When I go out on urban wandering expeditions, there are always two things I make sure to carry with me: a Metro Vancouver mapbook in my backpack, and a fold-up TransLink Metro Vancouver transit map in my pocket. I still lack the instinctive familiarity of the street layout in this area, and while "head toward that bridge way over there" can work on a macro level, it's also an extremely easy way to get lost while you think you're heading in the right direction.
These days, it feels like I'm one of an increasingly small group of old-style navigators. With mobile phones ubiquitous among everyone except me, and with the integration of web-browsing and specifically Google Maps functionality into modern phones, there's increasingly less necessity for people to carry physical maps around with them.
Or, at least, it seems to me that there's the increasingly common perception that that's the case. As that perception becomes cemented in society to an ever-greater extent, we unwittingly provide ever-greater opportunities for us to get into trouble. I started thinking this through after watching a video by Tom Scott, an Ignite London presentation about how flash mobs can stumble into horrific things. It's embedded below - I seriously recommend that you watch it. Sure, it's a story, but one with real teeth - ten or fifteen years ago, it would've been firmly science fiction.
In Tom Scott's tale, the sudden arrival of hundreds of mobile-using flash mobbers crashed the local network, and its transformation into a flash riot may have been precipitated - at least in part - by all of these people who had got there by following directions on their phones, and in the absence of those internet-based geographic tools had no idea where they were in relation to what they were familiar with, and no idea how to get out. That's a frightening situation, that. Ignorance feeds fear, and when fear gets high enough, rationality goes out the window.
Nevertheless, navigation by mobile phone is not the problem. In fact, for many people it's a godsend; some people aren't able to hold a coherent map in their heads, and in cases like that phone-maps fall into the niche of "external brains" that's been batted around in science fiction for decades. No, the problem is choosing to get around with phone-based navigation in an unfamiliar area and not having a backup plan.
For me, it's relatively simple - I find the nearest transit stop and board the first bus that presents itself. While not all bus routes in Metro Vancouver link up with the SkyTrain, the network's extensive enough that even without a guidemap I'd be able to blunder my way to familiar territory eventually. The biggest issue I have with mobile phones is my perception that they've begun to influence thinking at a cultural level, that they may help lead to a seat-of-the-pants culture where things are dealt with only as they arise.
I may be wrong. I hope to be wrong. Nevertheless, whenever I go out I'll always make sure I have that map in my backpack.
I've been somewhat out of touch with the wider world recently; it's an inescapble fact that comes with my setting down new roots here in New West. My landline telephone service won't go active for another couple of days yet, and it'll be about another week before my internet service goes live - until then, it's purely through wi-fi at Starbucks and the public library. I won't say it leaves me floundering, as there's a lot that goes into setting up a new place that the internet is merely a distraction for.
Making sure that you've got a can opener kicking around is a pretty big one.
It may be that need to go out and find a connection, rather than having one available at home whenever I need it, that amplified my reaction to Douglas Coupland's recent article in The Globe and Mail, "A radical pessimist's guide to the next 10 years." Much of it is what you'd expect, given the situation in which we find ourselves: a disappearing middle class, a world made smaller from resource shocks and oil crunches, and so on. Buried within it is one particular prediction that doesn't deal with either of these: instead it looks at one of the key factors of science fiction, how technology influences society.
33) People who shun new technologies will be viewed as passive-aggressive control freaks trying to rope people into their world, much like vegetarian teenage girls in the early 1980s
1980: “We can't go to that restaurant. Karen's vegetarian and it doesn't have anything for her.”
2010: “What restaurant are we going to? I don't know. Karen was supposed to tell me, but she doesn't have a cell, so I can't ask her. I'm sick of her crazy control-freak behaviour. Let's go someplace else and not tell her where.”
For one, I find it difficult to believe that there were restaurants in 1980 that did not sell anything that wasn't once part of an animal, but that's neither here nor there, and for that matter in 1980 neither was I. What bothers me is the assumptions behind Coupland's prediction number thirty-three, and the worry that he might be right on that account.
Yes, it's still got usefulness in it today. No reason to look surprised.
I've probably brought it up time and again on this weblog, but once more for the record - I do not own a mobile phone, nor have I ever. That likely puts me in something like a 1% minority of the population in my age bracket, and if I continue living like this I will increasingly look like an out-of-step luddite. I'm well aware of that, and I accept it.
