Snapchat started selling Spectacles, their $150 sunglasses with the built-in camera. Whoever is wearing them can essentially: take a short video of anything and anyone without much notice and upload it to the Interwebs right away.
Sure, it’s only 10 seconds of a video, and their usage is very limited, and the quality is crap and and and.
But you know where the future is heading.
In a few years’ time, everyone and everywhere will record everything. Just like we all have mobile phones that follow us everywhere, we will keep glasses with ourselves at all times. I know I will. You know you will, too.
The content will also be searchable, with tags and location and everything. You can ask: “hey, Internet, what’s going on right now in my hood?” — and there you have it, someone’s live stream.
It’s not what we want. It’s what technology wants. When Google came out with the Glass it wasn’t useful at all, but it showed us what the technology could do at the time. We didn’t like the product. It was too weird and clumsy and too geeky, something like mobile phones were 20 years ago.
Now, Snapchat may bring something more fashionable. Something that we might embrace. If we don’t, that’s not a big deal either: you can be sure that in a few years someone else will reinvent the lot.
If there’s anything we should have learned about technology by now is that whatever it wants: will get it.