Time really does go by quickly sometimes and at the one week mark I thought I’d take some time to look over the past 7 days and see how (if any) Glass might have changed my life for the better.
Remember that the whole idea behind Glass was to take the user away from looking down at a phone, and instead engage with people, but still be connected to the internet, receiving updates, sms text, calls etc.
To be honest it did succeed in allowing me to get information without looking down at my phone, even though it was very limited amounts, but I feel the real missing point here is that it seems to try to solve a problem which doesn’t really exist, or it’s trying to solve the wrong problem.
I don’t think people looking down at their phones is really the real problem here, the problem is more endemic in society in that in massively populated cities, people are not designed to interact with so many people, and hence they look for mechanisms that allow them to segregate themselves whilst in transit mostly.
People are purposefully looking at their phones, and if they are not, then the problem is not with the device or the form factor, but more so the psychology of the individual.
the anthropological reason
If you consider that hundreds of thousands of years ago, cavemen and tribes roamed the land and humans would live in tribal villages with perhaps upto a maximum of 50 people.
For thousands of years we lived like this, evolved like this, adapted to work, live, and communicate in a world of 50 people, and this DNS or genetic programming is not going to just change in the last few hundred years.
In fact when you think about it, we haven’t even had mobile phones for more than 100 years yet, so there can’t possibly be any evolutionary change. The reason why I think people tend to switch off into their phones whilst out and about is because they simply aren’t interested, nor are they willing to create a tribe of over 50 people.
In most people’s lives, they couldn’t even name 50 close friends and family, so getting people to acknowledge and live in the real world looking up, by using a device like Glass, is almost hypocritical being that it is possible the most futuristic form factor yet.
Is it possible that more people in the future will have such devices, of course, but not in its current stage of development.
Isn’t the question of living in the now, getting people to stop engaging their devices and looking down more of a societal and cultural issue, possibly even a biological one? I don’t think a technology is going to change base human behaviours that are built into each and every human on the planet.
Those are my thoughts today, I don’t think I’m taking this too philosophically, do you? Maybe it’s because I’ve been watching too much tennis lately! All that back and forth of the ball!