What I don't accept is the prospect of mobile phones twisting the culture to such an extent that I'm demonized because of a simple choice to do without. I mean, look at the example above. Karen is a control freak because she does not have a cell, thus requiring the party to - gasp - decide on a plan of action before embarking on it, rather than just going from the seats of their pants? To my mind, that's the opposite of such behavior; shouldn't a control freak love always being in command of every particular of the situation, being able to change it at a moment's notice if it fits their fancy? Or am I completely misreading the situation in general?
Just because a new technology, or a widely-used one, can change cultural standards is not a reason why it should: what I get from this prediction of Coupland's is concern that forward-thinking might, by and by, filter out of the average person's consciousness - after all, why plan ahead when things can be made on the go?
I don't think I like the routes that might take us down. One could argue that we're standing where we are today precisely because of decisions that were made on the fly, with no time spared for planning and without regard for the future.
The subject of augmented reality recently came up on one of the forums I visit, and predictably, the thread was full of people squeeing over how awesome it would be to be able to delegate more and more and more memory and comprehension tasks to their phones - not exactly in those WORDS, mind you, but I feel it's most honest to get my own personal feelings about the whole things out the door soonest.
Augmented reality promises to be the killer app of the early 21st century. The BBC recently reported on an in-development AR application for the iPhone, currently the alpha and omega of AR functionality, that uses the phone's camera, accelerometer, and GPS to display directions to the nearest Underground station when the phone is held up.
Sure, it has the promise to revolutionize the way we interact with people and the world. What concerns me is that it won't necessarily do that in a good way. Frankly, the implications of augmented reality becoming widespread scare the shit out of me.
Privacy, even the extremely basic expectations of privacy one has in the public sphere, has the potential to be even further eroded by the wide availablility of AR systems. Facial recognition technology is proceeding apace even now; for the last two years, adding the string "&imgtype=face" to a Google Images search will reprocess your search request with Google's facial recognition technology. Sure, it's not foolproof; when I searched "toronto" and appended the string, the eighth hit was an ordinary picture of the Toronto skyline, but technology always marches on.
Twenty years from now, when reasonably mature AR systems are available, I have no trouble imagining rigs that run with facial recognition software that, upon seeing a passer-by on the street, could scan the internet for matching photos and slap their name above their head in a virtual space that only the AR-user could see. You wouldn't have to go to Cheers for everyone to know your name. What further worries me about that prospect, though, is that there are people who cheerlead it.
I'm sorry, but my preference for every stranger with an augmented reality system to not be able to know who I am probably outweighs your desire to not have to worry about forgetting someone's name and being embarrassed by that. I'd rather not have to walk around in public wearing massive sunglasses in order to not be recognized, thank you.
Augmented reality is one of those big topics I'll probably be returning to again and again. I foresee it being the "cell phone craze" of the 21st century, and if that's the case I can take comfort in the knowledge that I'll most likely remain an outside observer - I don't have a cell phone, let alone a smart phone, so why would I need AR?
Unless, of course, they start redesigning society so that mechanical assistance of that sort is mandatory. Happiness is mandatory, citizen. Praise Friend Computer.
Despite my better judgement, I can't help but be just slightly nervous at the prospect of stepping on a plane in August. No matter how aware I am of how safe flying is, there will be a small part of my brain that recognizes there is a chance, however miniscule, that I'll never step off again; whether that chance is greater or lesser than, say, Earth being sterilized by a gamma-ray burst between now and then is open for debate.
Intellectually, though, I know there's no real danger. Realistically, I know that I'm in far more danger crossing the street at an intersection with the lights in my favor, and if the latest news is any indication, the driver that hit me would probably be texting.
The Toronto Starreported today on the findings of a Virginia Tech Transportation Institute study that found truckers driving while text-messaging were twenty-three times more likely to get into an accident than truckers with their full attention on the road. The study found that when the truckers took their eyes off the road to read a message, they did so for "nearly five seconds" - and when you're on the lanes at a hundred per, that's practically forever.
I've always heard it said that the reason teenagers are so liable to get into accidents is because of a sense of "youthful invincibility," that nothing bad could possibly happen to them because, you know, they're them and not someone else. The general implication, never said outright, was that that these attitudes went away with adulthood. At least, that's the implication I derived from it while growing up, but now, I can see that's just wishful thinking. I know that not only do I still feel the same way now as I did when I was 18, I'll probably still feel the same way I did when I was 18 - mentally, at least - when I'm 80.
