There's really something fundamentally different about these new trends, and I think it's important to try to put a finger on it, rather than blame technology g

There's really something fundamentally different about these new trends, and I think it's important to try to put a finger on it, rather than blame technology generally. Part of the smartphone/Facebook/Instragram addiction is cheap escapism, filling the same role as TV does to many. But it's also the social addiction - the need to know what other people are doing, and "be part of it", and the narcissistic look-at-me. I see Glass as especially concerning given Google's marketing, which is clearly intended to feed into these social (and other) addictions. The New York Times just published an extraordinary article[1] about the way the US food industry knowingly manipulated consumers into eating extremely unhealthy foods which were engineered by our finest minds, using advanced mathematical models, to perfectly induce and maintain craving. They were explicitly compared to Big Tobacco, as being complicit in the damage they have caused. I look at the parallels in the way the tech industry is using modern pysch/neuro research and explicitly engineering products designed to manipulate humans' social monkey-brains into craving more-more-more, getting dopamine hits every time someone clicks "like". This is not the sort of future we want to build. [1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinary-science-of-junk-food.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&smid=tw-nytimes&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinary...