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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."
This is vs staring into some one's face while you ignore them while reading something off your glasses?
I don't know about Brin, but my e-masculinity is e-normous. Bookends help hold it all in.
Sent from my ENIAC
The size of your screen?
There are a number of things you can say about a smartphone, but - emasculating? Seriously? Out of what orifice did he pull THAT?
Is Brin worried that Glasses are going to be another Q?
#DeleteChrome
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.
Sergey just doesn't get it. My Android phone is a big swinging phallic symbol, especially when it does those 3D maps.... iPhone toting hipster chicks never fail to notice. Got plenty of mileage out of that, opposite sex wise. Sergey just doesn't know how to hold it.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
You keep on using that word... I do not think it means what you think it means.
Seriously, does he legitimately expect that I'm going to suddenly ditch my phone and throw the contents of my wallet at him for a product that makes Navin's Opti-Grab look stylish simply because he's calling me and one-seventh of the human population -- including women -- castrated girly-men?
This "Joy of Tech" cartoon explains what will really happen with Google glasses:
The Reality of Google Glasses
For me, he is well past his sell-by date. Can't he buy some remote island and cocoon there?
There are several problems. If you want to talk about Glass as enabling face to face human interaction, you'll find most people won't want a camera shoved into their face. Secondly, most people will probably notice your eyes darting about so they know you're not paying attention to them, and once that happens, they'll never believe you're paying attention unless you take the damn things off.
But I'm sure you'll find a lot of people "encouraged" to wear the glasses because they ARE a portable camera that basically records 24/7. While useful to catching crooks because basically the entire public space is under surveillance all the time, and anyone who stands out will probably have multiple cameras trained on them, they also have the downside of well, everything you do would be recorded. So if you visit any sort of morally questionable establishment, it'll be recorded.
And of course, with Google Goggles, it'll all be tagged for easy searching.
People were skilled in being fucking idiots long before smart phones.
However, offloading some memory tasks isn't necessarily a bad thing if the alternative is spending active time trying to memorise these things (I'm mainly thinking of rote-memorising facts). That time may be better spent actually actively thinking.
Then again, actually having memorised a range of information may be instrumental for novel ideas which draw on the variety.
Based on the fact that the primary (and really, ONLY) interface to Google glass is voice recognition, and given my experiences with voice recognition using the latest (or at lesast recent, Android 4.1) technology Google has for voice recognition, Google Glass is their Apple Newton.
The tech, it just ain't ready yet. I carefully enunciate: "Send Text to Kathy (pause) I think the problem is Becky, who wants to cancel Robert's plan"
A few beeps later...
"Sending text to Becky, The problem is Becky who wants to cancel Robert's plan".
Yeah, the example sorta sucks, but this pretty much happened to me when I decided to trust the text to speech for texting. It was almost a complete interpersonal disaster. It's good, but it's just not good enough. And given that text to speech has been "almost" good enough for at least 20 years, I'm not expecting it to improve any time soon until semantic understanding is part of the mix. (Watson: I'm looking at you....)
In response I like to send random sounding texts to family members like "Happy birth tazer ahh" just to see the response, to which I can reply: "Stupid voice to text, happy birthday Sarah!"..
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
When Sol Trujillo was running Australia's Telstra (running it into the ground, but that's another story), he had his sales employees wear recording devices around their necks so that management could replay what the sales staff did each day. It was excused as being commonplace in the USA, and after hearing about how HP employees were bugged for all I know it may be true. I can see management with an almost slave owner attitude being attracted to such devices.
Touching an inanimate object made of glass and plastic each morning and night is nothing new -- well before the days of smart phones (or even cell phones at all), I used to have a manual alarm clock that I'd have to set each night and turn off each morning. So this "strange intimacy" with our gadgets has been going on for 50 years or more.
Since it was a 12 hour clock, it wasn't possible to reset the alarm when it went off at 7am in the morning or else it would go off again at 7pm, so one had to set it each night.
Now my smartphone is my alarm, and it's better in that I don't have to set it at night, but it's still the first thing I touch in the morning since I have to stop the alarm.
I might buy the Glass, but only if the device connects only to my computers and does only what I want. In effect, it would be a convenient HUD, not a service. Not a bit would go outside of my LAN.
