Wearables

Google Glass and the rise of the connected (yet disconnected) human being

Google Glass and the rise of the connected (yet disconnected) human being
Gizmag shares a few more random musings about Google Glass: more connected, less connected, or both?
Gizmag shares a few more random musings about Google Glass: more connected, less connected, or both?
View 6 Images
Gizmag shares a few more random musings about Google Glass: more connected, less connected, or both?
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Gizmag shares a few more random musings about Google Glass: more connected, less connected, or both?
Technically this is what you see in your field of vision
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Technically this is what you see in your field of vision
Is Glass a baby step in turning us into cyborgs?
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Is Glass a baby step in turning us into cyborgs?
We've been using v2 of the Glass Explorer Edition
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We've been using v2 of the Glass Explorer Edition
After a while, we found Glass to feel less like a tech product and more like an extension of ourselves
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After a while, we found Glass to feel less like a tech product and more like an extension of ourselves
This is closer to the experience of using Glass: your physical surroundings are background blur
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This is closer to the experience of using Glass: your physical surroundings are background blur
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Face computers like Google Glass have their advantages. But when you start talking about the disadvantages of Glass, one of the big topics that keeps coming up is a general disconnection from your surroundings. Keep an eye out for our full Google Glass review, but in the meantime, we have some more thoughts on the subject from our time beta-testing it.

So you strap this US$1,500 tech product onto your face and enter the world of Google Glass. You suddenly have the entire internet waiting for you, ready to be displayed on the tiny glass prism that sits above your right eye. You can summon the world's information completely hands-free, with just a nod of the head and a few words. You're now the world's most connected human being.

Or are you? While you're extremely connected to your inbox, Twitter, and the internet at large, what are you taking your focus away from?

Give and take

Is Glass a baby step in turning us into cyborgs?
Is Glass a baby step in turning us into cyborgs?

You could say that being very focused on one thing means you're choosing not to focus on a thousand other things. Someone who's considered a genius at work might be a terrible husband or father because he isn't focusing on the basics at home. Likewise, you could say that neglecting something really just means you're placing your focus somewhere else. A neglectful husband is ignoring his marriage, but maybe he's putting his focus on, say, work or his new girlfriend. You get the picture.

So if Glass lets you focus that easily and often on Google, social media, and cyberspace in general, then is there something else that it's taking your attention away from? To paraphrase John Lennon, are you disconnecting from the life that happens while you're busy making other plans? Or does that life just live less often in your physical environment and more often in bits of data floating through the air?

We've been using v2 of the Glass Explorer Edition
We've been using v2 of the Glass Explorer Edition

After using Glass for a few weeks, I think the answer to that is really going to depend on how you use it. Glass definitely has the potential to turn you into a disconnected zombie who ignores the world around him. But, then again, so do smartphones. The only differences with Glass are that a) you don't have to bother taking anything out of your pocket, and b) the people around you might not have a clue that you aren't paying attention to them.

You could argue that because Glass sits just above your line of sight, you're actually more focused on the world around you. You aren't constantly checking your phone for messages and, when you do read an incoming text or email, you can do it without looking away from whatever is sitting in front of you – whether that's the road, your office, or your date.

I don't, however, subscribe to that line of thinking. Just because something is still in your field of vision doesn't mean it's any more a part of your experience than if you were staring down at a smartphone screen. When you're actively using Glass, everything but Glass becomes background blur.

So while all of this is technically in your field of vision:

Technically this is what you see in your field of vision
Technically this is what you see in your field of vision

... my experience, while using Glass, is typically more like this:

This is closer to the experience of using Glass: your physical surroundings are background blur
This is closer to the experience of using Glass: your physical surroundings are background blur

Glass doesn't completely zap us out of our surroundings. But it does continue the trend of check-out periods. I'm here with you, now I'm with my inbox, now I'm back with you. I'm with you for a few more minutes, now I'm with a Facebook message, now I'm back with you. To some degree this is the story of smartphones, but it's even more the story of Google Glass.

The question, then, is how much more of that intermittent dropping-out we're willing to incorporate into our lives? And whether we'll still tolerate that dropping-out when it can be done much more stealthily?

You're a part of me

After a while, we found Glass to feel less like a tech product and more like an extension of ourselves
After a while, we found Glass to feel less like a tech product and more like an extension of ourselves

It seems a little far-fetched to compare wearing Google Glass to transforming into a cyborg, but, as I've touched on before, I really think it's a first step in that direction. There's something about the hands-free, on-your-head nature of Glass that makes it feel like more than a tech product. It starts to feel like an extension of you. A much more connected, Borg-like version of you.

One example: when I'm not wearing Glass, I'll sometimes catch myself starting to wink to take a picture (a feature added in the last Glass update). There's actually a part of me that begins to feel like that's something I can do, a natural human ability of mine, as opposed to something that this tech product allows me to do.

It's a bit like wearing contact lenses. I don't go through my day thinking "I can see things perfectly because of these silicone saucers sitting on my eyes." No, I just enjoy seeing things in 20/20 vision. And even though I intellectually understand that it's because of this wonderful optical enhancement, in the moment it feels like a natural ability. It's as if my vision never went south in the first place.

That's the direction that Glass can take you ... only replace 20/20 vision with the internet. It's like our brains have restored their natural ability to instantly tap into any information, instantly connect with anyone, and instantly be entertained by anything. Of course the key difference is that, unlike excellent vision, none of us were ever born with those abilities. We aren't restoring something natural that degraded; we're adding something completely new.

Though Glass is every bit as removable as a contact lens, wear it enough and it starts to feel just as much like an integrated – almost necessary – part of you. Is that an amazing thing, a frightening thing, or just the next thing? Well, I guess it depends on whether you think technology can merely improve your life – or whether it can actually improve you.

We're going to keep rolling with our series on Glass, so keep a cyborg's eye out for our full Google Glass review and other random musings on the search giant's smart specs.

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2 comments
2 comments
BeWalt
A truly excellent article, thanks! To see what human beings do with options that become available, one just has to look around.
Facebook: Being better in contact with your friends and genuinely caring about them, or accumulating meaningless numbers of "friends" in one's account, and obsessing about ...cats? "Friends" who would click "like" if they saw footage of their "friends" being eaten by a bear. "Friend" used to mean something different. Now it's just a part of an omnipresent marketing scheme.
Cars: Being able to travel quickly and safely from A to B when needed, or driving uselessly around to show of, not going anywhere, obsessing about vehicle types and looks? Fellow humans are endangering other people's lives by speeding, tailgating, idiotic lane changes and other pushy habits, all of which don't not gain them anything and yet they gamble away their own and everybody else's lives, just for the heck. Always, and everywhere.
Gunpowder? Chemistry? Physics? Don't get me started.
Google Glass is great. Everybody with money will have it. Eventually, it will play us localized customized overlay ads onto whatever we look at, and provide us with screen savers and reality curtains to cover up the unlucky starving bastards we have to climb over on our sidewalks as we are heading to our latest newest favourite in-thing, using cyber-coupons to buy up junk, to grow the pacific garbage patch until it kills us.
Omen
I am a psychological anthropologist and value your insightful observations because you are absolutely correct. The human brain is highly adaptable, but it has limits. Even driving with the radio playing a book costs almost 10% of one's alertness.
The big danger is that those most likely to adopt Google Glass will be the young, and they already have attention problems as a result of their growing brains and the development of new neural pathways.