In the comments stream for — Cracking the Fiery Core: We Are Not What We Have — I said this, that has, ever since, had me thinking about the unfolding of such future events:
I think the next wave push is going to be “Limitless Lifecasting” — where you just stream video of your life all day and all night long. You’re online 24 hours a day. Google Glass will be the first step into the bloody morass. Re-winding will be the new Re-tweeting and Re-blogging.
With the revelation this week that Google Glass, Part II is set to debut soon — along with the news that current Glass users now able to invite three of their most gullible friends to shell out $1,500.00USD to share in the pioneer experience of getting punched in the face — our new, shiftless “re-” future is officially embedded among us.
The problem with recording your every move is that the process instantly makes you an observer and not a participant in the world. You are artificially distancing yourself behind a framework that is more limited and less complex than your biologic eye. Viewpoint and vision and perspective are lost in adoring the mechanism.
You are also placed out of the float of real-time and pressed backward into a static re-membering and re-cording and re-winding of what you just experienced as a non-re-actor in a living environment.
I see a future of us barely interacting with each other in the real world, while we are consumed with re-playing what happened and why. We will be stuck in history, and the future will only be something that happens while we’re moving away from the instant each other.
We’ll spend our days readying for re-recording and our nights will be wasted editing out the unwanted record. We’ll create our own life loop that never ends and never begins. Our alert creation will de-grade. Our talent to foresee will be forsaken. The moderation of goals will devolve into the immoral abyss.
When we record things for memory beyond the mind, we do so because we want to share those experiences with other people; but over-sharing and endless cloud storage options have purposefully encouraged us to live in the past while saving every irrelevant bit of us just in case we may want to add it later to a Vine video or our Twitter timeline.
What we lose in a “Re-” society is the quiet contemplation of an active mind — and innovation and imagination are no longer the human principles of duty.
Is there a bright side to any of this? I don’t think I can see one.
I guess the bright side is in the hope of joining these “always on-ers” and somehow trying to teach them to “set it and forget it” when it comes to re-gressing back throughout the day to re-reflect upon their re-lived lives. I don’t think that would really work, though, because it goes against the whole idea of “saving” indirect experiences for re-experiencing later.
I think we’re going to have to play along just to get alone. It’s almost like gun ownership. If you don’t have one — then you’re perceived as being vulnerable and weak and open to whim exploitation. These always-on recordings are certainly an expressed, public, threat that will change how we live and learn and behave.
Seems like a frightening future!
It’s the culture we already have — but the cameras will move to eye-level instead of looking down on us from above.
Reblogged this on mangkoks0p.