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."

Comments

Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Hmm

[MrEricSir]

Or trying to hold a conversation with someone who's ignoring you and reading Slashdot on their glasses?

Re:Hmm

[Trepidity]

The inability to even tell if they're looking at you is particularly weird. I had a meeting with this guy as a student 8 or 10 years ago or so, when he was wearing a heads-up display attached to a computer he kept sort of slung over his shoulder, with a one-handed chording keyboard on the outside of it. It seemed interesting tech-wise, definitely at the time, when it was all DIY'd. But it was slightly weird always being unsure when he was looking through his glasses at me, and when he was looking at his glasses reading the web or something. At least with a smartphone or laptop you can see people look down and look up.

Re:Hmm

[thegarbz]

There's a great defence when going out on a date.

"Looking down at your cleavage? Please what kind of person do you think I am! I was watching porn!"

Re:Hmm

[itsthebin]

or 2 people wearing "glass" ignoring each other while having a skype conversation with each other .........

would that be similar to "crossing the beams" ?

Re:Hmm

[serviscope_minor]

Oh come on. We know you were actually reading slashdot on your date. Noone's going to believe the porn story.

Re:Hmm

[vux984]

No one's even going to believe the date story. :)

My mind has bookends?

[Press2ToContinue]

I don't know about Brin, but my e-masculinity is e-normous. Bookends help hold it all in.

Re:My mind has bookends?

[deimtee]

EOF

Doesn't it really all come down to

[bobstreo]

The size of your screen?

Re:Doesn't it really all come down to

[DerPflanz]

Only people with small screens say that!

Re:Doesn't it really all come down to

[drkim]

I am so going to write an app for this. Overlaying naked bodies on top of the people you're actually talking to. Great!

You: Oh Hi, Grandma, Grandpa...
Grandma: Honey, you look kind of sick. Are you feeling all right?
You: Let me just turn this off...

Re:Doesn't it really all come down to

[happy_place]

I would not be surprised if introverted personalities do precisely this sort of thing or something similar. Not just for sexual or even silly reasons, but because it creates a barrier to communication that at some level introverted personalities would prefer. Psychologically the ability to do this sort of thing could become very addictive. These devices form a buffer between the uncertainties of cold hard reality and ourselves.They enable (or at least give us the perception of such) us to be more clever than we really are.

We already see this happening a lot with people that would rather text you than talk with you in person. There's a subliminal dislike to actual conversations, and the uncertainty that comes from an immediate action/reaction--that lack of control and the inability to formulate the perfect response, I suspect, is part of the reason why people do this. Texting and other forms of communication that require a time-lag or deny you of personal one-on-one exchanges, enable both parties the ability to be conveniently (and purposefully) ambiguous. iow, we feel smarter, more emboldened, and even more able to objectify one (which sounds bad, but at some level serves us because if people aren't objects the stakes are just too high) another with this sort of technology.

Unfortunately, a technology that is supposed to assist us in communicating and seeing one another in greater clarity, will most likely have the opposite effect. It will enable those who wish it, to put on another costume atop all their other ones. . . but then social media is all one giant masquerade of smiling idyllic snapshots of who we all wish we could be.

What a bizarre statement

[93 Escort Wagon]

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?

Re:What a bizarre statement

[c0lo]

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...)

Sergey Brin is the new Mike Lazaridis.

[aristotle-dude]

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.

Re:Sergey Brin is the new Mike Lazaridis.

[Moridineas]

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.

This cartoon explains it best

[Anonymous Coward]

This "Joy of Tech" cartoon explains what will really happen with Google glasses:

The Reality of Google Glasses

Re:Regardless of what you think of smartphones...

[tlhIngan]

these glasses are going nowhere. They look stupid so they are dead on arrival. Furthermore, they only appeal to the part of the population that already wears glasses.

The hype over these nerd glasses couldn't more clearly illustrate how out of touch dorks are with regular people.

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.

Re:Regardless of what you think of smartphones...

[mcrbids]

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!"..

Re:Regardless of what you think of smartphones...

[dbIII]

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.

Only on my own terms

[tftp]

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.

Re:Regardless of what you think of smartphones...

[lxs]

The great thing about Google Glass wearers is that a combination of traffic and natural selection will limit their numbers.