Glassy Eyed

A Tuesday 21 January post at Cannonfire was about a guy hauled out of a movie theatre in Columbus, Ohio, wearing the new Google Glass. He was questioned for 3 hours by men who he later discovered were not FBI as he'd assumed, but Department of Homeland Security officers. Members of this "inquisition" suspected (wrongly) the guy was making a video of the film for some pirate movie outfit.

I can't decide whether to be more shocked, if the story is 100% true, that the DHS was spending time and manpower investigating Google Glass wearers and movie piracy, or whether to be astonished that anyone in their right minds would want to wear Google Glass in everyday life, especially when going to the flicks - or, come to that, at all

Google Glass. I'd had some vague idea that this mini-computer attached to a spectacle-like device was now available. It can, apparently, be incorporated into sunglasses or prescription spectacles, or worn alone. I do acknowledge that there are speciality uses for which it will prove to be invaluable - for surgeons transmitting pictures of "how to do a liver transplant" live to students for instance. In everyday life though, I see Google Glass as an undesirable, though inevitable, development. Not only do we have the NSA recording our every communication, our neighbours or passers-by in the street, if wearing this device, would be free to video or photograph any of our activities without our knowledge.

Drivers wearing Google Glass could become a danger to other motorists and pedestrians. A counter-argument, that watching a navigation/GPS system via Google Glass would be less dangerous than glancing down at a dashboard screen while driving could be persuasive. Yet over-riding that, I believe the average mind cannot be in two places at once....on the road and on a screen whether on dashboard or a secondary eye-level screen. Dang! In the USA the average mind can't even manage to be in one place at once a lot of the time!

This post makes me seem like a consummate Luddite - I never have been, but maybe that is what I've become. Maybe my Aquarius/Uranus bits have stopped working. Maybe I'm right to think that life, as she is lived, is changing at too rapid a pace from how she has been lived up to now. Life is in process of turning into something so very different, that within it I doubt I shall fit with any degree of comfort.

On the other hand maybe, just maybe, Google Glass, after an initial spurt of popularity, and having made a million or two for its manufacturers, will go the way numerous other fancy gadgets have gone in the past: to be stored at the back of a drawer, forgotten.

For more information on Google Glass, I'd recommend an excellent review by Tim Stevens.