Week Eleven - The Future, Again

Source: http://collider.com/wp-content/uploads/back_to_the_future_movie_image__10_.jpg

Can we still call the future 'the future'? Are we already living in it? 

The Keller Easterling reading explores the importance of interactivity in the future of media and communications. Interactivity allows for users to connect with one another via their media. Interactivity in media allow for audiences to keep in contact not only with their friends and family, but strangers, events, the Media, as well as public and private information. The internet of things is growing at an unbelievable rate with anything and everything available with the click of a mouse. This video extrapolates on the potential future of mobile media and communication, and it highlights Easterling's point about the importance of interactivity:

One of the most important points that this video discusses in relation to the future of media and communications is privacy. Media privacy is an issue I have long been concerned about, and it woud seem that the issue is only going to get bigger in the future. This area is critical to my research project as I will be dealing with the way in which people use and abuse their own privacy, and the implications this will have for future media usage. Companies like Google are working to develop products like Project Glass: Augmented Reality Glasses.







Whilst this will be a convenient future product for checking subway timetables, the chance of rain or the location of the music section in the bookstore you're standing in (which you could probably see yourself if you took off the glasses), I think it raises potential issues around the concept of privacy. I personally would feel my privacy had been severely invaded if my friends could see how far away I was from them. The other concern about this future direction of technology is the removal of human instinct, human experience and human capacity. In the video the guy wearing the glasses does not investigating for himself, when the subway is shut he uses his augmented reality glasses to give him directions to the bookstore. He even needed directions to get around inside the bookstore. If everyone in the future was equipped with a pair of augmented reality glasses, what would happen if they broke them or lost them? Would they still have the necessary skills to read signs, remember locations and navigate their way around without high-tech aid? Would we experience things in person, or would our experiences be limited to what we see through a screen? Would people across the world be serenading their partners through virtual screens instead of taking them to the actual location? I don't quite see how Google thinks watching the sunset through your webcam is better than being in the actual place when the sunsets. I worry that in the future technology and media will grow at a rapid rate, whilst human capacity, intuition and experience will decrease, at an equally rapid rate.












References


Easterling, K. (2011) ‘An Internet of Things’, e-flux journal, <http://www.e-flux.com/journal/an-internet-of-things/>


Pescovitz, D. (2012), 'Google's augmented reality glasses project', <http://boingboing.net/2012/04/04/googles-augmented-reality-gl.html>