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Are We Socially Ready For Wearable Computing?
An anonymous reader writes "Smart watches have arrived, and Google Glass is on its way. As early-adopters start to gain some experience with these devices, they're learning some interesting lessons about how wearable computing affects our behavior differently from even smartphones and tablets. Vint Cerf says, 'Our social conventions have not kept up with the technology.' Right now, it's considered impolite to talk on your cellphone while checking out at the grocery store, or to ignore a face-to-face conversation in favor of texting somebody. But 20 years ago, those actions weren't even on our social radar. Wearable devices create some obvious social problems, like the aversion to Glass's ever-present camera. But there are subtler ones, as well, for which we'll need to develop another set of social norms. A Pebble smart watch user gave an example: 'People thought I was being rude and checking the time constantly when I was really monitoring incoming messages. It sent the wrong signal.' The article continues, 'Therein lies the wearables conundrum. You can put a phone away and choose not to use it. You can turn to it with permission if you're so inclined. Wearables provide no opportunity for pause, as their interruptions tend to be fairly continuous, and the interaction is more physical (an averted glance or a vibration directly on your arm). It's nearly impossible to train yourself to avoid the reflex-like response of interacting. By comparison, a cell phone is away (in your pocket, on a table) and has to be reached for.'"
Next !!
If you can't tell that I'm reading email, or surfing the web while interacting with others, that's a good thing. I don't want things intruding into my presence unless I ask for them though.
A Pebble smart watch user gave an example: 'People thought I was being rude and checking the time constantly when I was really monitoring incoming messages. It sent the wrong signal.'
I've got news for you. You're not sending a good signal when you check your phone for text messages during a conversation either. In either case you're indirectly but very clearly saying to the person standing in front of you that anything, including the time of day, a text message, or a facebook update is more important/interesting than what you are saying to me right now.
If you are monitoring incoming message while you are with other people you ARE being rude.
The social stigma of checking your damn watch still hasn't gone away, and we expect people to accept wearables like Google Glass? Maybe when the boomers and the gen x/y are pretty much gone, the melianals will maybe think it is ok at that point.
The ability of some people to multitask by emailing/txting and having a conversation has to be acknowledged by society as a whole before wearable will even have a chance.
People thought I was being rude and checking the time constantly when I was really monitoring incoming messages
So you were being rude by ignoring them and 'monitoring' incoming messages.
they're called pagers. I know now one but drug dealers and doctors wear them anymore, but they do exist.
I wear a pager for work and frequently have to wear it when out in public. I can turn the alert from audible to vibrate when I am in public. Most relevant to the issue at hand, it took me 1-2 years after I got my first pager to train myself to not automatically look at the pager as soon as a message/phone number came in.
In short, you CAN train yourself to not look instantly once you get it through your head that you are not expecting an urgent/emergency alert.
Similarly, hospitals are environments where, because of the ubiquity of wearable communication devices (ie pagers) it has become socially acceptable to read incoming messages almost anytime.
My conclusion is that these two forces will apply outside of the hospital/drug deal: people will learn to resist looking instantly at their watch or other wearable device unless they really are expecting something urgent and bystanders (many of whom will have wearables of their own) will grow to accept more frequent checking of such devices in the correct context.
New vistas in stalking.
"Gargoyles represent the embarrassing side of the Central Intelligence Corporation. Instead of using laptops, they wear their computers on their bodies, broken up into separate modules that hang on the waist, on the back, on the headset. They serve as human surveillance devices, recording everything that happens around them. Nothing looks stupider; these getups are the modern-day equivalent of the slide-rule scabbard or the calculator pouch on the belt, marking the user as belonging to a class that is at once above and far below human society. They are a boon to Hiro because they embody the worst stereotype of the CIC stringer. They draw all the attention. The payoff for this self-imposed ostracism is that you can be in the Metaverse all the time, and gather intelligence all the time."
Because we all know how lovable those two are when one says "I'm near the tools" belarpp and the other says "I'm near the linens" deeeep. Who doesn't love to be part of someone else's game of big box marco polo. . .
I remember someone telling me once, he was one of the very first people who got a earplug/microphone for his cell phone and even cell phones were fairly rare. So he was apparently talking straight into thin air to someone who wasn't there, holding a conversation with them. Unless they spotted the earpiece and realized what it was, people thought he was certifiably insane. Today nobody would blink twice at that.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
what are they going to do when we have neurally connected computers that sync with our brains?
