OK, Glass, Don?t Make Me Look Stupid

On March 11, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell succeeded in making the first telephone call with his assistant Tom Watson?

Photo by Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone/Getty Images

A man sitting alone at his kitchen table pauses before eating his breakfast. He looks at the empty room before him. ?Meet me in front of Strand Books at 2,? he says aloud, then takes a bite out of his bagel sandwich. It is not a condition of the mind that has this man speaking to a person who isn?t there. It is a text message. This is the opening scene of Google?s first concept video for Glass?a mobile device that you wear on your head like glasses. The words the man had spoken appear before him in the device?s lens. As he eats, he sees the message float away to his friend.

As the concept video implied, Glass doesn?t come with any sort of hand-held keyboard. It is activated with an upward tilt of the head. From there, you can use a small touchpad on the side of the headset to perform some basic tasks?like taking a photo. But most commands must be uttered aloud, after the user says, ?OK, Glass.? The big idea behind Glass is that it will free the world from constantly looking down at smartphones. To achieve this hands-free freedom, though, people will have to get used to issuing voice commands to their devices in public. Although some of Glass? functions can be controlled with its touchpad, and Google may add more physical gesture controls in the future, talking is a big part of using Glass. Google apparently believes that this will eventually become commonplace. But will it?

It?s too early to know for sure, but Google Glass isn?t the first technology to face this kind of social barrier.

When the telephone was invented, people found the concept entirely bizarre. So much so that the first telephone book, published in 1878, had to provide instructions on how to begin and end calls. People were to say "Ahoy" to answer the phone and "That is all" before hanging up.

In The History of the Telephone, published in 1910, Herbert Casson wrote: ?The very idea of talking at a piece of sheet-iron was so new and extraordinary that the normal mind repulsed it. ? People who talked for the first time into a telephone box had a sort of stage fright. They felt foolish.?

Ultimately, the telephone proved too useful to abandon for the sake of social discomfort. It was also something people could to get used to in their own homes. They didn?t have to overcome the awkwardness in public (neighbors eavesdropping on party lines notwithstanding). That was a barrier another device would have to deal with 100 years later.

It was one of the very first electronic devices that people would regularly carry around with them: the Sony Walkman. The idea of wearing headphones in public in 1979 was unheard of and largely considered silly?not unlike the idea of wearing Google Glass is today. Paul du Gay, co-author of Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman, says that even Sony wasn?t sure there would be a demand for the device. But the company had a plan to prove the Walkman could make it over the social acceptability barrier.

?When they launched it,? du Gay said, ?they actually called in a load of journalists and told them they were going to be launching a new product. Then they took them into a major park in downtown Tokyo.?

Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=5c687d42d891deb15e1f966fc45feac3

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