Google Glass: The Geek's Revenge
Technology’s associations with the ‘high school nerds’ of American sitcoms are long gone. Sure these nerds are still massively invested in technology; they’re the ones being made billionaires from their harbouring of it. But over the last ten years there has been a change in mood: technology became cool, and not only cool, it became associated with fashion.
In the early noughties it was a major faux pas to have a phone which was big enough to actually use, and then if you didn’t have a Nokia 3310 we didn’t want to know (we should all probably tell our parents that this trend has died). If you were still coming into school with a personal CD player in 2004, you deserved a beating, and now you’re not on the social network if you can’t BBM and all the coolest kids take their notes on an iPad.
But will this technological trending end, when it develops from something you hold, to something you wear?
Google have introduced a new project, a device known as 'project glass'. Essentially a pair of glasses, this whole technological advance comes under the term ‘wearable computing.’
Wearable computing. Oh dear God.
This Google Glass, right in front of your eyes allows you to search the web, watch videos, read texts and post photos without having to bother with all the effort of getting your device out of your pocket.
It is undeniable that some elements of this Google Glass are pretty cool; it offers the opportunity to see events as they appear before someone else’s eyes, such as sky diving, which Google have already displayed with it.
However, how many people do you know personally that are going to be sharing these kind of experiences? Most people I know use advances in technology to share pictures of their dinner.
But whether or not this is a necessary technological advance, or another step forward creating a state of surveillance, the main issue which I have with the Google glasses, which is entirely more pressing than the possibility of a Big Brother takeover, are how bad they look.
Science boys can make all the billion pound technological advances they like but when it comes to dictating fashion well... four words: Princess Leia, gold bikini.
Was there no budget for a stylist in this entire enterprise? There was such potential for some, oh so chic and satirical, geek glasses with a thick enough brim to make the attached camera appear subtle. But the attempt Google have produced are along the lines of the nineties-esque, ‘invisible’ (aka brimless) glasses. An attempt to make glasses invisible merely reminds us that glasses are not cool. Which is a shame after all the efforts Ray Ban have gone to recently to prove otherwise.
And this in turn has awakened us to remember that technology is not cool. When the nerds were faced with their old nemesis, the glasses, they could not help but reveal their old ways.
Or maybe, just maybe this is the nerd payback. They’re trying to trick us all into looking ridiculous in the outfit we used to mock them for. Genius.
Mallory McDonald
