Todd Bishop, writing for GeekWire:
“I’m a thought leader,” jokes Dave Meinert, owner of the 5 Point, speaking on the Luke Burbank Show at our news partner KIRO-FM this morning. “First you have to understand the culture of the 5 Point, which is a sometimes seedy, maybe notorious place. People want to go there and be not known … and definitely don’t want to be secretly filmed or videotaped and immediately put on the Internet.”
It is noted in the post that this pre-banning of Google Glass is done partly as a joke, but it does have a serious aspect to it.
This gets to the heart of the biggest challenge for projects such as Google Glass. The biggest challenge is cultural, not technical. It is noted in a follow-up link in the GeekWire article that the 5 Point does in fact use surveillance cameras, but that is altogether different than what Google Glass's introduction into society will entail. People are somewhat more comfortable with the idea of surveillance cameras used in a general sweep of an establishment than they are with cameras that are directly in front of them.
Some have said that Google Glass is not much different than what we already have now, where cameras on smartphones are ubiquitous. However, it is indeed different since it is far more obvious when someone is using a smartphone to record video than it is when someone is using Google Glass. It is a tad more difficult to hide a small rectangular object than it is to hide a small blinking light.
Folks, this sort of technology isn't going to just go away. We will have to decide how best to integrate it into our societal norms and practices just as we have done with other new technologies.