Mark West

Some technologies are inherently disruptive.

It isn’t always obvious at first glance which innovations will end up changing the world and which will end up as footnotes, relegated to the lower shelves at Best Buy. The personal computer, in the days of the Altair and Imsai, looked like a technology in search of a niche. But once the protean abilities of the PC were realized — its ability to replace the calculator and the ledger book and the typewriter and the file cabinet and the record player — it became a transformational technology.

A similar technology, whose transformational potential is only now becoming clear, is radio frequency identification, or RFID. These are those small printed tags that set off the beepers as you leave a store, printed radio transmitters that respond with a digital radio signal when they’re “interrogated” by a broadcast radio wave.

My puppy has an RFID chip; should Spike decide to go on a walkabout, any animal shelter that picks him up knows to wand him with a small transmitter. The tiny RFID chip we implanted in our puppy’s thigh will respond by transmitting a code the shelter can link through a database to our name and phone number.

The FDA has authorized the implantation of such chips in humans. The applications range from trivial — a Barcelona night club uses them for easy billing — to important, as when nursing homes use the chips to deny Alzheimer’s patients prone to wandering the ability to use their facility’s exit doors. Similar applications of the technology are in use in prisons in three states.

But the technology has potential far beyond these simple uses. One of the first next-generation applications entering field testing is a tool that can actually track individual reading patterns in magazines in waiting rooms, telling researchers which pages are being read and for how long.

The technology, developed by Mediamark Research and Intelligence, consists of a magazine cover little different in appearance from the standard covers used in any doctor’s waiting room. The individual pages of the magazines, however, are marked with printed RFID tags, and the cover can detect when the pages are or aren’t proximate with the back cover — that is, when the magazine is open and the reader is looking at any given page.

RFID is just a way of telling, for a few cents, when an object is close or near. That’s a fundamental question, and being able to answer it reliably and cheaply and constantly would be a transformational technology.

What would a “killer RFID app” look like? Imagine a bracelet which beeps whenever baby wanders more than some set distance away. Junior can have free rein as a child. Imagine driver’s licenses with RFID, which can be triggered by the beam from the radar guns that the Highway Patrol carries. Imagine garments imprinted with resonant ink designs, garments that send out signals appropriate to the logos visually imprinted on them. Imagine consumer loyalty cards that make the prices on counters change as you approach. The technology for all these applications exists today, only lacking someone with the imagination to apply it.

Considering the remarkable applications that may be possible with RFID, there has been precious little public conversation concerning the technology. Perhaps that’s on purpose; considering the disastrous decisions on stem-cell research enacted by the Bush administration under the influence of the lunatic Right, the RFID research community may want to keep the potential of its technology out of the public eye.

After all, there are already hundreds of right-wing web sites equating RFID with prophecies in the Book of Revelation; and in the current political climate, even the most beneficial technology could be made illegal if some wacko on the religious right were to whisper in the ear of George W. Bush.

And, as we know from sad experience, the president doesn’t mind listening to nut-jobs.

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Mark West is a professor of mass communications at UNC Asheville.