A footnote to history

When you put an adult into VR for the first time, there often seems to be some sort of difficult moment when they are asking themselves whether its ok to be there.

In contrast, when you put kids in VR, they go crazy. To them it’s the best thing ever, and they take to the experience like a duck takes to water.

What’s even more interesting is that if they are really little kids, they don’t even go crazy for VR. They just accept it as another reality, like TV or movies or the games on their iPad. It just makes inherent sense to little kids that they can enter a completely different world, one with magical properties.

Today, during a panel discussion that I was moderating, somebody asked what we should do about all the adults who refuse even to try VR, and who therefore never know whether they would like it or not. And I had a very specific thought in response to that question, which I did not speak out loud.

I thought about the widespread adoption of the telephone over a century ago. And then I thought about those people who thought of it as crazy and disruptive, and who therefore refused to ever use it.

And I found that I just didn’t care about those people. They didn’t matter, because telephony did matter. It ended up rapidly evolving from a curiosity to a cornerstone of modern communication. And that meant that it became inextricably woven into the fabric of society itself.

If that happens with some version of VR (which I think it will) then people who refuse even to use it will cease to matter. They will become a footnote to history, an archaic artifact of a bygone age.

2 thoughts on “A footnote to history”

  1. That’s kind of sad to say that the ones who refuse to go with some technologies are somewhat less than their peers, a whole side of life left apart by evolution (that is, cultural / economical evolution).

    Will the indigeneous people from pacific islands have been wrong for refusing to embrace our love for carbon dioxide-based producing industry when mermaids will dance above their palmtree ?

    One thing sure, they will then become a footnote in History.

  2. That’s not what I said. I was not speaking of all technologies, only of those technologies that end up becoming an integral part of how a particular society communicates with itself.

    The jury is still out on VR, but some technologies, like books and telephones, are an integral part of Western culture. So refusing to use them is, effectively, an ostentatious expression of Luddism.

    The situation is very different in traditional Pacific Island cultures. The aspects of our own culture which lead us to embrace books and telephones may be irrelevant to the way those cultures communicate. They have developed other technologies for that, which may be serving them very well.

    I don’t think you can separate questions of adoption of communication technologies from the particulars of different cultures. If you try to separate those topics, I think you end up with false comparisons that may miss some of the more interesting questions around the topic.

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