Harvard prof on Google Glass: ‘We shouldn’t accept these devices as inevitable’

“Brace yourself for more Glassholes,” Whitney Erin Boesel – a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, a Visiting Scholar at the MIT Center for Civic Media, and a PhD student in Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz – writes for TIME Magazine. “Beginning last week, Google started to make available a limited supply of Google Glass to anyone with $1,500 to spare. To be certain, Glass still affords—or makes possible—a whole range of problematic behaviors. There are concerns about distracted driving; about people (probably men) taking photographs of other people (probably women) without consent; about Glassholes serving as foot soldiers in Google’s data-gobbling army, expanding the corporation’s ongoing assault on what we used to call ‘privacy.’ These are real issues, but not new ones; rather, they are the newest manifestations of much larger, long-standing problems. While Glass may make those problems more visible than they were before, hating Glass (or even Glassholes) won’t make the problems go away.”

“It’s doubtful, of course, that Glass will catch on in any meaningful way; as ever and always, ‘Google doesn’t get Social.’ But Glass is not the first wearable computer or camera out there, nor will it be the last,” Boesel writes. “Samsung is rumored to be working on something like Glass; Apple insiders predict a smartwatch; the Narrative Clip, a wearable “lifelogging” camera, is already in production; and MIT has been working on Wearable Computing for close to 20 years.”

“We shouldn’t accept these devices as inevitable, but neither should we assume that by eliminating the devices, we can eliminate the cultural faultlines that the devices foreground,” Boesel writes. “Instead, we need to ask hard questions about what kind of a society we want to live in—and then demand that new technologies both move us closer to that goal, not further away from it.”

Read more in the full article here.

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