Last week Google unveiled Project Glass, their augmented reality eyeglasses designed to help you “explore and share your world, putting you back in the moment.” Here’s the demo video:
Now, there’s lots of things to say about this - for starters that it’s amazing technology; probably distracting; potentially dangerous; and that it’s likely to have the opposite effect than putting you ‘in the moment’.
However, I noticed something else in the video that I think might be a bigger issue for Google.
“Who could be against more communication and conversation, participation and collaboration, transparency and free speech? To question the spread of the web would be like being against dolphins, green space and trees and things that are self-evidently good. Yet many sensible and thoughtful people, not just Luddites and cultural conservatives, have grave reservations about the impact and implications of the web.” - Charles Leadbeater
In his 2008 book “We Think”, Charles Leadbeater wrote a chapter called For Better or for Worse in which he weighed the potential of the web to strengthen democracy, freedom and equality against the possibility that negative effects will overwhelm the gains leaving us worse off, less free, more controlled, more confused.
Much of my experience of the South by South West conference this year seemed like a safari through the jungles of those negative effects and the fears they generate.
Well, it’s two weeks now since Saul and I were at South by South West Interactive (how can that possibly be?!!) and it’s about time I took stock…
I’m going to break this initial post down into a few sections: what the basic experience was like; whether my plans for the conference panned out or not; and what sessions I actually went to. Then I’ll follow up with some more about what I actually learned while I was in Austin in another post…
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So, I’m off to South By South West Interactive, the biggest geek festival in the world. Seven days in Austin, Texas, by all accounts the hippest corner of the lone star state - I suspect Rick Santorum supporters will be thin on the ground at the ACC…
I’m currently sitting towards the rear of a Boeing 777 somewhere over West Virginia, roughly eight hours into a ten hour flight, and thinking about how i’m going to approach this week - not so much what sessions i’m going to go to, but what I want to get out of it all, and, as Amsterdam’s Picnic festival reminds visitors each year, what am I going to bring to it?
Of course, I haven’t only just started thinking about this, but now is a good opportunity to write down my thoughts so far. Also, I’ve spent some of the idle time on this flight, catching up with some recent TED talks and one of them in particular has caught my attention:
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