Moving sidewalks for the 21st century, please.

Personalization of the soul, that’s what all this technology is leading to. Gizmo’s are being designed to give people what they feel they need, when they need it. Need to call mom? No problem, just call her up on the video phone, she’ll pop up in your left sunglasses lens while your walking down 5th Avenue. Don’t need to worry about bumping into anything ‘cause the sidewalks move and your internal GPS system is sending your brain signals when to take the next left!

I exaggerate, but people do think of these things. Technology is evolving so we can start devolving from doing anything for ourselves. Soon we won’t have to wipe…well, you get my point.

There are some cool developments and Rheingold made a pretty good observation from Shibuya that certain technologies are giving freedoms to people that were never available to them. Teenagers are able to establish an identity and privacy away from their close, quartered families. The idea of controlling several aspects of your life from one device is convenient and being able to pull forgotten memories (Digital Memories) from a digitized storage area is pretty outstanding. But will it ever be too much? Will we stop evolving by learning how to do things for ourselves and by stepping outside of our comfort zones? If we have personal fabricators like Gershenfeld’s, maybe people won’t cease in doing things for themselves, they’ll just create their own inventions to improve their lives. Maybe all this simplification and personalization will allow people to pursue new things that the normal day of living can not allow (I suggest reading Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End). Or maybe the machines will really take over the world….

People are becoming so dependable on their pieces of technology that they believe they can’t live without them, not knowing that they can. Some people forget that there was life before cell phones and computers. Life was there, and it led us to here.

Rheingold, H. (2002). Shibuya epiphany (pp. 1-28). Smart mobs. New York: Perseus.

Czerwinski, M., Gage, D.W., Gemmell, J., Marshall, C., Pérez-Quiñonesis, M., Skeels, et al (2006). Digital memories in an era of ubiquitous computing and abundant storage. Communications of the ACM, 49(1), 45-50.

Gershenfeld, N. (2005). Fab (Selection). New York: Basic Books.

~ by Cait on November 7, 2007.