Thing 14: Augmented Reality

About a year ago I met a woman who was touring with Riverdance and while performing in Limerick asked to come and see the National Dance Archive of Ireland.  When we had shown her the premises and told her everything she wanted to know about the archive, we sat down with her for a cup of coffee and asked her how the performances were coming along.  Her greatest source of regret was that audiences seem to have lost their ability to live in the moment and to interact with a performance, being too preoccupied with recording it on their tablet or smartphone or whatever mobile application they use for the purpose.  This left her as a performer feeling ignored and undervalued, almost irrelevant.

This struck a chord with me.  Don't get me wrong, I'm not a complete technophobe and I understand the importance of teaching digital literacy to children, I just feel that we run the risk of overdoing it. Going to an art gallery and pointing your phone at a painting to find out all about it is well and good but where exactly does that leave us?  Will we get to a stage where we just point our phones at a book and it will give us the plot, character analysis, reviews and an  interview with the author thus conveniently eliminating the need to engage in a real life reading experience?  Instead of reading a book we just read about it.  And another thing: who ultimately is responsible for the information channeled to us in this manner?  Will we accept everything that is fed to us through our phones and lose our ability for critical judgement?  This is already a problem with the internet and I can't see augmented reality helping at all.  The problem lies in the very word - who augments, what, how, and to what end?

I have never understood the obsessive attachment people have to their mobile phones, and augmented reality leaves me ice cold.  I find reality is complicated enough without any augmentation and frankly how boring can your life be if you feel a compelling need to enhance it through technology or to escape from it into a virtual one?  Instead of encouraging children to watch bees buzzing in an augmented reality poster, wouldn't they be better off going for a walk in a meadow and watching real bees doing real buzzing?  Are we going to turn our backs on current issues such as climate change, energy crisis and pollution and escape into a perfect virtual world in which such issues do not exist?

There is an old saying that fire is a good servant but a bad master.  I believe the same applies to technology.  It is important to remember that technology is not an end in itself, it is a tool, and as such it is only as good as its user.  Properly harnessed it can streamline and enrich life but if given total control it will take over, enslave and ultimately destroy us.