Sent to you by Sean McBride via Google Reader: High-tech badges log human networks via New Scientist Technology Blog by Tom on 1/22/08 Surveillance badges that lay bare the social details of people's everyday lives have been developed at the Human Dynamics lab at MIT. The high-tech badges recognise each other using infrared, then record your speech, note your distance from other people, and track your movement.
We ran a feature last year about how such tags have been used to reveal that we are not fully in control of our own lives - many of our actions are simply predictable reactions to external events. Now one of the researchers, Ben Waber, has blogged about handing out the badges to delegates meeting with their corporate sponsors. The badges were set to record face-to-face interactions between the people wearing them, and displayed a social network illustrating all recorded meetings on a screen. You can see in the image posted here that most people wearing the badges were linked in some way, with a few people left unconnected. Over at the original post, you can see images showing how, over the course of the day, more people became connected within the network as they met more people. Apparently, people began competing to become the centre of the network, by meeting as many people as possible. If installed into the standard name tags of conferences, perhaps these 'sociometric badges' could make networking more interesting. Tom Simonite, online technology reporter Things you can do from here: - Subscribe to New Scientist Technology Blog using Google Reader - Get started using Google Reader to easily keep up with all your favorite sites
