The year: 2006. The place: Chinatown, Manhattan. One Sunday morning, bleary and tired from a great night out with friends, I poke around with one hand on the floor by the bed in search of my glasses. "Google them," my tired brain told me; which at the time made me chuckle--or at least, muster an exhausted smile.
Eight years on, the internet is invading our brains and the idea of Googling misplaced glasses is not laughable. Since 2006, Apple solved the touch-screen problem, giving us a device that was delightful to stare at day and night, in blissful ignorance of everything going on around us. Samsung and HTC followed in hot pursuit and now almost everyone can afford to be online while they're on line. Soon, wearables like Looxcie and Memoto, propelled by crowdsourcing fund Kickstarter, could help us locate items lost in a haze (and fill us in on a number of other late-night high jinks that might best be forgotten). Lucky pioneering "Glassholes" might literally be able to Google the whereabouts ("wearabouts") of their high-tech specs.
Futurist Ray Kurzweil writes that the integration of our brains with the Internet doesn't require a direct hard wire, à la Keanu Reaves in the Matrix--or even a Bluetooth connection--but in fact that it's already a reality. With a couple of swipes and taps of my finger, I can access needed "knowledge" from the internet in not much more time than it would take to pause for thought to recall something in my own memory.
This instant access from anywhere I am separates the current state of integration of external information sources with our brains from the previous availability of information in the form of books, magazines, etc. In the analogue era, the cost in time of locating information needed to satisfy our curiosity made it undesirable to do so.
You're at a restaurant with some friends, circa 1990, and for some reason that no one can remember it's now essential that the group confirms Michael Jackson's star sign. You could use your primitive cell phone, if you have one, to call a librarian and see if they are willing to find an encyclopedia and track down the information (calling directory enquiries first to get the librarian's number--remember directory enquiries?); or you could ditch your friends and run home to comb through your back issues of People, which you have been saving for just this occasion. Instead, you give up answerless, frustrated.
These days, the barriers to discovering the answer to any question are so low you never need to labour under a misapprehension again. I don't have to imagine where my friends are or what they're doing, I can just look it up on social media. Thanks to Google Maps, I "know" that Zambia and Zimbabwe are land-locked, and that the traffic on 101 South is clear right now. A lot closer to home, I don't need to walk over to the window and open it to feel what temperature it is outside, I can click a button and see it right in the palm of my hand.
As backlash to all this abundant power, some are starting to switch off more regularly and, unlike some who experience intense FOMO (fear of missing out) when not connected, report that it is possible to achieve a state of JOMO (joy of missing out) when not plugged in to the 'net. This being relative--because one can easily guess how I heard tell of this latest trend.
In the end, I found my glasses without the need for lifelogging or the Internet of Things, they were in the freezer with the rest of the vodka, of course. Three years later, the musician I mimicked so often as a child while wearing my father's black fedora and blasting Bad on vinyl suddenly died. Michael Jackson, Virgo, was 58. But then I didn't need to tell you that. I never need to tell you anything again.
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