When I first read Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story I thought he made very acute observations on how technology is changing human behaviour.

In his book, technology had shortened people’s attention spans, made them obsessed with their youth and prompted the quasi extinction of books and hard news journalism, among other things.

Sure, the book exaggerated these effects, but that was sort of the point since it served the narrative of his technology-dominated (and slightly fatalistic) future. 

Three years since the book came out, Google Glasses seem to at least mimic one aspect of the future envisioned by Gary Shteyngart: the fact that we will wear our technology.

It may not be the äppärät, a pendant-like device through which characters in the book livestream thoughts and conversations, but instead, glasses are supposed to respond to our voice commands to record video, take pictures, and provide us with information.

“It’s been really magical to capture moments spent with my family and kids that I would never have done with a camera or a phone, on a swing, in the air, whatever situation.” 

- Google co-founder Sergey Brin at the TED conference in California where he explained Google Glasses.

While I am all for new technology making life easier and helping us connect (and full disclosure, I’m a huge fan of Google products), the increasing obsession to document and broadcast every minute of our lives has this chilling effect in my mind.

In his TED talk, Brin made the point that the glasses will free us up from gadget-staring and let us experience stuff more (I’m paraphrasing).

But what worries me is not that we are not fully experiencing things because of our gadgets, but that we feel that to fully experience things we must constantly - almost incessantly - capture them, romanticise them through filters, and make sure everyone else around us knows and acknowledges that what we just went though is totally awesome/cool/worth telling.

The glasses will just augment this behaviour. Of course, we usually forget we have the power to op-out whenever we want.