Google Glass & Short-Sightedness

You're not likely to see me wearing Google Glass any time soon. Way too dorky/creepy.

And thus far this kind of sentiment feels like where the wider, collective reaction to Google Glass has settled, people being too unnerved by the privacy thing - nevermind the nerd angle -  to seriously consider owning a pair.

And that could well be the end of it, Google Glass was a dead duck at launch, unable to jump through some reaonably fearsome hoops of adoption fire.

But I actually suspect it's not the end - it's just going to take society a while longer to digest Glass.

Like it did with the first automobiles that had people running for their lives when they first clattered around a corner, or the first flights or the first of anything that moves the game on in a significant way.

We're toolmakers and we just need time to adapt to new tools, just like we always did.

I'm not a fan of Google Glass today, but I've come to suspect that we'll look back in twenty or so years and amusingly refer to the time when short-sighted people used to wear those old, analog spectacles that just corrected their vision.

Short-sighted, right enough.

Immigrants To Tech

I'm about halfway through Malcolm Gladwell's latest book, David and Goliath. It's OK, if a little Gladwell-esque if that's not too harsh.

One of the most interesting vignettes Gladwell illustrates is where he refers to the metaphor 'immigrants to wealth' first coined by Jim Grubman and Dennis Jaffe. Term was used to articulate the notion that people who work their way to positions of personal wealth from a starting point of social adversity can often have trouble adapting their social values when it comes to parenting.

In short, while they grew out of impoverished, working class backgrounds and were self-made successes, fighting for every penny and luxury along the way, their children subseqently experience a more privileged social environment and consequently there's often a breakdown in parenting when the self made parents share fundamentally different value systems from their children. Somewhat akin to first generation immigrants.

It's interesting to consider this framework when applied to the emerging era of social/mobile/cloud tech where forty-something upwards diehards of the PC generation struggle to adapt to the new, hyper-connected world we now inhabit, while their kids crack on as it had never been any different.

Generational Symmetry

Dropbox and Box file sync and revisioning rules are to my generation what programming the VCR was to my generation's parents.

It's like dog hearing. We're intelligent and smart and olde worlde computer literate and all that but just as our parents couldn't wrap their baby boomer heads around something as simple as how to program the VCR timer to record Coronation Street, there's just no way we can work out how this modern day file revision and sync shit works.

It's so symmetrically tragic that it's beautiful.