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Waltzing in the clouds with our disembodied awareness is a likelihood with problematic results. On the one hand, it can expand our consciousness by making it easier to wirelessly store and retrieve data through any device that provides Internet access. On the other hand, it will hasten what Cori Ferman terms “the Mediapocalypse.” Not the absence but the ubiquity of media. “It is no longer something we do, but something we are part of, “as she explains in a MediaPost piece, “The End of Media As We Know It.”

Photo by Meres ‘Mack’ McCarroll    

That, in turn, poses a threat to NHTSA Administrator David Strickland who cautioned in a recent talk, “A car is not a mobile device, a car is a car.” He said his agency “will not take a backseat while new telematics and infotainment systems are introduced. There is to much potential for distraction of drivers.”

Erik Sass agrees in his column for Social Media and Marketing Daily: Do We Need Social Media In Cars? Probably Not. He sees the possibility of converting Internet input from text to audio as a means of lessening the distraction for drivers. However, he feels that “cognitive distraction (rather than physical) is still dangerous to some degree. He says, “Although it’s embarrassing — like not being able to walk and chew gum simultaneously — there are definitely times when I’m driving when I have to turn down the radio or tell the person in the passenger seat to stop yammering because I’m nearing sensory overload.”

Useful definitions:

Cloud Computing – “a term used to describe applications and services hosted and run on servers connected to the internet that end users do not have to maintain or support.” – Center For Media Research.

Algorithms – “an effective method expressed as a finite list of well-defined instructions for calculating a function. Algorithms are used for calculation, data processing, and automated reasoning” – Wikipedia