So, wearable devices such as watches don't have silent mode? (No, I'm not talking about vibrate mode).
I think it's all about the form factor, and Google has gotten it wrong with Google Glass. IMO, the best possible form factor for wearable computing is that of a wrist watch. Even in that regard, companies like Samsung have still gotten it wrong, and for the exact opposite reason that Google has gone wrong.
Glasses are essentially a display device. They should be an I/O type peripheral, but Google made them the heart of the system. They can't be anything but glasses, on your face, obvious to everyone, with a camera sitting there pointing at everyone, drawing suspicion about what is being recorded or what you might be seeing, etc. They should not be the core of the system, but a peripheral to be used only when needed for those specific functions.
Now take Samsung's watch. It SHOULD be the core of the system. It should have your CPU, storage, networking, etc, because it is a non-invasive device that billions of people are already used to wearing all day every day. It is the optimum form factor for having with you all the time everywhere you go (even while swimming, etc). But instead they made it a mere peripheral for their phones / tablets.
The watch should be the core of the system. You can do simple tasks with its small display, it can vibrate in different places (on the bottom of the band, in the watch, etc) in different patterns that could communicate a variety of things without any annoying sound effects (since it's on the wrist the vibration could be very light, unlike a cell phone which has to be felt through clothing, etc). Then if you need a bigger display, you grab a tablet IO device (a mere wireless peripheral for IO for your watch), or a device like Google Glass, or you simply output media from your watch to the nearest TV, etc.
Anyway, IMO I think everyone is getting it totally backwards when it comes to wearable computing devices.
Better known as 318230.
If you convince your mom to put it on my **** then why not!
Which is not to say that the day won't come when _everyone_ is _always_ "jacked in."
William Gibson nearly had it right in, I forget, was it Burning Chrome or Mona Lisa Overdrive, with the microsoft (versus MicroSoft®) slot surgically implanted at the base of your skull.
Ha ha, the captch is "vacuous"
Do Not Want.
So now, I'm expected to do the consumer thing again by buying an over-priced, extremely fragile and unperfected new piece of tech. Thanks anyway, I'll pass on this 'magic'.
The reaction to someone wearing Google Glass should be the same as if someone held their cell phone like they were recording a video of you. Maybe they aren't, but you don't know.
Take them off or go away. It's rude otherwise.
They may just be tools, but they'll make you look like one too.
The fundamental problem with all wearable computing and cell phones is that they are an interruptive technology. While they do queue up SMS messages and emails so you can deal with them when convenient, people don't do so. Instead they rudely proceed to stop whatever they're doing, even a conversation, to deal with the message right now.
There is no excuse for it other than being rude.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Where are we going? Is this a borg society where people are going to be continuously plugged into some sort of network grid and that's the most important thing in the world?
.. not a human doing.
There are scientists and engineers pushing this idea of wearable computing because it seems cool. What we need isn't the opinion of scientists and engineers, we need to focus on philosophy. Adjust society for computer? Bah, what a load of hogwash. Adjust computing for society! Stop thinking like a computer engineer and start thinking like a human being
Anyone still use pagers?
Here, they disappeared completely when sms appeared and got similiar coverage. A few years later, and that is many years ago, they shut down the pager infrastructure. It saw so little use - it didn't pay to have parallel systems. Each and every mobile phone support at least SMS - and when they get an SMS, they can both read the details in the message, and use the phone to call for more info. Kids see a pager in a classic movie now and don't know what it is.
Mobile phones do so much more than pagers ever did - and I am not even talking about smartphones. Why do anybody still want pagers? For what? Even Africa use mobile phones now.
Surely it's within the wit of designers to include a feature to stop interrupting me for a while, either for a set duration or until I say otherwise?
I wear a pager for work (hospital environment). When there, everyone knows exactly why I'm checking it immediately if it goes off. When there or elsewhere, I apologize for checking it by saying, "Sorry, I'm on call. I need to check this." Usually they ask if I need to take it. If I don't, I tell them someone else will get it (we blast to the entire group). If I do, I tell them I'll get it when we're finished. Yes, the stuff I work on is that time critical. 5 minutes can be, and has been, the difference between getting the parts I need that day and getting them back up, or them being down an extra day. I think the key is to tell your audience what's going on instead of just tuning them out.
