“I Am Here”

This isn’t directly related to screenwriting, but given new technologies, if you’re writing an action or thriller piece, and you need a really cool way for one character to track down info on another character, you should give this Wired article — “I Am Here: One Man’s Experiment With the Location-Aware Lifestyle a read:

The location-aware future — good, bad, and sleazy — is here. Thanks to the iPhone 3G and, to a lesser extent, Google’s Android phone, millions of people are now walking around with a gizmo in their pocket that not only knows where they are but also plugs into the Internet to share that info, merge it with online databases, and find out what — and who — is in the immediate vicinity. That old saw about how someday you’ll walk past a Starbucks and your phone will receive a digital coupon for half off on a Frappuccino? Yeah, that can happen now.

So what did the author do? He became a “geo-guinea pig.” And check this out:

To test whether I was being paranoid, I ran a little experiment. On a sunny Saturday, I spotted a woman in Golden Gate Park taking a photo with a 3G iPhone. Because iPhones embed geodata into photos that users upload to Flickr or Picasa, iPhone shots can be automatically placed on a map. At home I searched the Flickr map, and score — a shot from today. I clicked through to the user’s photostream and determined it was the woman I had seen earlier. After adjusting the settings so that only her shots appeared on the map, I saw a cluster of images in one location. Clicking on them revealed photos of an apartment interior — a bedroom, a kitchen, a filthy living room. Now I know where she lives.

Okay, so for a screenplay, the scene description would involve a lot of screens (phone, computer, etc) which are inherently boring to watch on, well… another screen (movie, TV), but you have to admit the arc of current technology is both astonishing and creepy at the same time.

Which all reminds me of the 1998 movie Enemy of the State. Here are its promo taglines:

It’s not paranoia if they’re really after you.

In God we trust. The rest we monitor.

The only privacy left is inside of your head

Es ist kein Verfolgungswahn — Sie sind wirklich hinter dir her (It’s no persecution complex — They’re really after you.)

And here’s the trailer: