I am exploring the ways in which our relationship with technology plays out in the real world. I have long been obsessed with the intersection between people and technology as part of my API Evangelist work, but this is increasingly something I am interested in from the end-user perspective and specifically how end-users are being guided, exploited, and controlled using technology. Audrey shared an interesting article in Curbed about the public space becoming an earbud space, with the following phrase bouncing around in my head since I read it.
“The result is that few of the people we see in public are really there. Our bodies may be in a park or sitting in a pedestrian plaza, but our minds are tethered to some indoor environment somewhere.”
As I ride my bike through midtown and Central Park each day I regularly encounter human bodies who are physically in my way, but clearly mentally are somewhere else as they step into the bike path without looking or just wander down the middle of the road through the park. It reminds me just like the automobile, which provides a similar disconnect, but more steel and fiberless in between the human and me. While I worry about someone listening to music or a podcast while not paying attention in their car hitting me, I equally worry about someone listening to music or a podcast and walking into the bike lane as I make my way through NYC.
From a storytelling perspective I am captivated by these people’s minds being “tethered to some indoor environment somewhere”. These people are in the physical world in body only, with their mind somewhere else. This disconnect manifests itself in some very dangerous and obstructive ways in the physical world. I can somewhat understand people wanting to check out walking through midtown Manhattan, but I am less clear why people want to say tethered to an indoor space while walking through Central Park. I don’t think people are fully aware of the tradeoff they are making and their lack of honest negotiation with the world they are physically making their way through, and it is something that will result in a more deficient relationship with the physical world.
