Sergey Brin Says Using a Smartphone Is 'Emasculating' 325
An anonymous reader writes "While speaking at the TED Conference in California earlier today, Sergey Brin seemingly tried to set the stage for a world where using Google Glass is as normal as using a smartphone. What's more, Brin went so far as to say that using smartphones is 'emasculating.' Brin said that smartphone users often seclude themselves in their own private virtual worlds. 'Is this the way you're meant to interact with other people,' Brin asked. Are people in the future destined to communicate via just walking around, looking down, and 'rubbing a featureless piece of glass,' Brin asked rhetorically. 'It's kind of emasculating. Is this what you're meant to do with your body?' Is wearing futuristic glasses any better?"
Another reader sends in an article that also muses on our psychological connection to our devices. Or, as he puts it, the "increasingly weird and perhaps overly intimate relationship we have with our gadgets; the fist we touch when awake, the last at night. Our minds have become bookended by glass."
Re:Hmm (Score:3, Informative)
Or trying to hold a conversation with someone who's ignoring you and speaking to their glasses?
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Informative)
The inability to even tell if they're looking at you is particularly weird. I had a meeting with this guy [gatech.edu] as a student 8 or 10 years ago or so, when he was wearing a heads-up display attached to a computer he kept sort of slung over his shoulder, with a one-handed chording keyboard on the outside of it. It seemed interesting tech-wise, definitely at the time, when it was all DIY'd. But it was slightly weird always being unsure when he was looking through his glasses at me, and when he was looking at his glasses reading the web or something. At least with a smartphone or laptop you can see people look down and look up.