2010 has been a strange so far, and as Fall approaches and the year winds down it most likely will continue to be cursed with “interesting times”. The security and illusory safety of routines has been interrupted several times, unusually and inevitably. In the past seventeen years that I’ve been online most events have unfolded very slowly in real time while internet time has sped up.
Everything is an opportunity they say. Recent experiences have led me to rethink Geek. I’ve found myself Geeking On way more things than just technology as games and gadgets. I found myself using games and gadgets in ways that I hadn’t expected to either.
Geeking has become more holistic. I want to review everything I experience. Reviewing in itself has become part of Geeking On something. Ultimately, describing a user experience is essential blogging, and Geeing On it seems to be the offering of an expertise on top of that.
The Geek experience is progressing us into evolving as a techno-biologically enhanced beings. Olivia Munn the Geek Goddess has predicted that it is only a matter of time before robots take over. I believe.
Having an App for that, and this, and everything else makes the integration between myself and my cyber presence even more seamless. Everything online wants to connect to my Faceplant account. Up to and including my toilet paper.
Think about it for a second. We are waking up to the gadget of our choice, and that is a routine part of the day that has become accustomed by us since the clock was invented. Though the morning commute routine might include much more than that. We could be getting a full on morning emotional impact from our self imposed data consumption along with the big dose of caffeine that it takes to digest it all. Television, internet radio, iTunes, satellite radio, cellular or satellite conversations, news, weather reports, entertainment, and social networks.
We are becoming more emotionally involved with our machines. We often say that we love our cars, which today are as much computer as they are hardware. My LG washer and dryer beep endearing little songs at me, making my laundry doing experience more pleasant. Every time I hear the song I associate it with the washer as being “cheerful”. The upright freezer is ‘sexy’. And my iPad is magical.
It’s the smart phones, pods and pads that are small enough to integrate themselves into the more intimate corners of our lives. Waiting around sick rooms for health care personnel was transformed from ordinary passe’ pacing by sedate games of Words with Friends. Nervous moments while waiting for bad news were alleviated with numerous rounds of Tap Tap Revenge on iPod. Photos were taken of monuments, jpegs of floral arrangements were ganked off the web. Maps and directions were distributed. Reservations made. Light music was played from an iPod into an iLuv. Even speeches were given from iPods. It can be said that both an entire life and even a funeral can be “Made on a Mac”.
How tied are we to these things? I know that having the eSleep on my iPod has made a big impact on my real life, so has the iTunes. Just being able to hear the Dali Lama’s recorded voice during tough times was invaluable, and touching. We make intangible kinds of connections into our inner life with our technology. Will that lead us to the next step of actually integrating and enhancing ourselves with bio computers? The ability to not only invent robots as our tools is on the horizon, but also the future where we and the technology begin and end is blurred. Ghost in the Shell doesn’t seem that far away.