Jan Chipchase : You are what you carry // Week 4 Reading response

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You are what you carry best illustrates the conditions in which our current day situations influences the important items in our lives. The three items, the wallet, keys and mobile phone each represents a different need in which best describes the needs of an urbanite.

However as they have pointed out, as technology continuously progresses, everything is increasingly becoming less intangible. About 4 years ago, the lightest I would travel would be my identity card, credit card and my phone. And looking at today, all I really need is my phone. Even the hardest of things to prove such as identity can now be squeezed into your phone, though fingerprint and facial recognition. Even systems such as governmental bodies and private establishments such as shops and service providers as slow to catch on to implementation. You’ll still need your physical identifications in some situations.

The chapter then moves forward in expressing and presenting our needs in the different levels of importance and our behaviors surrounding them. This to me is interesting as most of these items do not actually have a object value to me, I could do without them, but i cant do without their function. The importance of usage is more important and the only pain is the inconvenience and cost of losing these item. More and more redundancies are in place, such as a cloud backup of your phone data and fingerprint locks.

I am however excited to see where does all these improvements in technology take us, to reduce the physical value of this to of nothing for everyone else, to put away the risk of theft and the benefits of it as a motivation. Which then in turn will make our society a much better place.

However certain things are irreplaceable, from the inhaler you need in a event of an asthma attack to the bottle of water you need to carry. These are the things that I feel really stand out, and are they inevitably are the things you carry that defines you.

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