~a column by Colleen O’Brien
As the new technology zooms along, I make periodic half-hearted stabs at figuring it out. I have no intuition about it or what to do with most of it; the explanations on how to work the latest gizmo confuse, and the names of things are letters and numbers that are way too reminiscent of algebra for me to cozy up to them.
But, I refuse to be the crabby old grandma who says, “I don’t need one of those !#%* walk-around phones,” even as the electronic age speeds up, and a Silicon valley entrepreneur says to a convention of his peers, “It always seemed inevitable to me that we’ll all just put on headsets and plug directly into our brains.”
Never seemed inevitable to me. But then, neither did the reality of every second person at the grocery store talking on a cell phone.
Having started out w/ a mobile phone a couple of decades ago, I moved on to a flip phone, and now I have a smart phone. It is indeed smart, much smarter than me on the smartest day of my life. This fact is somewhat okay now that I’ve had it for a while and can make it take pictures and send them to friends and family; and that I can make Siri, its global positioning system (GPS) voice, talk to me in her condescending little falsetto and tell me how to get to a wine store in Cincinnati when that’s where I need to go.
As vague and irritated as I can be about new inventions, this part of the electronic age works for me.
The rest of it makes me feel like the shoelace salesman when Velcro came in.
In the latest Vanity Fair, a fine magazine for in-depth articles of serious nature (and of haute couture, if you’re able to understand that piece of weirdity), I discover that Mr. Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook before he was old enough to drink, is, 10 years later, worth several billion dollars, and more than a billion people use Facebook. And, he has a new interest in a new (to me) technology. This one is called “augmented reality.” He’s bought it from another child genius, 22-year-old Palmer Luckey, for around $2 billion.
This “latest” thing has actually been around for a few years in the form of “virtual reality.” The word “virtual” here means “existing, though not in actual fact, form or name.” So I guess that means when you read a column of mine, you are experiencing me in a virtual way.
Mr. Zuckerberg believes that these new electronic advancements will “actually solve these bigger problems that will shape the world over the next decade.”
This sounds so wonderful, noble in fact. But I don’t see Facebook doing this; perhaps I’m shortsighted, or in the case of new-age electronics, blind. Some people think that today’s virtual interconnectivity is more real to millennials (18 to 34-year-olds) than the “real” world, these young people feeling more at ease donating money over the Internet to a farmer in Bangladesh than bringing Jell-O to a sick neighbor. I don’t know if this is true because I am related to a couple of millennials who don’t seem to mind talking with me.
I saw a movie last spring called “Her.” It was about a guy divorced from his wife. In his loneliness he fell in love with a voice app (application) on a telephone, a GPS Siri-type artificial intelligence. She knew him, helped him, was his friend. Eventually he fell in love with her. And then, of course, she left the system. That part is not in any way different from real-life comings and goings within male/female relationships.
But falling in love with a voice? This Siri-type gal in the movie called herself Samantha. She was not real; she was a computer whose answers to, and conversations with, the lonely guy were programmed by some company tracking millions of emails, texts and cell phone calls.
In this virtual reality of no touching/seeing/being-with relationships, I as watcher fail to grasp Zuckerberg’s hope or belief in solving “these bigger problems that will shape the world over the next decade.” I am unsure, for one thing, what he defines as “bigger problems.” The biggest problem — not close to being solved — is humankind’s male/female antagonism, along with simply the general inability of people getting along.
I am now one of the oldsters, the dying breed (manifests each generation). Many of us old birds would rather have the land line telephones we grew up with, real people talking to us on those phones from banks and stores and government entities, somebody getting paid a living wage to pump our gas, no newspaper article ending in, “If you want more information, try WWW.yadda.yadda.com.”
We are the old guy a hundred years ago who didn’t understand, want or believe in telephones.
So, my behavior is not virtual reality but actual dinosaur. Once I’m out of the way, you folks in the next generation or two will find some new invention so inexplicable and unimportant to your lives that you, too, will act like grouchy old grandmas and grandpas, wanting only your virtual, augmented reality, not whatever it is future child geniuses have in store for you.
