The home environment can greatly benefit from mobile technology that enhances the user’s experience through easy interaction with the immediate environment. Designing the home of the future, integrating communication devices, is not an easy task. It is a challenge that includes consideration of home dwellers’ opinions, preferences and tastes.

During television’s first fifty years, the practice of consuming TV changed very little. A limited number of broadcasters determined the content, and the viewer could choose to watch or not to watch. Except for the transformation from black and white to colour, the soaps, movies, news and children’s programmes merely changed according to the times, and we watched either together or alone in one particular setting: the home, more specifically, the sitting room.

In an industry which is very forward looking, one interested in the future development of information and communications technologies, it can be useful to have a sense of, and learn from, history. The recent pioneering of the use of texting by youth is a well known and much cited example of unexpected innovation. But in fact there have been numerous occasions where technologies have entered our everyday lives through the influence of users, or at least some users, in ways that were unanticipated by industry.

1947 was a big year. That year, Bell Labs invented the transistor and Levittown, New York, the first modern American suburb and the model for most others to come, opened for business. 1947 was not only the beginning of the Baby Boom, but of a whole new lifestyle of electronic home appliances. The Boomers, who begin to retire this year, are the first generation (at least in the US) that mostly has no direct experience of pre-suburban life and pre-electronic media.

A friend of mine has taken to texting his eldest son when he wants to ask him a question. Nothing strange about that, you may think. Except that he does it even when he knows that his son is in another room in the same house.

The reason that he texts his son is simple. It’s because he knows that he’ll get a proper reply.

Established broadcast organizations are currently renegotiating their relationship with the new kids on the block: internet giant Google recently bought up YouTube for the hefty sum of 1.6 billion dollars after Murdoch Inc acquired MySpace about a year ago. Ever since the popularization of the internet in the mid-1990s, technology gurus have prophesied the decline and eventual demise of broadcasting.

Everything seemed insubstantial. The only solid evidence he had was a lump the size of a dodo’s egg with a pain that bourbon couldn’t kill. He had enough information to sail a ship on, but no clues to navigate by. Only a raft of words taking him nowhere, very, very slowly. They offered to tell him everything, but so did the dictionary. The victim was more eloquent. And those crumpled sheets on the bed spoke volumes that the flat white sheets of paper could never match. On those there were only words, words, words.

So what exactly are teens doing on MySpace? Simple: they’re hanging out. Of course, ask any teen what they’re doing with their friends in general; they’ll most likely shrug their shoulders and respond nonchalantly with “just hanging out.” Hanging out amongst friends allows teens to build relationships and stay connected. Much of what is shared between youth is culture - fashion, music, media. The rest is simply presence. This is important in the development of a social worldview.
For many teens, hanging out has moved online.

I suppose there are break-ups happening via text message these days. That’s a sad thought. I know people who have been fired through emails as well. There are methods of communicating that are somewhat less personal, which make it easier for the non-confrontational types to just say what they need to and not deal with the other person’s emotions. At least with a phone call you get the chance to respond immediately.

Mood Threads (2005) is a behavioral system which is seeded by mood tags and images taken from the LiveJournal.com blogging site.