*Since I'm a writer, I hate to say stuff like this, but this written screed would have been a lot more effective as a short design-fiction video. Describing this situation with words is like dancing about architecture.
http://pandodaily.com/2013/05/25/google-glass-in-10-years-the-view-from-dystopia/
*A video something like this, from three years ago.
Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.
*We novelists *already* lack the language to describe how people relate through electronic means. Describing, for instance, how two fictional characters relate through Facebook requires quite a stilted set of verbal descriptions in order to work on a page.
*This means that literary language has drifted away from the everyday vernacular – which is pretty common in literature – but never before has the vernacular drifted so far away from language structures that can be placed on a page. I really don't know what's to be done about this. Written language is powerful, but we seem to be in a situation akin to paper checks being being annihilated by electronic banking.
*And that's not merely one transition, either, because the electronic methods that replaced the paper are themselves profoundly unstable. Imagine writing the ultimate literary text for the Barnes and Noble Nook, the one ideally suited to the Nook reader and the Nook as a means of expression. That's what is *really* going to happen to all the Google Glass fooforaw that this writer is talking about – he rather sounds as if he's ahead of the game, but he's making himself feel better rather than confronting modern reality.
*It's as if some great people had a national language formed in a stodgy landscape of meadows and mooing cows, and then they became war-torn nomads drifting through a seismic zone. That's not a "dystopia." Dystopias are static places. They are writerly creations, and they're fictional places where the writer doesn't have to think any more, because everything got ideally bad.
*Network culture is a different entity from paper culture – it doesn't have roots, it has aerials.
