The Future Is Close
Dave Eggers' new novel, The Circle, takes place in a slightly futuristic company of the same name--sort of a mashup of Google, Apple and Facebook--and begins with a 20-something woman, Mae, arriving for her first day at work. It spoils nothing for me to reveal that early in the book, Eamon Bailey, one of the Three Wise Men who run The Circle announces a new product: a miniaturized, self-powering, ultra high-resolution camera that can be placed anywhere, constantly beaming video via satellite to the Internet. With enough cameras in enough places, all connected and instantly viewable by anyone else, the Wise Man says, there will be such global transparency that almost nothing bad will happen anymore. All will be visible to all. Or, as he puts it, "All that happens must be known."
The Circle is about much more than just this camera, but the concept hit home when I saw this item from the January 7, 2014, International New York Times. Eggers manages to avoid having his novel take a dystopian turn, and that strikes me as a useful approach to change wrought by technology. Lamentation is, while possibly cathartic, mostly useless. Rather, we out to be thinking generatively about what this technological convergence (bandwidth, ubiquitous connectivity, nanotechnology, etc.) means for schools of the future. It doesn't add a fourth dimension, but it significantly changes the way we live in the three that we have.