The revised Google motto by John LeMasney via 365sketches.org #Inkscape #Google
Summary of On Recording the senses.
Go Pro vs Glass, and the importance of us recording senses that we can’t normally, such as the ability to taste, such as the ability to spell, such as the ability to touch.
We already have the very clear record of what we see and we have the ability to hear and record what we hear. We are just beginning to understand how to record how we touch with haptics, like in remote robot gloves.
But we don’t really understand yet how to record smells, although perfume begins to speak to it, and we also have no idea how to record tastes. Recipes are really important because the combination of flavors and ingredients in a food lead to that particular taste but there may be other things that we are missing; if we do perfectly it may not have exactly the right taste, and we may not know why, because we haven’t done a very good job of recording why something tastes the way it does.
The recording of the senses.
Other senses are rather difficult to record. If you ever wanted to record a touch, for instance, you’d find how few tools exist for the task. Poetry and great literature begins to do it, because something that is well written and explains something leads to a sense of touch in the mind, but it’s not exactly the same as a GoPro recording a bike ride. It’s not exactly the same as recording something with a microphone, where you have a much clearer idea of what was heard or what was seen.
Why GoPro as a head-mounted camera gets a different response than Google glass with its head-mounted camera.
If the concern is only about the camera, then why are GoPros not encountering the same kinds of issues that Google Glass has? That’s a concern for me because, honestly, a phone is capable of everything that Google Glass is, but people just don’t like the idea of Glass right there on your face; They feel like their privacy is being compromised in the presence of Glass, but they certainly don’t feel like their privacy is being compromised in the presence of a GoPro. This is odd, in my opinion.
It seems like, maybe socially, we are not ready yet for Google Glass, unfortunately. I think that it is the next step in the way that we begin to think about recording our whole experience, including geolocation, video, pictures, voice, and anything else we opt into. Anything that can be digitized can be shared, can be apps, can be searched. There used to be arguments against laptops in the classroom, but of course if we look at the benefits of a computer over a sheet of paper, and all the pros and cons of each, there is no question that the laptop is superior. The same is true of Glass over glass.
We have to begin to realize that there are superior ways to record our consciousness. There are better ways of taking a picture than with a camera, or than recording a voice with a microphone. Combinations of these two sensors (cameras, microphones), along with many other signals, like temperature in the room, or heartrate while messaging, or tweets that were going on with me, or other streams that only become clear if they are being paired in ways like Glass would pair them. We might solve mysteries of the kind that only a combination of these streams might answer. If we saw the heartrate of a group of people simultaneously, you might be able to predict a riot, for instance. Without these streams, we’d have to guess. As Fitbit has taught me personally, it’s better to know.
But, we are scared of Glass. Despite its potential for ethereal, visible, recordable good.
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