EDUCAUSE recently posted an interesting excerpted interview discussing the future of mobile devices and social networking with Marc Smith, a Senior Research Sociologist studying Community Technologies at Microsoft Research. Gerry Bayne, EDUCAUSE multimedia producer, begins the interview by asking Smith to unpack his idea that we are moving from an ephemeral to an archival society.

Smith responds by asserting that approximately 1.5 billion humans carry mobile devices and that another 1 billion will be able to afford these devices at some point in five to ten years. Consequently, 2 billion to 2.5 billion humans will be carrying supercomputing radio stations that will be able to recognize each other. Smith suggests that in the near future these mobile devices are “going to sprout sensors like a Swiss Army knife, and our lives are going to be self-documenting in a way that they have never been before.”

The remarkable outcome of using these tools is that at the end of the day, the tool tells you who you’ve been talking to and for how long. “Oh, you bumped into Marc seven times, but you never talked to him for more than two minutes at a time. Oh, but you bumped into so-and-so, and you talked to him for forty-five minutes, and that was the longest conversation you had at this conference, and here’s all the contact information for that person.”

Smith goes on to state that in the not-too-distant future we’ll be dealing with a population of hundreds of millions of people leaving terabytes and terabytes of data behind, and thus we will have become an archival society rather than an ephemeral society.

He suggests that social networking is crucial in this transition because services like MySpace, Linkedin and Facebook “are soon going to be in the physical world, not just online.” Smith states, “At this point I can get to your MySpace page on my phone, and in the not-too-distant future you might be emitting the information necessary for me to automatically go get your MySpace page simply by standing near you. And so this is a new form of costume or a new kind of body adornment.”

We wonder how the conflation of physical and virtual selves through mobile technology might play out in a university setting. In what ways might this general societal transition enhance our campus communities?

The full podcast of EDUCAUSE’s interview with Smith is available in two parts: Part 1 and Part 2.