On September 17, 2024, The Atlantic published an article titled, "Smartphones Are So Over." The article was subtitled as follows: "Snap is trying to make computers fun again."
Based on the title of the article (and in ignorance of the subtitle), I initially thought that Caroline Mimbs Nyce, who wrote the article, might be advocating for a life in which we could all untether ourselves from our cellphones, returning to a world not lived "online," but in the shared physical and social space that we used to call "the real world." Anyone who has been reading my blog postings over the last several years knows that this is a prescription that I would endorse.
However, the essential message of Nyce's article appears to be quite the opposite of what I initially thought. In fact, she was reporting on - and more or less promoting - a new technology from Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, which promises to immerse users even further into a world lived in "cyberspace." Here is a description from Nyce's article:
Today, Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, one of the most popular social-media apps for teenage users, is announcing a new computer that you wear directly on your face. The latest in its Spectacles line of smart glasses, which the company has been working on for about a decade, shows you interactive imagery through its lenses, placing plants or imaginary pets or even a golf-putting range into the real world around you...
Consumers have sometimes been cool on the face computers, if not outright hostile toward them, but tech companies just can’t seem to quit the idea. From that perspective, it makes sense that Snap’s new Spectacles are more a demonstration of intent than an actual product: They’re targeted to developers who will apply and pay $99 a month to use them.
But this is also, arguably, what makes them interesting. In an interview last week, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel told me that he sees smart glasses as an opportunity to “reshape what a computer is, to make it something that actually keeps us grounded in the real world rather than behind a screen.” The company hasn’t accomplished this so far, of course, but the new Spectacles—and all those other smart glasses and AR headsets—are not being released into a void. They’re arriving at a moment when people are feeling pretty turned off by phones. People are angsty about how much time they spend looking down at small screens rather than engaging with the world around them. Parents are concerned that phones are driving a teen mental-health crisis. Smartphone sales have slowed, and even the latest iPhone isn’t doing great...
Perhaps most important, at least when it comes to Spiegel’s bigger vision, the Spectacles can sync together, so that multiple people can see the same digital creations at once. In one experience, called Imagine Together, users can shout words to create cartoons that then appear in little bubbles on the screen. “Imagine a fox!” you might say, and then a small fox appears, floating in a bubble in midair between you and your friend.
Spiegel, who has four children, dreams that someday he’ll see his kids playing together in augmented reality. I asked him what he might say to parents who would be nervous about their children adding an additional level of computing into their daily life. (Parents are already plenty concerned about screen time as is, without the screens being barely an inch from their teens’ faces.) What would he say to the parents who just want their kids to go outside? Spiegel countered that he is a go-outside-and-play parent himself—but argued that the glasses could make playing together outside more fun (emphasis added).
I am not as sanguine as Nyce appears to be. The CEO of Snap says that its new "Spectacales" will not only be "more fun," but will "keep us grounded in the real world." However, the way I understand it, the whole idea is to convince users that the "real world" is a world accessed through a computer, albeit a computer that comes in the shape of a pair of glasses. I think that's a prescription not for the primacy of the "real world," but for a continuing confusion about what the real world really "is." Furthermore, based on an article in The New York Times, these A.I. glasses are poised to eliminate the last vestiges of "privacy" that most of us still take for granted.
"Smartphones," which are small, pocket computers which we call "phones" only because you can utilize the hardware to make telephone calls, are not easily confused with "the real world." What makes people "angsty" is the fact that more and more people are choosing the online world, accessed by their cellphones, instead of setting those cellphones aside, so as to reimmerse themselves in what we still admit is our common "reality."
When our "reality" starts being accessed only through our eyes, as we peer into the "Spectacles" that are supposed to "ground us" in reality, the genuine reality slips further away.
Will that be lots of fun? Maybe, but I don't think so!
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