My first day back at the office after a summer of working remotely featured a traffic jam of the sort that reminds me why I hate commuting:\u00a0 one car crash, a key highway closed, and no reasonable surface road alternative routes.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 There’s just nothing to do but suffer the consequences when that road backs up.<\/p>\n
I had an early team meeting and was already scrambling to leave the house with a buffer of half the regular commute time.\u00a0 It wasn’t going to be enough.\u00a0\u00a0 I dropped a note to my team, who’d all be participating from their\u00a0 locations (in other cities and countries), and warned them.<\/p>\n
As I was driving to work, I thought about the fact that any one of my team, who know roughly where I live, and where the office is, could look at the Google Maps traffic status for the route and make a reasonable guess about my progress and likely delay.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 That works because Google Maps is a World Wide Web resource, and is uniformly accessible to everyone on the globe.\u00a0 That’s kind of a key feature of the Internet and its resources.<\/p>\n
That kind of uniform access, where services don’t (in fact, generally can’t) pre-judge the boundaries of their service market, has been a hallmark of the Internet information age.\u00a0 It has been the leveler of playing fields.\u00a0 It has made obscure parts of the world accessible to all; kept people in touch with their home towns, opened small businesses to global markets.<\/p>\n
The thought that chased that one through my brain was:\u00a0 how different it would be if each of my team had to download a traffic map app for my area in order to be able to check on traffic status.\u00a0 They wouldn’t do it.\u00a0 In fact, who’s to say that the traffic map app for my area would even be available in the iTunes store of another country? (Since that model more or less encourages pre-judgement of your target market).<\/p>\n
As we rocket into the future of Internet-as-seen-from-your-mobile-device, I think it’s an important issue to ponder.\u00a0 Are we exiting the age of ubiquitous information and access?\u00a0 Is that a good thing?<\/p>\n
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My first day back at the office after a summer of working remotely featured a traffic jam of the sort that reminds me why I hate commuting:\u00a0 one car crash, a key highway closed, and no reasonable surface road alternative routes.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 There’s just nothing to do but suffer the consequences when that road backs up. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internet"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbjRsG-1P","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkingcat.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkingcat.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkingcat.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkingcat.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkingcat.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=113"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkingcat.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":114,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkingcat.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113\/revisions\/114"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkingcat.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkingcat.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkingcat.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}