Klicka på bilden för att läsa mer om Wiffiti = Wirelss+Graffiti

Miljoner människor över hela världen sänder miljontals privata SMS meddelanden varje dag. Vad händer om kaféer, uterestauranger och andra allmänna platser sätter upp stora elektroniska graffititavlor där vi kan läsa alla andras SMS meddelanden? I alla fall de som vill bli lästa? Hus skulle en allmän SMS-diskussion se ut?

Kommer det kanske att göra det underlätta allmänna diskussioner eller leda till det som Howard Rheingold och andra kallar Smartmobs.

Hittills verkar digitala medier och Internet har gjort oss mer isolerade trots att det i samma veva har gjort det lättare för oss att nå ut till tusentals människor världen över.

Det är inte troligt att Wiffiti kommer att göra det enklare för oss att umgås med andra människor i vår omdelbara omgivning men som all ny teknologi kan den kanske finna en nisch som vi idag inte kan ana.

Det är idén bakom Wiffiti, trådlös graffiti som Economist skriver om i sin senaste uppgaga: The writing on the wall. Technology and society: Is the mobile phone mightier than the spray can? New “digital graffiti” systems are being put to a variety of uses:

The latest digital-graffiti systems are rather more elaborate, thanks to the efforts of companies such as LocaModa, a start-up based in Somerville, Massachusetts. It has installed eight “Wiffiti” screens (a name derived from “wireless graffiti”—it has no relation to Wi-Fi networking) in coffee-shops in several American cities, sometimes with the support of sponsors. Between double espressos, patrons send text messages to the 50-inch screens. What they write is also mirrored on the web, so that visitors to wiffiti.com can remotely observe what\’s going on at, say, the Hurricane Café in Seattle, the Filter Coffee Lounge in Chicago or Half Fast Subs in Boulder, Colorado.

When Jason Hetherington, a 26-year-old exam instructor, was working in Dubai for six months, he often visited wiffiti.com to see what was up at Somerville\’s Someday Café in Somerville, Massachusetts, his old haunt. “It was a great way to get a taste of what was going on back home,” he says. Stephen Randall, the boss of LocaModa and one of the founders of Symbian, a company that makes software for smartphones, likens the result to a location-based blog. He plans to have sponsored screens capturing “the word on the street” in 10,000 places by 2009.

Some of the messages sent to the screens are remarkably banal, but things occasionally get spicy. In March one woman received a marriage proposal via the Wiffiti screen at Toscanini\’s café in Cambridge, Massachusetts. What is more, she accepted via Wiffiti—after a mere 29 minutes of contemplation. Although it might seem to make more sense to talk to, rather than text, the person sipping coffee nearby, “people are looking for a way to break the ice,” says Tamara Mendelsohn of Forrester, a consultancy. Furthermore, systems like Wiffiti are “noncommittal—you\’re not going to face rejection,” she adds.