Basking in the Blue Glow

My lack of posting in the past week was due to a disconnect caused by a road trip to and from a week long vacation in Miami. During the 24 hour straight drive down to Miami, there wasn’t much to look at besides license plates, billboards and the repetitive white lines. During the night hours, I noticed that drivers and passengers’ faces were lit with a blue glow.

The blue glow was either from their iPods or their built-in or independent GPSes or the video screens on the back of seats or hanging from the roofs. It got me thinking, technology is not only everywhere, but welcomed into spaces, such as cars, where at first thoughts, would be a unnecessary addition.

Basically, SCREENS ARE EVERYWHERE. If they aren’t everywhere yet, they will be.

Now while television/movie screens in vans aren’t new (I believe they became almost common place in the early 2000’s), GPS screens are. As a user of a tab-browser and an automatic multi-tasker like so many of the X, Y and Z gens are becoming, maybe adding screens in cars was only a matter of time and is really less dangerous now than if implemented without the expectations of multi-tasking in other settings.

My face was lit with the blue glow back in the ’90s. When it was bed time and lights were out, I turned on my GameBoy to play a few more levels of Tetris or Pokemon Red. But all these devices I’ve listed so far are portable.

But the blue glow is making its way in other places that are unexpected such as the Kindle, potentially replacing the future of book shelves (and as of now, I don’t see it happening in the next decade). Or how about Verizon Hub? You may have seen the commercials where a parent communicates with their child or a husband gives his wife an alternate traffic route all from their kitchens? Verizon is calling it “The Home Phone Reinvented.”

The Blue Glow in your home is taking on a new place. Instead of broadcasting from your TV, or radiating from your cell phone, or pulsating from the home or mobile computer, it’s planted right there on your kitchen counter top. While I might not be their target audience, (due to not having a place to live after graduation yet) I want one. I think it’s cool. And I have to say Verizon made me think it’s cool. The Hub was actually shown on Gossip Girl, one of my favorite teen drama shows just 2 weeks ago.

So overall a few things I’ve realized about this glow:

Don’t count out the telecommunication field. They are doing some pretty exciting stuff. Things that I would love to work on.

Are the implementation of screens for entertainment, communication, and/or another purpose? Or does it not matter anymore? Like most successful tools of the web, will screen technologies, whether it’s touch or otherwise, be left up to the consumer?

Is portability possibly taking a back seat? The Hub, from what I gathered, is put as a pretty much stationary dock. Now while it looked like most communications were moving to be portable and small, maybe there is a small and slow reversal?

Where will the next source of the blue glow come from and why? Looking at the Hub, I can’t say where the next screen will pop up. If there is a purpose, a screen will be there eventually.

Image Sources:mdumlao98’s Flickr, Colourful Life 別”再”叫我阿姐 , 叫我Teresa’s Flickr, Engadgent/a>