It's pretty scary thinking that one day your appliance can communicate with you. It's even scarier thinking that one of the implications of this would be emotional attachment. Now, imagine your toaster as your pet, your companion. You will name it, communicate with it and eventually bid it goodbye.
This is a perfect example of what I think the future holds:
Now imagine that others can monitor the progress of your toaster on websites such as Talesofthings.com. So what would happen if one unfortunate day your toaster friend is no more? How you think this would impact you and the followers of your toaster?
I personally think within minutes of your toasters passing there would be facebook pages, blogs and Youtube (this is assuming your toaster would be quite popular).
I know I sound quite extreme in what I'm saying, but this is what I think the future is headed for in terms of technology.
What do you think?
Reference:
Talesofthings.com, 2011, 'It's a memory thing', Accessed 28th October 2011, http://www.talesofthings.com/
Image sourced from: http://walyou.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/HotToastNightmare_by_Madspeitersen2.jpg
I am totally on the same wave length as you! I find it scary that these objects of our everyday lives could one day converse with us, something that they were obviously not meant to do. I like how you wrote about the toaster being more humanised. Its just like the internet and networks being described as a nervous system, both being linked back to humanisation. In terms of the future...in my blog I predicted an Irobot/Minority report society that end up in a Terminator future. Even though these are just movies, manifestations of creativity and imagination it seems that the path we are leading to is towards what has been written in movies! I guess only time will tell. Call me crazy but the day my TV adds me on facebook is d-day for me!
ReplyDeleteI really like this video; it seems like very warm and everything at home becomes family. Everything seems to be organized by them at home. The fact is it may not necessary that everything becomes automatic. In other words, people would lose the interest of doing things, sometimes people just enjoying cook rather than used to everything ready for them. Personally, it is good thing that object things become emotional and thinkable, whereas it would brings some negative aspect to people’s life, people would become lazy.
ReplyDeleteI hear you on the whole it's scary. It is nuts to think one day my phone might yell at me for constantly playing games on it. I really don't want to have my appliances speak to me, it's scary haha. It's bad enough when a pet dies now if all my appliances and devices were par tof that pet category, so help me god I think emotionally I wouldn't last long >.>
ReplyDeleteThanks for posting the vid. I missed out on the lecture and it also gave me a better idea of what the reading was trying to say in terms of the 'blogject'. I agree that the emotional side of this idea is a bit scary. Its starting to seem like something out of a bad movie where technology turns on humans. But thats not to say there are advantages that need to be recognised. It all seems to tie in with media convergence. Appliances monitoring themselves and transmitting status updates to the owners computer. Imagine how much time this could save.
ReplyDeleteI agree that this could save time but my big worry lies in the usability of these items. I own an iPhone and most of the time all I want it for is to call but almost every time I try to call someone it wont let me. I spend hours cursing and wishing we could go back to the days of Nokia 33 15's which actually called. If companies can ensure that these products will be reliable I will be happy to let them into my home but I honestly can't believe that they can guarantee that if they can't even make phones that perform the most simple of functions.
ReplyDeleteIf we get every inanimate object working for us, will society become that depicted in WALL-E? No one bothering to get out of chairs because robots and computers do everything for us. Don't get me wrong I'm as lazy as the next guy but i think that might be crossing the line just a bit.
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