IT blurs business and pleasure

It is not desktop applications that will drive mobile ones, I believe, but rather the reverse. So what will those mobile apps be? Well, according to analysts, they’ll be 3G apps, as in girls, games and gambling.

We live in a fragmented world and, often, in alienating workplaces and iffy financial situations. So much of mass IT will be about the distractions of pornography and dating, multiplayer games, and bets on sport and games.

Such distractions are already prominent on desktops – not least, at work.

But now polyphonic, picture-messaging mobile devices will, through wider screens and the moment-to-moment feeling of “presence” furnished by broadband, make them more prominent.

A generation of teenagers whose experience of IT is primarily playful will bring that ludic sensibility to every office. Meanwhile, mobile intranets for doing real work may well take a back seat. In presenting this perspective, I must declare an interest. The Policy Studies Institute journal Cultural Trends is about to publish a 21,000-word magnum opus of mine precisely on this subject of play.

Before he worked on the Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer for the Manhattan Project, the Hungarian physicist and mathematician John von Neumann spent years analysing poker. After Eniac, he co-wrote the book that founded game theory.

Then, in 1950, Alan Turing published his famous conceptual test of artificial intelligence as a duel of wits between a human and a hidden machine. The aim was for the former to guess the identity of the latter – man or machine.

In this, the test imitated a parlour amusement known as “the imitation game”, in which an interrogator, communicating only through the written word with two hidden people claiming to be female, has to guess which of the two is in fact a man.

The action of play and the results, like those of IT, depend on decisions made within real time and a clear framework of rules. “Games,” remarks John David Bolter in his excellent Turing’s Man, are “the form of intellectual activity that computers imitate most effectively”.

Every programmer “spends hours refining programs that have no real purposes [and] knows the fascination of playing the electronic game for its own sake, of searching for a solution that is both correct and elegant”, as Bolter put it. And hackers often hack for the fun of it.

IT can reinforce attributes of play. It can record and score playful performances and contests with precision, and thus encourage players to learn new tricks. It can introduce chance occurrences into playful activities in a way that is, paradoxically, systematic. It can project 2D and 3D simulations, and it allows the construction of different “virtual” personal identities.

None of this means that the much-hyped “information society” has ushered in a “play society”. That would be technological determinism. But dogmas about information society have certainly emboldened playful visions of society. Those visions are where mobile IT and IT in general are headed.