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Sergey Brin Says Using a Smartphone Is 'Emasculating'

An anonymous reader writes "While speaking at the TED Conference in California earlier today, Sergey Brin seemingly tried to set the stage for a world where using Google Glass is as normal as using a smartphone. What's more, Brin went so far as to say that using smartphones is 'emasculating.' Brin said that smartphone users often seclude themselves in their own private virtual worlds. 'Is this the way you're meant to interact with other people,' Brin asked. Are people in the future destined to communicate via just walking around, looking down, and 'rubbing a featureless piece of glass,' Brin asked rhetorically. 'It's kind of emasculating. Is this what you're meant to do with your body?' Is wearing futuristic glasses any better?" Another reader sends in an article that also muses on our psychological connection to our devices. Or, as he puts it, the "increasingly weird and perhaps overly intimate relationship we have with our gadgets; the fist we touch when awake, the last at night. Our minds have become bookended by glass."

4 of 325 comments (clear)

  1. Hmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This is vs staring into some one's face while you ignore them while reading something off your glasses?

  2. Re:What a bizarre statement by c0lo · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Emasculation

    Emasculation is the removal of the genitalia of a male, both the penis and the testicles. Removal of the testicles alone is castration.
    By extension, the word has also come to mean to render a male less of a man, or to make a male feel less of a man by humiliation.

    Women should be safe from the effect of smart phones

    (yes, I understand that the most metaphorical sense would imply weakening in a generalized sexless sense. However... think how well the following expression sounds to you: she felt emasculated by...)

    --
    Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
  3. Sergey Brin is the new Mike Lazaridis. by aristotle-dude · · Score: 5, Insightful
    The two founders of RIM suffered from Founder's Syndrome and now it seems that it has spread to Google. Don't insult your potential customers deliberately. Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie drove their company to ruin by ignoring the competition and insulting/ignoring potential customers.

    Sergey, you should leave the marketing to professionals in your organization. You can be the "vision" guy but don't trying to create the narrative for your company. You are not Steve Jobs.

    Steve Jobs was the founder of Apple and the CEO until recently but he had some qualities that are unfortunately uncommon among tech industry CEOs. He knew how to "think" like the common man and figure out what the common man wanted before he knew that he wanted it. He also had a sense of taste and an extreme attention to detail to help his company "polish" their products.

    --
    Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
    1. Re:Sergey Brin is the new Mike Lazaridis. by Moridineas · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Jobs knew how to manipulate people into wanting what he had to sell them. He was an excellent salesman.

      He was an excellent salesman, certainly fallible, and with a well-earned reputation for his RDF. However, he did a damn good job of knowing what people did want!

      I guess a bad sense is still a sense, so, ok.

      So if you're saying Jobs had a bad sense of taste, yours--by comparison--is better? Why should we believe you? The corpus of Jobs' legacy is in front of us.