via venture beat

Huh?

Speaking at the TED Conference today in Long Beach, Calif., [Google co-founder Sergey] Brin told the audience that smartphones are “emasculating.”

Okay…

“You’re actually socially isolating yourself with your phone,” Brin told the audience, according to an account in Wired. “I feel like it’s kind of emasculating…. You’re standing there just rubbing this featureless piece of glass.”

Hmmm.

“The cell phone is a nervous habit. I whip this out and look as if I have something important to do. [Google Glass] takes that away,” he said.

Actually, I’m fascinated by the emerging effort to sell Google Glass (or maybe “position” is the better word? marketing is so complicated) as an answer to distraction. When Joshua Topolsky visited Google’s New York office and test-drove Glass, Google engineers pitched the idea that Glass is a

completely new kind of computing device; wearable, designed to reduce distraction, created to allow you to capture and communicate in a way that is supposed to feel completely natural to the wearer. It’s the anti-smartphone, explicitly fashioned to blow apart our notions of how we interact with technology. [emphasis added]

Project direct Steve Lee explains to Topolsky,

“Why are we even working on Glass? We all know that people love to be connected…. [But a] big problem right now are the distractions that technology causes. If you’re a parent — let’s say your child’s performance, watching them do a soccer game or a musical. Often friends will be holding a camera to capture that moment. Guess what? It’s gone. You just missed that amazing game.” [Lead designer] Isabelle [Olsson] chimes in, “Did you see that Louis C.K. stand up when he was telling parents, ‘your kids are better resolution in real life?’” Everyone laughs, but the point is made.

Human beings have developed a new problem since the advent of the iPhone and the following mobile revolution: no one is paying attention to anything they’re actually doing. Everyone seems to be looking down at something or through something. Those perfect moments watching your favorite band play or your kid’s recital are either being captured via the lens of a device that sits between you and the actual experience, or being interrupted by constant notifications. Pings from the outside world, breaking into what used to be whole, personal moments.

Steve goes on. “We wondered, what if we brought technology closer to your senses? Would that allow you to more quickly get information and connect with other people but do so in a way — with a design — that gets out of your way when you’re not interacting with technology? That’s sort of what led us to Glass.”

The assumption here is that distraction is primarily an ergonomic phenomenon, or perhaps one caused by the fact that we have to multitask between competing, opaque realities: we can’t watch our screens AND our kids, and the solution is to overlay them on top of each other.

Is this vision correct? Is distraction just a display issue? I’m skeptical, for two reasons.

First of all, it’s perfectly possible to be distracted with only one thing in your field of vision: ever started woolgathering while driving down a lonely stretch of highway? Distraction isn’t just a matter of bad UI; it’s also an internal thing.

Second, the videos all hew to the vision of people using Glass to record or enhance embodied experience, and no doubt plenty of developers will work first on apps that do location-based context-aware blah blah blah I can’t even go on— but what will developers work on after that?

The next wave of apps will be for location-based context-aware advertisements; services using Twitter or Foursquare or Facebook for automated lifelogging; e-mail readers; spreadsheets in your eye; etc. (I call dibs on things for Glass that end in -I; i.e., Microsoft Internet Explorer-I, Excel-I, Kindle-I, etc.) In other words, I’m skeptical that the habit of using screens to either block out the boring parts of the world, to just check your e-mail really quickly, or to make productive use of down times– all of which have turned into practices that put our devices in competition with our lives, nudge us to spend more time working or reading TMZ, and eat into ever-larger quantities of time– will go away just because the screens are attached to our brows. As Venture Beat says, “You think people constantly whipping out their cell phones is bad? Just wait until you start having conversations with people who are constantly looking at the little displays attached their faces.”