It's not as if this situation was engineered by the study; plenty of people, far too many, do this sort of thing of their own accord. Talking on a cell phone while driving is so common now as to be wholly unremarkable. While bicycling along Queens Quay a few weeks ago, I was caught behind another cyclist wearing earbuds and no helmet, who was so oblivious she almost cut off a right-turning car. Texting while driving is only the latest manifestation of the go-go-go, always-on 24/7 culture that makes me refuse to get a cell phone in the first place, evidence of the degree to which we prize convenience and efficiency over as pedestrian a matter as safety.
If you'd asked me about this a few years ago, I'd have hoped that "texting while driving" would fall into the same domain of ridiculousness as "shaving while driving" or "applying lipstick while driving." Unfortunately, though, texting seems to be gaining more and more cultural acceptance by the day, even if I still have difficulty figuring out why everyone is so crazy for it - so you can send messages without having to talk. So what?
It's news like this that makes me wonder if low-level solipsism is a more common psychological condition than we think.
Humans, for the most part, are a gregarious bunch. In the beginning we needed it to stay alive. For humans, with intelligence and endurance but limited raw fighting power compared to animals that can take a man's head off with one sweep of a claw or clamp of a jaw, strength and safety came from numbers. An intelligent species that didn't have that drive to build communities, where members could survive and thrive on an individual basis, might never build up enough inertia to lay down civilizations.
Technology has only brought us together more and more steadily. The last ten years, in particular, have seen interconnectedness spread like a restless spider's web. When I graduated from high school eight years ago nobody had a mobile phone, and now they use them to cheat on tests. This interconnectivity is becoming more and more of a social need. The Transhuman Space supplement Broken Dreams had among its offerings an urban legend, popular in 2100, of people dying of shock when they were cut off from data networks.
With the way things are going, I'm surprised that sort of legend, maybe revolving around an inopportunely broken BlackBerry or iPhone, hasn't already gained substantial traction in reality.
On July 4th, Australian time, the Sydney Morning Herald carried an opinion piece by Brigid Delaney entitled "It's a lonely planet out there - get used to it," which held up modern networking tools as "symptoms of the death of our ability to be alone." Ordinary people have never been in a position to share as much information as widely and as frequently as they do today. In the article, Delaney takes umbrage with the increasing abandonment of solitude, and asks if "the 11pm call from the boss [is] better than nothing, silence, being disconnected - and perhaps missing out?"
This is one issue I've been worried about myself. I don't have a mobile phone, nor do I have any particular interest in getting one, which seems to make me a definite freak of nature when compared with the rest of my age group. For now, mobile phones remain in the "accessory" stage, and while they're far more commonplace than they were ten years ago, culture has yet to substantially shift toward the assumption of 24/7 availability for everyone, or at least mostly everyone.
How long do we have before this changes? It's probably sooner rather than later. It might already be here, and I just haven't realized it. What concerns me is that inevitable moment when the system flips from one state to another, when a mobile phone ceases being an optional device you carry to assist you with your life and instead becomes an expectation, and if you don't have one there must be something wrong with you. I read a story like this recently - though I can't, unfortunately, remember the title or author and don't have it close at hand - in a world where "bugseyes," the logical conclusion of smartphone evolution, were universal, and a character who did not wear one fell under police suspicion for no other reason than that he did not wear one.
I'm worried this is where we're heading. That in the crowd's headlong stampede toward connection, away from solitude and toward the endlessly yammering, clamoring din of the world, the pendulum will be pushed too far and get stuck. No matter how much of a social butterfly a person may be, in the end there's always a necessity for a pause, silence, and reflection. Constant communication is constant distraction. It interrupts. It can very easily be like trying to play Jenga during an earthquake.
Perhaps it's because I'm a writer, and I need long stretches of solitude to put my thoughts in order and come to terms with the world, that I tend to think this way. There's a discipline in self-reliance, in putting distractions aside - and if we discard that, what else will become of us, in the end?
Also, the Fourth of July. I know there are at least a few Americans reading this, so here's the flag of the United States and also Ohio's. Now go drink and attend barbecues and watch fireworks. Your media gives me the impression that doing so is your patriotic duty.
roughly luddite ranting concluded; thank you for your patience
