The Edge of Tech

 Music at the WWDC

 I happened to be in downtown San Francisco last night and bumped into about 10,000 people, mostly male, mostly wearing black and everybody looking at little devices in their hands.  Yes you got it.  It's the Apple World Wide Developers Conference and those are iPhones that everybody was looking at.  These young people are on the cutting edge of cool tech and boy were they an excited bunch as they lined up around 4 blocks to get to the Thursday night party! 

It all made me think that it is really difficult these days to understand what "connected" means.  These guys are very connected to their friends and industry colleagues and they use technology to keep those connections alive with Tweets and IM and texts.  All the conference go-ers in San Francisco are figuring out more and more ways to keep us online, connected to friends and marketers.  Above all there seems to be an increasing thirst for this way of communicating with each other among humans.  What on earth is it that we are doing to ourselves, I wonder? Are we happier to live and spend all this time online?  Do we avoid what is real?  Perhaps it's no different that watching a movie or a sunset, but we do seem to be captivated (and we are being cashed-in on it in a huge way). 

I think our notions about reality are going to be really challenged in the not too distant future and, as a person who likes little gadgets and reality, I am looking forward to that discussion.