Peter.shackelford

In Guys Like This Could Kill Google Glass Before It Ever Gets Off the Ground, Marcus Wohlsen gets to the heart of why I personally dislike Google Glass:

Google Glass, like the Segway, is what happens when Silicon Valley spends too much time talking to itself. Maybe that’s even overstating the case: The rhetoric around Google Glass is what happens when important tech people spend a little too much time congratulating each other.

When I was much younger and just starting to become fascinated with technology, I’d greet every new development with hopeful excitement. The older I get, the more I’ve started to see new developments as a fresh coat of paint on problems that already didn’t need to be solved, shiny new toys to play with that are at best unnecessary and at worst useless. (This is even more true with web services and mobile apps.)

Still, there are plenty of tech-evangelists, marketers and cybertheorists to convince you otherwise, condescending to you about how this or that is the future and there’s never been anything better in the history of the world. I’ve never felt as strongly condescended to about any technology as I have about Google Glass.

I can’t make myself buy into the hype. It doesn’t solve any problem for me that isn’t already solved by a typical smartphone (or far less complicated technologies in some cases). I have no desire to be a cyborg and I definitely don’t want to look like the people who wear Google Glass. I don’t want to pay an exorbitant amount of money to be “that guy.”

But what’s notable about Google Glass is that my dislike for it isn’t sustained primarily by my own unwillingness to use it, but my adamant opposition to being around those who do. Why would I want to hang out with people who constantly wear a tiny camera on their face, sneak pictures with a wink and stare vacantly while pretending to be present? I don’t.

Maybe there’s a day in the future when this becomes acceptable and the “cool thing to do” (in the same way Facebook has made oversharing the “cool thing to do”), but it will never appeal to me.

In No Comment, James Shakespeare lays out some arguments against allowing reader comments on blogs, including my personal favorite:

Before the user has had a chance to process what they’ve read and form their own opinion, the content of the article has blurred into the responses of others. The stream of information that was so fervently stimulating their grey matter mere seconds ago has descended into a clattering of opinions that rapidly drowns out the intended message of the article. It’s the equivalent of reaching the end of a book and having a mob of other readers immediately descend on you, everyone trying to make their review heard above the fray. They could all have valid opinions on what you’ve just read, but with everyone shouting over each other it’s more likely to inhibit your ability to process information than it is to aid it.

I’d venture to say that the inability to slowly and thoughtfully digest bits of information is one of the primary cultural problems we face. People are often far too eager to hear what they should be thinking instead of arriving at some conclusion after giving it a good mulling over. Then, people are left with a bulleted list of facts or some arbitrary information when they might have otherwise been able to distill it, either through the lens of experience or of hypotheticals, into wisdom or understanding.

The idea that comments somehow “engage” the audience in a meaningful way is the sort of marketing nonsense I can barely stomach these days. The bloggers who promote such an idea have comment sections overrun by kiss-ass self-promoters echoing, agreeing with and praising every article, wanting only for their names to have a prominent position on a popular site and, if it pleases the blogging gods, a keyword-loaded backlink. If a comment isn’t driven by self-promotion, then it’s probably intended to be irrelevant or incendiary.

Shakespeare touches on this point when he writes:

Say you get to the end of this article and pen the most eloquent, rational comment that makes everything I’ve written look like pseudo-intellectual drivel. What’s the likelihood that a) you will have read the comments of every other user before leaving yours and b), that you will come back and check for a reply to your comment, or even read a reply if you are notified of one? Most comments are simply drive-by arguments, and with everyone doing it we’re not cultivating valuable engagement.

In the past, when I’ve written for and created sites with open comments, they didn’t represent anything to me except another currency through which I could measure my success (or lack thereof). I didn’t have any sincere desire to start a discussion, since my mind is usually already made up and some people will get it and most others won’t. I didn’t have any sincere desire to interact with readers in the format, since it’s limiting and shallow and usually hard to follow.

At the end of the day, I write because I have an opinion or a story to tell. Comments are unnecessary addendums to those opinions and stories. They are capable of changing the mood and twisting my own words.

This site is intended as my platform and each piece of writing is intended to be, in itself, a complete work.

Shakespeare finishes with these words:

I’m not saying comments are inherently bad and that no site should have them. There are plenty of scenarios in which providing a centralised point of discussion is the right thing to do.

I can’t imagine such scenarios myself. If you’ve been on the web for any amount of time, you’ll soon realize comments sections are only good for hatereading.

Thanks to writer Steven Poole and his article, Invasion of the Cyber Hustlers, I’ve added a useful new word to my vocabulary: cybertheorists.

Cybertheorist, as I understand it, is a pejorative term for those who would have us believe that technology is the savior of humanity. They preach utopian visions of the future and saturate their language with words like “open” and “democratize” and “share.”

Cybertheorists’ jargon often betrays an adolescent hatred of the world in which they find themselves. Jay Rosen, a prominent “future of news” cyber-guru, takes care at every opportunity to sneer at publishing institutions by pasting to them the epithet “legacy”: “legacy newsrooms”, “legacy media”. Another favourite cyber-adjective is “disruptive”. For most of us, disruption is annoying, but for cyber-swamis the more disruptive of established practices technology becomes, the more exciting it is.

So, then, if cybertheorists market feelgood utopian visions and use words like “disruptive” to talk about what they or their startup—another good word–does, clearly “cybertheorist” is the word I should be using to describe the sort of people who market nauseating and overly optimistic fluff about the future.

The famous words of Thomas Sowell might also be applied to these cybertheorists: they wish to replace what worked with what sounds good. Or, rather, not what sounds good, but what can make them money.

They want to shape the way we think about the world, that their fantasies might seem more reasonable.

Poole ends the article with these two beautiful paragraphs:

Cybertheorists in general could perhaps be tolerated as harmlessly colourful futurists, were it not that so many of them, through the influence of their consulting work and virtual bully pulpits, are right now engaged in promoting widespread cultural vandalism. Whatever smells mustily of the pre-digital age must be torn down, “disrupted” and made anew in the sacred image of Google and Apple, except more open to the digital probings of the internet- company oligopoly. Long live sharing, social reading, volunteering free labour as a peer student or member of a company’s online “community”, and entrusting your documents to the data-mining mega-corporations that control the “cloud”.

Cybertheorists love to apply the adjective “smart” to one another but, as a group, they are the most prominent anti-intellectual cadre of our day – little Pol Pots of the touchscreen and Twitter.

If you’ve ever gotten sick of the wishywashy, cult-like positivity of technology experts, you’ll appreciate this piece. I highly recommend you read it.