Do Google Glasses Make Me Look Boring?

Technology improves our lives but ruins those of everyone who hangs out with us. I spend nearly as much of my life waiting for people I’m with to answer a call, text back or finish a tweet as they do waiting for me.

I’ve already intuited that owning Google Glass–the eyeglass frames with a computer attached–will radically transform my life into a virtual reality exactly like moving my cell phone five inches closer to my face. What I need to know is what it’s like to interact with someone who’s wearing Google Glass.

I invited Heather Anne Campbell to have lunch with me and wear her Google Glass the whole time. Heather, a comedian who appears on the new Whose Line Is It Anyway?, is one of about 8,000 people Google chose via Twitter and Google+ to buy the $1,500 device before it’s made available to the public. Heather said she’d wear Glass during an improv show. The bar for do-gooding gets pretty low when you make someone pay $1,500.

I did not think our lunch would go well, since I’m one of the few people who believe setting your phone to ring instead of vibrate should be limited to “surgeon on call” mode. To me, putting your phone on the table indicates that you don’t think I can tell a story as well as someone without a face or body. It’s like pointing a real-life remote control and yelling, “Entertain me, loser, or I’ll change the channel!” No one else seems to mind any of this stuff, yet they already call some people wearing Heather’s new technology Glassholes.

When Heather arrived, I noticed that while she is very attractive, she looks even better wearing her white Google Glass. I don’t know if it’s the design, the power Glass denotes or the fact that if a woman will put a computer on her face, God only knows what else she’ll do.

Shortly after sitting down, Heather told me that she would never actually wear these glasses to a lunch. “It’s a social threat,” she explained, since by moving her head or saying a command, she could make the glasses shoot video or, worse, look me up on Wikipedia, which would definitely end lunch early. Besides, you can’t be nearly as surreptitious with Glass as I assumed: I could detect when the tiny rectangular screen over her left eye was on, so I’d know immediately if she wasn’t really paying attention. No one over 65 can complain about people wearing Google Glass since they all leave Fox News on when you come over.

The only disruptive part of the experience was that everyone came by our table and treated Heather like a celebrity because she was wearing Google Glass, except our waiter, who treated her like a celebrity because she’s a celebrity. But after a while, I stopped noticing her Glass and focused on the endless amount of tech stuff Heather, who used to be an editor for a video-game magazine, told me I needed to buy, such as Google Chromecast and wireless speakers. Later, when I started talking a lot about my career, I asked Heather if she was tempted to secretly nod her phone to life and surf the Web. “I wouldn’t,” she said. “I’d do it on my phone. This is not a rich enough experience.” Convinced, I went right back to talking about me.

I was discovering that my initial fears were no more than simple social insecurity. I’m sure that after Gutenberg cranked out his 180 beta versions of the printed Bible, people in Germany were worried that if they didn’t deliver some interesting gossip, their rich friend who knew people up in Mainz was going to break out Deuteronomy. If anything, Heather and I decided, Google Glass might lead people to have fewer mediated experiences. Unlike fans watching concerts through an iPhone they hold aloft, parents seeing a child’s first step through a lens or C-list celebs focusing less on their sex partners than on finding a flattering angle to film from, Glass wearers can record events and still see them too.

Right about then is when my totally outdated phone vibrated in my pocket. Worried it was my wife calling about my son or something even more pressing, like a celebrity more famous than Heather, I pulled it out to check. Heather, meanwhile, gave me her undivided attention. Before I could finish chastising myself and apologizing, my phone rang a second time. I checked again.

It’s not the technology that makes the Glasshole; it’s the person using the technology. There’s a chance that by making the first Glass wearers submit plans on how they’d use them, they’ll set a better example than the 1980s Wall Street jerks who yelled into the first cell phones at restaurants. Maybe, in fact, Google will be responsible enough to never sell me one.