Just remember – you heard it here first: we are witnesses to the birth and education of a new species (or sub-species): “Homo Appiens”. The identifiable characteristics of this species is the tendency to require, or at least prefer, a mobile application – an App – to underpin the regular incidents of daily life – finding stuff, locating oneself, remembering things, gathering and sorting information, providing entertainment, taking photos, updating trivial information from friends, communicating with fellow Appiens, tracking one’s mood and wellbeing . . . What is intriguing is the speed with which the species and their devices have emerged from the evolutionary pool and the power that Apps hold over thought, action, knowledge and interaction.

I confess to an irony in writing this note about the invasion of the Apps – using an App while writing on an App-laden tablet computer in a café. And I’ll later use an App version of WordPress to upload the results to this Kluwer blog. But this is not a Luddite rant against the technology; rather, it’s part of an exploration in integration between the mediator’s tools of conversation and dialogue and the device-based tools of Homo Appiens.

An earlier conversation set me thinking about this: in the Faculty common room of my former university I noted one of the administrative staff tapping away at a mobile phone; and inquiries revealed that she was “on” Facebook, Bebo, MySpace, and email (at least). When I asked how she used all these platforms, she said (probably with some pity) that it was to keep in touch with friends – most of whom were in the same city. What I further inquired as to why she might not prefer to go to meet these friends for a coffee she said there’d be no point in that: all of the information that might be conveyed over coffee was already there on her phone. Call me old fashioned if you like, but it seems to me that there’s something more to conversation than information!

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