During a brief visit to Berlin several months ago, I excitedly accepted a dinner invitation by two friends celebrating their third wedding anniversary at unsicht-bar, where you dine in complete darkness and you’re served by blind waiters. At the entrance, we followed the waiter by holding onto each other’s shoulders towards our table. We opted for the surprise menu, knowing that it would add more fun to our pitch-black evening trying to guess what we were served. The ambience was initially awkward, but jazz and waltz music helped us relax. We didn’t wait long before Angela, our friendly and legally blind waiter brought our meals. In a unique experience, we took turns relying at first on the senses of smell and touch before involving our taste buds in attempts to remove the mystery from our meals. My hands were my utensils tackling my meal, which was a slice of roast beef with pasta and green beans. Even though the food was mediocre, the experience was thought-provoking, at least to me.

Berlin is reputed for its eccentric fine dining; there’s a restaurant where you can pay what you wish (Weinerei), and another that caters for anorexics (Sehnsucht) and employs bulimic waitresses. There’s also a toilet-themed restaurant (Klo, German for toilet), and the more popular, but still unconventional, Hard Rock Café; a casual dining venue built around a theme of rock and roll, from live music to interior décor. Later on, it became apparent to me that these restaurants were not only limited to Berlin. In fact, it has been a growing global phenomenon over the past three decades called “concept restaurants,” sometimes also called “theme restaurants.” I wondered about what underlies that trend and whether there’s a common thread among concept restaurants. Based on a lot of research and travelling, I drew the conclusion that they all reflect a relatively recent worldview prevalent in contemporary culture known as postmodernism.

Image via Romania-Insider.com

From the mid-18th century forward, the Modern era brought along the Enlightenment Age (sometimes labelled “Age of Reason”), introducing ideals that were … Read More

For a few months after I bought my first smartphone that comes with the typical GPS functionality, like most users of such phones, I downloaded dozens of apps, some of which prompt a familiar message asking me for permission to “turn on location services.” I mindlessly approved these messages without much consideration. Later on, I found out that many of my apps had been tracking my physical location – with my consent, in most cases. Even my dictionary app (the popular app from Dictionary.com) states on its end-user license agreement (or EULA) that they “collect and store your exact geographic location information to power (some features)” and they also “share this information with advertisers and advertising networks.” I thought it was perplexing that my dictionary records my exact location. While seated at my desk, after I looked away from my screen to catch a nostalgic, appreciative glimpse of that big, ugly and bulky dictionary on my shelf, I realized the real problem.

Art by Slorker

The problem was not with location tracking or advertising networks but the shockingly long time it took me to fully understand such personal information is being transmitted from my phone to app providers, developers and advertising networks. Why my lack of understanding lasted such a long time before I learnt how this geolocation technology works, even though it deeply affects my privacy? I am not alone in having had barely any knowledge of how location data, or other recent technologies for that matter, could be used to compromise my privacy and safety. I had in my pocket a tech tool that can alter my life in many ways that I wasn’t even aware of. GPS-enabled phones can be used in truly wondrous ways, for example, to guide you through an unfamiliar city, and it can also be exploited by someone to stalk you. Thus, my criticism is not of technology or tech devices per se, but of how we’re usually behind in our grasp of how they can significantly affect us. Millions of users today suffer from the same problem: an opaque and incomplete understanding of … Read More

Adoption at a Rate Never Seen Before

The rate of adoption of consumer technologies since the beginning of the previous century has been rapidly increasing, so much so that today’s technology spreads at a rate never seen before. The following are U.S. stats but they also describe similar trends in other Western countries and, to a large extent, a clear global trend. Electricity reached 90% penetration of U.S. households within 50 years, the refrigerator accomplished the same in 30 years, cell phones, in about 20 years. [Source: New York Times] Additionally, even though it would have been desirable in the past by most, as it is today, to own such new innovative machines or devices (e.g. cars or phones), they were still only affordable to businesses and the wealthiest of society, which played a role in constraining their proliferation, granting society time to question, study and adapt to the tools which were about to become a part of their lives.

Chart via The New York Times

Today, in a new paradigm where the Internet is ubiquitous, adoption time can be measured in days or even hours. In the case of products deployed online, a new technology can be used by millions of people, with minimal or absolutely no understanding of its effect on the users. Our modern societies have occasionally praised the speed at which technology is moving and how, thankfully, we don’t have to wait long before reaping the marvellous benefits of latest breakthroughs. However technology is now advancing so quickly that society’s foundations in fields like ethics, legislation and privacy are struggling to evolve to reflect the changes, and in many ways failing to keep up.

Art by Kosmur (via Deviantart.)

Cyberculture Shock

The American futurist Alvin Toffler predicted in 1970 in his aptly titled book Future Shock that we will struggle “to cope at a progressively faster rate with situations that are, for us, decidedly unfamiliar, ‘first-time’ situations, strange, irregular, [and] unpredictable [1].” He warned that we are “doomed to a massive adaptational breakdown [2],” describing the phenomenon as a “future shock” similar to a “culture shock” … Read More