How beautiful it once was to explore the world; to see its illustrious scenery and lush landscapes, to explore its vast terrain and experience its endless world of potential.
How spectacular it once was to explore this world and run in to the mystery of the unknown head on, as if it was always there and never there at all.
How marvelous it once was to explore this mysterious place and find a fellow traveler along the way, filled with stories of excitement and passion, eager to explain the winding paths of their own dramatic journey.
I am not suggesting that camping and hiking and bumping in to new people along the way is a thing of the past. No. I am declaring that being in a physical place and encountering tangible people and things is becoming altogether a thing of the past. Frankly, the iPhone is King in the world of the blind, mute, and deaf man and woman of the twenty first century. Its camera is our eyes, its speaker our ears, and its functionality our voice. With the iPhone we have the power to do anything we wish at any time, and it has become a staple of modern times. This power has made our society drunk with a remorseful disrespect to our biological social obligations. It has turned some in to zombies, and others in to droids.
That being said…
The introduction of Google's next generation technology seems to be the first step towards a new type of communication, a type of communication that has never existed before - interpersonal communication.
It's one thing to look at a device and program it to do what you want and when you want, and its another for that device to actually know what are you going to do or in the process of doing. It is bringing us one step closer to a purely synthetic relationship with ourselves, one that may potentially diminish our capacity to interact with each other, or deepen our relationship with devices. Google, however, is carefully masking the fact that "Project Glass" is a device, and presenting it as the obvious next mode of communication and the primary object every contemporary human needs.
It can make calls, take photos, mark your calendar and remind you of appointments, send text messages and schedule meetings. It can do all this, and so, so, so much more...but it does it all with through a virtual reality based system that is streaming via a headmounted display. That's right - VR glasses to taint your world, alert you that stores are having sales, and that your friends are only two blocks away from you (it shares your location so you can always
know where your circles are) are finally here.
Project Glass may be one of the first steps to solve this twenty first dilemna of ours - this inability to comprehend the beauty of physical space and the dynamic poetry of physical presence and interaction with each other. It may also be one of the first ways that will eliminate all intimate and personal types of contact and spiral modern man in to a techno frenzy of pop-up advertisements and digital thought clouds that will refuse to leave us alone.
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