I do not believe we are ready, nor have we as a people have been ready for much that may be thrown at us at this point. Recent things that have been brought to light involving the example set forth by our government: If people break the law, it is public record and evening news, if the government breaks the law, it's classified, that is a double standard and not a healthy or trustworthy attribute of a government. I doubt that the people believe such a device does not include a back door installed by the NSA or some other invasive corporate marketing directive, nor did they ever believe they would have to contend with military force being applied by a government on it's own people (being that the NSA is DOD rooted). The first response to revelations brought to light by Snowden is the government has tried to turn the tables and stated that Snowden is to blame for both the information awareness apparatus for the 'war on terrorism' and economic damage that has resulted. There are people out there that do not mind their privacy being invaded and I realize that, though there are others that are not terrorists or criminal that are offended by all this and further are a bit pist that this is what their tax dollars are spent on, so maybe it's time for a vote by the actual people rather than corporate owned political assets before we move forward with tech advances for now, hate to see something that might be a good product get swept aside due to the current situation at hand.
We are ready because the technology is there. There will always be people that will look down on wearable technology, and in the future implanted technology. They dont matter. Technology wont stop, they will either adapt, or just eventually die.
No and hopefully we never are.
I will give a person one chance to take them off and put them away around me. If it is a public place that I spend money, I will be polite and ask, "Please put that camera away.", if they refuse, I will go straight to the business owner, tell that that I am leaving and will no longer spend my money in their establishment as long as they allow those things, and leave. If it is in my home, they get the one chance and if they refuse, they will be unceremoniously ejected, if they argue the point, they get my fist right into their google glasses and then they will be thrown ( literately ) out my door and off of my property.
As to the rest, if someone does not have social skills to know that constantly twiddling with their latest toy while in a conversation is just plain fucking RUDE I will make them aware of that and then leave.
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
If I am in a bar and you take video of me, you will
be shopping for a new device shortly thereafter.
Apparently the most important function of Google Glass is to summon "Internet Tough Guys" to post on Slashdot.
....with a bazooka!!"
"If somebody dares to wear Google Glasses without my permission I will shoot them in the face
...to waste on waiting for people to finish their teleconversations, I got better fucking things to do. Like for instance, dealing with the next in line who's obviously not engaged in some inane drivel about what colour knickers Miley Bleedin' Cyrus might be wearing today and just wants to pay for his shit and go...
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Hospitals still use pagers for one simple reason. They are 1000x more reliable than a text message. Pager system coverage areas are far larger and more saturated with signals than cell systems which are full of holes in coverage. The signaling scheme used in paging systems is more reliable and the frequencies used penetrate buildings better than cell signals.
You check your watch for incoming messages. You look at your phone to check the time.
So, it has come to this.
http://xkcd.com/1022/
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
We're never socially ready for ANYTHING new. The process of building social norms around something can't start until after that thing is introduced. The implication, then (often made explicit by hand-wringers calling themselves "ethicists" or some such thing) that we should stop the thing until we ARE "socially ready" for is equivalent to pure conservativism -- stopping everything new.
How is this any different than people who do nothing than stare at their phone nearly every minute of the day? If I see some guy wearing Google Glass, I'll totally engage him and talk with him, because it's a great piece of technology. As for the social aspect...it's not a real issue. People willingly give their SSN to overseas customer service reps all the time.
Humanity has never been socially ready for change, even tho it is just about the only constant in life.
Buy a jammer.
with luck women will shun the dweebs who wear that crap and sooner or later it will die.
It's great that we can be so connected, but ask yourself this: how urgent is that email from Amazon? Or that calendar invitation about a party next month? Are you living your life or just sifting through emails and instant messages? If you're on-call for your job, have a friend or family member in the hospital, or some similarly important event going on, then that's definitely a valid reason for interrupting a conversation and attending to your device. If you want to read emails while pretending to pay attention to someone, then perhaps face-to-face socialization isn't for you. While people *think* they can covertly read emails while holding a conversation, I've never met anybody that could actually do so. I've been guilty of trying that myself and realized how silly the whole situation is. Anyone trained in business or interpersonal communication will tell you the same thing: Pay attention to the person with whom you're speaking, or excuse yourself to read your emails.
