Visiting Google today, and looking at a Google Glass device close up, I found myself pondering the future of social turn-taking.
Today that act of reading a text or tweet is a somewhat socially heavy operation. You need to look down at the mobile device you are holding in your hand, thereby breaking eye contact and social continuity with whomever you are talking to.
If you need to take the device out of your pocket, that is an even heavier gesture. The performance of this act itself implies “There is something more important than talking to you right now.” Even worse, your conversant has no reason to think you even know who the text or tweet was from. So the implication might be “Anything is more important than talking with you right now.”
But what if we were all wearing Google Glass or some similar device? A simple drift of the eyes up and to the right would allow us to read the contents of our incoming texts. Yet even this movement would probably be easily noticeable.
Suppose we wish to read our incoming texts without interrupting the social flow of the conversation, and without making the person we are with feel unimportant? Perhaps we will learn to devise ways to hide such telltale eye moments.
Tweets might become even more terse than they are now. A brief enough micro-tweet could be read in a very short amount of time. Still, making that particular eye movement while somebody else is talking would give the game away.
So we might end up becoming practiced at waiting until just the right moment in conversational turn-taking to read those incoming micro-tweets. Say, a moment when it is socially natural to move one’s eyes off to the side.
In this scenario, the simple act of looking into the display can serve as a trigger to the device: If our wearable display detects that we have looked at it, this can serve a signal for it to prepare the next micro-tweet.
I admit I’m troubled by the possibility that any of this might come about. Not only would it promote a form of social dishonesty, but it would also encourage an even more fine grained fragmentation of attention than we already have these days.
Then again, I suspect that to any child growing up in such a world, this will all just seem perfectly natural.
A simulation:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UjcqCx1Bvg
Wonderful!
The tragedy of it is, they were clearly meant for each other. 🙂
What makes you think that people will possibly be motivated to socialize in the local locale wearing these anyway?
As we say, PolySocial Reality: You’re Soaking in It!
My take on Google Glass:
http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2012/04/10/google-glasses-heads-up/
Wonderful article. And that parody video is delightful.
Are you saying that if people are wearing AR then they will no longer be motivated to talk to friends in the same room? That doesn’t seem to be how young people use mobile technologies.
Young people are using current technology to engage in a mix of local interaction and remote interaction. It seems reasonable to infer that this mix will continue, just as it continued after the invention of the telephone.
I think the fact that it is so incredibly easy to know when someone you’re talking on the phone has glanced at their computer screen argues that we’re generally much better at detecting distraction than at hiding it.
Yes. In fact, I think we can generally tell when somebody is distracted even when they are looking us right in the eyes.