Culture matters? Yes.
One of the primary concerns people have about Google glass is that it is difficult to tell when the device is recording you. Using a phone, a stranger would have to physically hold up the device and point the camera in the subject’s direction, a visible cue that they are recording. Whereas the Wearable camera like Glass is always pointed and ready to go. “The once sought-after wearable computer has turned into a piece of technology fraught with privacy concerns that have led to it being banned in certain public locations.” (CNN, 2013) Most of the concerns are highly related to the privacy regulatory framework prevailing in a particular country, which tends to reflect as well as shape the privacy preferences of individual consumers. (Steven, 2004) For American, whose privacy and copyright are valued to a great extent in their culture, cannot endorse this product in most cases. It’s no wonder why Google glass is dead, at least right now.
Content matters? Yes.
It seems the entertainment property of contents existing in current mediums nowadays is inevitable along with rich dimensions media settings. A throwback to Television’s first showing-up day in history, nobody would probably have perceived it as a powerful tool to play on a significant role in everyday life. Despite television is merely a “one-to-many” medium, which people passively receive contents and information from screens without volition to make choices, it abundantly visualized and enriches serious contents, like political and religious news. In the book Amusing ourselves to death, Postman argues the Age of Television, rendered“entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience”. (Postman, 2006) Started in 1960, the first television political election speech in the United State transformed political campaigns into more conversational, visual, commercial and recreational form. After a 21st century, Obama fully utilizes social media platforms to advertise himself and Donald Trump uses Twitter to publish political issues nearly every day. Seems obvious, from Postman’s perspective, contemporary culture is composed of various entertaining content in every aspect of life. According to Carr, contemporary culture, which is saturated by glamorous technology and distracting elements, contains fragmented digital information which makes us lost the ability of deep reading & thinking. (Carr, 2008) Accordingly, we tend to digest the serious covered by entertaining sugarcoat, resulting in mass production of entertainment contents embedded in very aspects of life.
Through Matthew Gentzkow, we acknowledged that even though television provides people with more forms for delivering political information, people will choose to consume entertaining content which has the wide range of array in their leisure time. (Gentzow, 2006) In a nutshell, television is not able to improve people’s political knowledge. What’s more, through Matrix’s article, video on demand is leading to a mediated culture of “instant gratification, infinite entertainment choices, and immersive experiences in televisual fantasies(Matrix,2014), exacerbating the entertainment influence played on the society.
Admittedly, not merely about television. People’s attention is always caught by those entertaining things on social media platforms. The top 10 heated hashtags in Twitter or Weibo are always dominated by entertainment topics. In China, there even exists a condition: when a sensitive news was exposed in social media platform, government distract people by turning the public’s attention towards entertainment news, like exposing a scandal of a movie star.
Confidently envisioning, more immersive communication technologies will be developed fully and soon like, Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality instruments. Not merely convey contents but also evolve people into the particular setting, having 100 percent immersive experiences and forming a different point of views. We should alert ourselves in the way just like Postman wrote to his fellows: asking them back to books, writing and thinking and don’t cling to talk on the radio and TV programs overnight exposure to name.
By Yueying Du, BU Emerging Media Studies Master’s Student.
Reference:
Postman, N. (2006). Amusing ourselves to death : Public discourse in the age of show business (20th anniversary ed.). New York, N.Y., U.S.A.: Penguin Books.
Carr, N. (2008). Is Google making us stupid? The Atlantic. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/6868/
Gentzkow, M. (2006). TELEVISION AND VOTER TURNOUT. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 121(3), 931-972.
Beniger (1987)_ Personalization & pseudo-community
Matrix, S. (2014). The Netflix effect: Teens, binge watching, and on-demand digital media trends. Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, 6(1), 119-138.
CNN Heather Kelly. (2013) Google Glass users fight privacy fearshttp://www.cnn.com/2013/12/10/tech/mobile/negative-google-glass-reactions/index.html
Steven Bellman (2004). International Differences in Information Privacy Concerns: A Global Survey of Consumers.