BOY MEETS BADGE

I contact Rick Borovoy through that Reliable model T of cyberspace, the telephone. “Your name sounds familiar,” he says. Briefly, I sketch out the highway map of my life: Pennsylvania childhood, high school in Connecticut, college in Iowa, assorted rites of passage in New Mexico. “That must be it,” he interrupts. Borovoy used to work with the Navajos there; I’d done some work with the northern Pueblos. “At least we found something,” he says, satisfied that our lives may in fact have intersected at some point.

Now had we met face to face, we could have dispensed with all that tired, wetware chitchat. Our Thinking Tags could have negotiated any fruitful common ground. These tags, the brainchildren of Borovoy and a team of researchers at M.I.T.’s Media Lab, are little wearable computers that can seek out other “smart” tags in a room and swap data. In that way, one can, upon approaching a stranger at a crowded, Thinking Tag-equipped conference, immediately know whether it’s worth the brain cycles to attempt social intercourse.

Not that there’s anything wrong with old-fashioned, sticky-paper hi-my-name-is-squeaky! name tags. “A name tag is a really great piece of technology,” says Borovoy, who insists that his team merely wants to help the technology evolve. “Our idea was to build a new kind of tag that tells you something more useful about a person. It’s a name tag about us, as opposed to just me; it tells you about our relationship.”

The microchip-driven, infrared-transmitting cards are programmable by the wearer, who is asked to input responses to five questions designed to triangulate one’s heart, soul and Q rating. Sample question: With whom would you rather have dinner? a) O.J. Simpson, Marcia Clark and Johnnie Cochran; b) Marvin Minsky, Noam Chomsky and Jerome Lettvin; or c) Peter Gabriel, Laurie Anderson and Yo-Yo Ma. (I’d pick b, unless I was looking for a book deal.)

At a Thinking Tag get-together, people wander about and let their badges do the work. When they approach within five feet of each other, pairs of tags sniff and display their results in a neat row of five red and green leds. What happens when you encounter someone who sets off five red lights? Do you turn heel and flee to a more compatible piece of chestware? In the “tag meets” that Borovoy has run, that hasn’t been the case. “People are very sophisticated readers,” he says. Opposites, after all, sometimes attract.

Fred Martin, a research scientist who works with Borovoy, says the tags have many promising uses. In a large corporate setting, they could help build consensus around controversial ideas. Another project, launched last week, uses the tags to help demonstrate to high school kids how easily diseases like aids can spread. Of course, Thinking Tags have an application that might seem particularly marketable to computer types more comfortable in cyberspace than in boy-meets-girl realspace. “The one that comes up 99% of the time is the singles bar,” says Borovoy. “So if you don’t mention that, you’ll be our friend for life.” Ah, but then what would our tags have to talk about?