--
Luck is just skill you didn't know you had.
That oIs not the only reason. Cell phones (esp. old/early models) emit very strong EMR as compared to pagers, and thus pose a safety risk in many hospital environments.
"Right now, it's considered impolite to talk on your cellphone while checking out at the grocery store, or to ignore a face-to-face conversation in favor of texting somebody. But 20 years ago, those actions weren't even on our social radar."
Sure they were. Twenty years ago, if you were in line at the grocery store and rather than paying attention to checking out, you were idly standing there chatting with the person next to you, that would be just as rude as talking on your cell phone. And if you were having a face-to-face conversation with someone and abruptly stopped to turn and interact with someone else, that would be considered just as rude as abruptly stopping to text.
The rude behavior is the same then and now. Distraction, interruption, inattentiveness, and so on. All that's changed is that the technology has allowed the other person in the scenario to become a virtual presence than an actual.
Liberty in your lifetime
Google Glass is perfect really, it looks dorky and obvious so at least you'll have no problems punching some asswipe who's uploading a video of you to Youtube.
Seriously, though. My fellow workers and I refer to most folks walking by, obliviously texting away as "Pod-People". Many of them with ear buds (or even huge, bulky headphones) to emphasize their wanting not to hear you. People aren't truly in tune with proper social behavior with cell phones/smart phones and constant (albeit intermittent) communications now. If a device (any device) makes it even more of an attention hog than it has already become, then people are going to start walking into traffic (even more than they already do). Many people today are already texting people they are physically standing beside as a method of "whispering" things clandestinely, no matter how rude it really is. People are already getting fully absorbed in their smart phones to the point of not knowing how to hold a coherent conversation over a meal. All this will simply be compounded with the more pervasive devices. It's only a matter of time before Google Glass becomes outright illegal to use while driving. It's bad enough that people think that having their smart phone in their lap while driving is acceptable and considered safe, despite being illegal in many places. What is it going to take before people start taking serious offense at others' smart device use in public places? Not serving people while they are on their phone is a decent start. After all, how rude is it to be expecting someone else to give you proper attention to serve you, and you can't even be bothered to pay enough attention to get the amount of you bill right? Little wonder why many employers have effectively banned smart phone use while at work, particularly in the service and hospitality industry. How far will it go? Extremism exists, and will manifest itself on both sides of this topic. Mark my works: It Will Get Ugly!
...do we have to get "socially ready" for anything? Computers, wearable or otherwise, are just tools. They serve us, it's not the other way around. Getting ready forcefully for some misguided new "concept" that nobody asked for is just stupid. Tools must solve real problems, not to artificially create them. Otherwise we'll all end up with monster versions of the Metro interface, won't we?
What is the actual problem "wearable computing" solves, anyway?
That doesn't make any sense, unless you also demand that shops shut off their security cameras when you walk in the door, assault houseguests who use smartphones, spraypaint over other people's dashcams, and ask that people avert their eyes in your presence.
"You can put a phone away and choose not to use it."
Who is this "you" the author is talking abut? Certainly not the people I encounter.
it's BS that you can't 'put away' wearables, you can always turn them off.. It's not like people put away their phone during meetings anyway.. People are more and more distracted by all those mobile devices.. I would propably even go as far as just banning those devices from the workfloor..
Hospital - totally understand. Get a text or alert: "check out my new cat sweater" - no I'll never understand. Like the difference between a fire trunk horn and angry commuter horn - one simply does not matter much. Learn to ignore that one.
I think the key part that's missing in this latest round of aspirant technology is personal AI. What you really need is a "v-assistant", "e-butler" or whatever the name might be that is capable of independently replying to *and* initiating communications (by text, email, voice, video, etc.) with other people or systems. It could prioritise what needs your personal interaction, depending on what you were doing at the time.
The level of input to us has been ramping up fast but our brains still have the same bandwidth they had a million years ago. Until we get an upgrade, we need help to deal with this increasing flood of information, that is mostly unimportant. Who knows, a call to someone in the near future on their "iWatch" might get answered by Siri...
Consider the tourist who doesn't speak your language, and is getting on the fly translation of street signs, etc.
Or the dyslexic who is getting the menu he's never been able to cope with before read to him.
