Spoiler alert: many of us are addicted to connectivity and hyper-awareness of the data streams surrounding our physical world. Manners & cultural values currently create cognitive dissonance as we suppress the urge to look at a smartphone while having a face-to-face conversation, which results in distraction, which results in not being fully present with the person we are speaking with.

Google takes a step towards reducing this internal struggle with the introduction of its  Project Glass – a heads-up smartphone display that provides information by projecting onto a lens while you pretend to be fully engaged with whatever you are looking at.

The issue with Project Glass in its current interation is that it requires vocal commands to navigate the interface. What will it take to get from Google’s vision all the way to the vision that Cory Doctorow presented in Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom?

The missing link is a technology that already exists. Emotiv has been working on an product to detect EEG brainwaves and translate them into computer commands. Users can manipulate computers just by thinking.

We are one device convergence away from a completely computer-mediated existence! Yeay?

On Tuesdays & Thursdays I get to hang out with a group of amazing middle school technologists who recently crowd-sourced the following definition:

“Technology is the use of new knowledge to improve our lives by solving problems or making us more productive.”

These world are the culmination of hours worth of discussion about the benefits and consequences of technology. At one moment in a conversation, a fifth grade student dropped this gem:

“Even music can be technology, because it uses knowledge to make our lives better.”

It took me a few seconds of bumbling to wrap my head & heart around the comment – such a profound and innocent statement that fuses the desire to create with technology’s potential to connect us with each other and the world around us.

There’s a beautiful illustration of this concept in Alive Inside, a new documentary that sits at the intersection of technology, music and therapy. Get past concerns of the word “iPod” dropping a bunch of times and watch through to the 5-minute mark where music reveals itself as technology, based on the above student definitions.

“It gives me the feeling of love, romance. I figure right now the world needs to come into music – singing you’ve got beautiful music here. Beautiful, lovely. I feel  a band of love, of dreams.”

original source: (Core77.com)