Placecasting the environment

A family member pointed out to me an ad in Mother Jones Magazine for an environmental reporting fellowship at Vermont's Middlebury College.  I've been to Middlebury before and found it a beautiful place.

The fellowship's definition of "environment" is especially intriguing:

We interpret the environment broadly—reporting projects dealing with economics, culture, global issues, and the like are fine, as long as they center in some way on the human relationship with the physical world.

The human relationship with the physical world is what I see changing so dramatically as a result of mobile computing. Technology is finally small enough that we can take it with us into the physical world and use it to help us understand that world.

That iPhone commercial where the hiker uses her device to identify the bird she's watching and the poison ivy she should have avoided is both creepy and extremely tantalizing.  

The promise of this growing information-anywhere mentality is that it can help us understand our world while we're in our world. This idea of Placecasting marries digital information content to a location in the physical world.

I admit that my impression of "environmental reporting" is usually limited to stories about changing ecosystems, corporate polluters and anything with "green" in the title. But Middlebury's broader definition is both logical and liberating.