For his 68th birthday Kevin Kelly, probably the most interesting man in the world, published a long list of good advice in a piece he called 68 bits of unsolicited advice.
While the list is great and entertaining and will generate a ton of comments and replies in the blogosphere, it got me re-listening to an old interview with Kelly on the Tim Ferriss Podcast (episodes 25-27). That in turn led me to his book The Inevitable - Understanding the 12 Technological Forces that will shape our Future.
Despite the book being already slightly old, much of it is still relevant and thought-provoking. The future will tell how right or wrong Kelly was about his “inevitable” forces. However, with certainty I can say that his predictions about “screening” and us becoming “people of the screen” were correct. At least when it comes to myself.
Forget about clunky headsets. AR glasses will be sleek and stylish. Photo by Maks Styazhkin on Unsplash.
Kelly argues that people will increasingly ignore the classic logic of books and lose their reverence of “copies” with fixed text or ideas, as all information becomes fluid, interlinked, and tagged. The multitude of screens around us will encourage us to interact and experience a “dynamic flux of pixels”. In other words, the people of the screen will be constantly “screening”.
The amount of screens I interact with on a daily basis is astounding. There’s the phone and the watch, the laptop and the tablet, the desktop computer and the gigantic TV screen in the living room. Thanks to the cloud, anything I start doing on one screen I can continue doing on another. I’m constantly switching screens, depending on where I am and what’s most convenient. And then there are all the countless other screens I see or interact with outside my home.
The screen I spend most time with is my phone. But just imagine what happens when AR glasses take over many of the functions of the phone. I’m not talking about those clunky VR headsets that separate you from the surroundings. I’m talking about the sleek and stylish design glasses that Apple is rumored to launch soon. Glasses that constantly provide you with information and interactive content, overlaying it on top of the real world.
Perhaps AR glasses will render most other screens more or less obsolete? Perhaps it turns out that the most comfortable and efficient way of screening is through glasses and we end up doing it every waking minute? In that case, we’ve truly become people of the screen, or rather “people of the glasses”.