Connectivity: a new norm of social relations
My only connection with Fon is that I am a friend of the founder of the dual access wireless networks company, who occasionally sends me new products to try out, such as its latest fonera, the latest development of its wireless router: tiny; extremely simple to configure; unblocked so that you can decide how to use it; and with one particularly novel aspect that caught my attention immediately, and that the more I use the more I like: it has Facebook built in.
How, I hear you ask, can a router have Facebook built in? My first reaction was that this was simply a gimmick; one of this “put a social layer on everything” trends. But actually, it makes a lot of sense being able to identify yourself online via your Facebook account, thus allowing you to give anybody visiting your home access to your WiFi if they are a Facebook friend. All they have to do is log in on your fonera with their Facebook account.
Facebook usage has evolved a lot since its inception: from its beginnings, characterized by users who competed with each other to see who had the most friends, searching anywhere for them, even delving back to childhood and school days (sadly, your memory of that teenage boy or girlfriend turned out to be an illusion, as you did for them :-), toward a model where the tendency is to progressively trim your contact list, leaving out people who are not real friends, and generally being more selective.
I would say that if you are still on my Facebook profile as a friend, then you are likely to visit me at home from time to time, and would be welcome to use my WiFi. So Fonera’s idea is a good one, and strengthens our overall connectivity, which has required passwords with a minimum of security (and therefore pretty difficult to guess for anybody but the closest friend or relative, as well as providing access to other things than connecting to the internet) or having to experiment with the router’s configuration to create a network of invitees, as is the case with the default setting on Apple’s Airport Extreme.
Fon’s initiative is worth thinking about: we live in a world in which the norms of courtesy have developed to the point where hospitality means not just offering a guest a cup of coffee, but offering them a wireless connection. Connectivity has become increasingly important in our hierarchy of needs, a phenomenon that would surely have given Maslow—he of the pyramid—some food for thought.
In a business, having an open and clearly indicated wireless network for visitors is the same as having a comfortable waiting room and will be much more valued than the usual pile of out of date magazines or well-thumbed newspaper, which normally lie there unread while the visitor tries to make the most of the wait by catching up on things via his or her smartphone. Offering a wireless connection is now an important part of hospitality, a social norm, and certainly something that one’s friends—who will naturally assume that you have WiFi—will expect when they visit your home, and who will be differentiated from those who already have your password. Yes, I know that we can all connect via the phone, but it’s not the same.
Our lives our now hyper-connected, and we all want a decent connection, even when we are visiting friends at their homes; not that this means we should spend our time there poring over our smartphone rather than engaging in conversation. This is a singular, but perfectly natural blending of technology with the rules, uses, and customs of society, and one that once again highlights the role that accessing information has come to play in our lives.