Or the blind guy who's using it like a seeing eye dog he doesn't need to feed?
Are you going to punch all of them in the face too?
Just because you're being a glassless-hole, doesn't mean they're interested in recording you.
I've considered getting a pair, but haven't - because they're ugly as hell. As another poster indicated - I too want "Terminator vision". When they are integrated invisibly into the glasses I currently have to wear, I'll go for it, but it will probably be running my own software, with me deciding how much of the feed I want to let out to external translation services etc. (and to be honest, it will probably be talking to the phone in my pocket)
I've got no interest in using a piece of crap quality camera with a lens the size of a sesame seed to record humanity. I have a real camera for that, and you'll know I'm using it because, well, it's a real camera, and if I'm holding it up and pointing it at you, well...
I used to say I'd punch the first person I saw wearing google glass in the face. Now, I can tear off their arms too!
I'd say we're nowhere near ready for wearable technology. For crying out loud, we can't even handle smart phones responsibly yet! As I almost saw some poor girl get run down this morning by some a**hole driving in front of a school while playing on some device.
Sometimes the "angry commuter horn" means you're drifting into their lane and half a second from side-swiping them... ignoring it is a bad idea in that case.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Someday soon we'll all be sitting in our cacoons waiting for Neo to come and save us from the Matrix.
It'll go the way of the bluetooth headset ... extinct except for the hardcore douchebag.
"Excuse me sir, you seem to have a little bit of douchebag on the side of your... oh nevermind, that's your bluetooth..."
frankly, I think this is a meaningless question. What does "Socially ready" even mean? Society does not "prepare" for change. Change happens and then society adapts. Or more accurately, change happens, some people adapt, and children grow up knowing a new society that never didn't have that change and can't conceive of a world that didn't have it.... then they grow up to ask whether society is ready for the next change, which their children will grow up familiar with, and who will think their parents were silly, crazy, and overly paranoid for doubting.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
The problem is not that a wearable allows you to be "connected," but rather that using it as an interface for "connection" misses the point. The point of wearable computing is context.
If, for example, the email is telling you that your order is waiting at the post office, your wearable should tell you that as you're about to travel past it.
Your wearable should file it as tentative in your calendar, maybe automatically accept or decline the invite based on conflicting engagements and a strong pattern of attendance (or lack thereof) for parties thrown by the same person in the past, and mention it to you next time you ask to review your appointments.
Your wearable should only be displaying an email when one of the conversing parties says something like "hey, remember that email?" and then it ought to be displaying only the relevant one(s).
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Go to Walmart and you'll see we have a substantial contingent of people who can't even function within the standard social context we have now. Disruptive technology doesn't change this, it just provides more opportunity for the existing impolite behavior.
I also guess the pager continues to work when the cell network is congested, and the pager is also not in danger to have an empty battery when the emergency call arrives because you just chatted with your friend for hours. Not to mention that most messages on your phone will not be urgent, implying the risk that you don't immediately check the urgent message because you don't know it's urgent, while on the separate pager you'll know it's urgent at the moment you hear it.
Sometimes the "angry commuter horn" means you're drifting into their lane and half a second from side-swiping them... ignoring it is a bad idea in that case.
Once my "angry commuter horn" meant "I'm hauling a load of cinderblocks, it's 10 degrees, and some psycho sprayed water on a steep downhill slope heading to an intersection"
Trust me, that wasn't a horn you wanted to tune out.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
The real question: if you have a problem with wearable computers, are you automatically a luddite with an irrelevant opinion?
Yes. Yes, those people will soon be living in the past. Congrats, everyone who has the word "glasshole" in their vocabulary, you are now old, crotchety, and a problem in the eyes of progress.
I recommend everyone just use their devices to find better people to be around. If a harmless worn object (whether it's a computer or a mullet) causes you to be ostracized, you live in the presence of harmful heels who should be relegated to their own fire-fearing circles.
I got picked on for being a nerd in school too, and I still hold grudges about it and always will, but I'm not going to take it out on people just because I'm envious that I can't afford a Glass. And I'm certainly not going to disguise choking-on-my-twisted-panties as some kind of argument against progress.
Insert exasperated, immature language here.
Every trollism an AC posts is prefixed, in my mind, with "A. Coward whined, in a weak and cowardly voice:"