In most cases, though, I don't quite feel the need to have one on. Do I need to wear a monitor in front of me? Do I need to threaten everyone with recording of all their activities, public and semi-public? My life does not revolve around constant communication; there is specific time and place for that. The employer will probably also be not very happy that you can watch movies and read Slashdot all day long without anyone knowing it. The police will be joyful to learn that a Glass owner can see not just the road but also his email and chat - and there is no way to prove it one way or another.
They do plan to sell it as prescription glasses.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Fun fact: when Google introduced Wave, they announced that it had superior contextual spell checking, and could (for example) correct "your" vs "you're". I tried plugging in that poem (on Docs) to see what would happen, and...
...it recommended changing "have" to "halve". And that was it.
Wow.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
That Mr. Brin doesn't seem to understand the difference between the two words is not a good sign that he has carefully considered the point he wishes to make.
Do mobile devices (not just smartphones) have the potential to make face-to-face interaction less likely or desirable? Sure. Where we once needed to actually be in immediate proximity to another individual in order to sustain a meaningful dialogue or communication with them, we now have the convenience of tweeting them or posting something on their (heaven forbid) Facebook wall. We can text them, even if they are halfway around the globe. Does this necessarily decrease the quality of interaction? The most honest answer I can furnish is that it depends.
Throughout history, humans have been devising ways to make communication easier. We invented written languages, books, telegraphy, telephony, television, and the internet. We did all these things because we found it facilitated connection. Does it mean that when the telephone was invented, people started to lament that telephones were "emasculating" (sic) because they made it possible to talk to someone without being physically in the same room? That's an absurdly regressive, not to mention historically and technologically naive, view. It borders on sophistry.
Let's be clear that over-reliance on smartphones and mobile connectivity, to the point of eschewing physical interaction, is a definite phenomenon. I don't want anyone to get the impression that I'm an apologist for all the spoiled teens whose interactions with their peers is primarily through virtual, rather than real, means--and rack up the bills to show for it. Or that I'm excusing full-grown adults who insist on checking their feeds every 5 minutes, who can't be bothered to put their phones down for a real-life conversation in the flesh. But it is painfully obvious that Mr. Brin has an agenda here, which is to sell his company's glasses as the solution to this problem. As such, whatever legitimate criticisms he has lacks credibility because of his bias.
Moreover, there's another problem with Mr. Brin's accusations, and that is the unspoken assumption that these glasses *must* be an improvement. That is a claim that remains to be seen, because it isn't at all obvious. I, for one, would be very uneasy at the prospect of living in a society whose members are constantly recording each others' movements and activities. I suppose Mr. Brin (and Google) takes the attitude that we will simply become accustomed to this omnipresent surveillance, but I think that it is an entirely legitimate question to ask why we as a society SHOULD move in this direction in the first place. Thus far I have not seen any compelling rationale to do so.
In summary, I am distrustful of anyone who advocates for a new technology as a solution to a problem that is largely symptomatic of cultural attitudes and a lack of etiquette. Don't want your mobile devices to turn your social life into a virtual experience? The answer is not to buy the next fancy gadget, be it some silly-looking headwear or something yet to be invented, but to simply make the conscious decision to be a better person by interacting in person. And similarly there is a point at which a society needs to collectively decide for itself that it is better to experience the world first-hand, rather than through a handheld electronic device. To the extent that such a device facilitates that goal, the more power to it. That is the reason for technology--to enrich our lives, not become what we live our lives through.
> you'll find most people won't want a camera shoved into their face
This is worse than 1984. In Oceania, one at least knew where the cameras were and could at-least try to avoid them.
> basically the entire public space is under surveillance all the time
Reminds one of the scene in The Matrix, where Neo is identified when the avatar of a homeless guy just sees him. So long privacy. It was nice knowing you.
Other thoughts...
- Google will agree to not track or store (less likely) faces unless consented to... sort of like Google Maps blanking faces
- Allow friends to follow you... literally, as you get detected by the crowd cams (why not? for some reason, people already let their online lives tracked by social media)
- Subscribe to FBI's most wanted list, local missing people.
The great thing about Google Glass wearers is that a combination of traffic and natural selection will limit their numbers.
It's spelled "FRIST," as in "FRIST PSOT!" Learn to write properly before you come to post here. This is /., the land of the pedant spelling Nazis.