motorola’s energy systems group. Warrior was corporate vice president and chief technology officer for Motorola’s Semiconductor Products Sector. She was appointed vice president in 1999 and was elected a corporate officer in 2000.

Warrior received an M.S. degree in chemical engineering from Cornell University, and a B.S. degree in chemical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in New Delhi, India.

Warrior served on the Texas Governor’s Council for Digital Economy, and is a member of the Texas Higher Education Board review panel. She was one of six women nationwide selected to receive the “Women Elevating Science and Technology” award from Working Woman magazine in 2001. She also is a director of Ferro Corporation.

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Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist from Portland, Oregon. You can follow her on Twitter @caseorganic, see also the Makerlab blog, as well as coverage of local Portland tech events at Nerdabout.com.