My Diaries

I wish I could take pictures of the people I pass outside. It looks like there was a new step in human’s race evolution. Call it what you want, homo modernus or homo technus, the fact is here� : we evolved. Now a human body is not only composed of a head, a trunk, two arms and two legs, it’s been added useful small devices such as telephones or pdas or mp3 players. So now if you walk in the street you can meet homo modernus musicus or homo modernus telephonus or homo modernus pda-us…

Some are more evolved than others. Take homo telephonus. Have you ever passed someone looking like he’s having a conversation alone? Well this guy is probably part of the most advanced variety of the homo telephonus. Don’t even think to consider him as a schizophrenic fool : he’s not, he’s the best of evolution.

Soon we’ll probably be able to buy multifunction implants, that would be placed near our ear to replace headphones, and near our throat to replace microphone, and maybe in the inside of our wrist for keyboard. Our glasses would have a miniscreen embedded that would enable us to visualize our diary or our e-mails while we walk ; if we meet someone, their identity instantly would display on the screen inside our glasses, and we wouldn’t have troubles to remember names anymore. Therefore everybody would wear glasses. Some authors like William Gibson even imagined we could buy artificial eyes that would be implanted instead of ours and directly connected to the optical nerve. Those eyes would do everything James Bond could dream of. Luminosity adjusting, night seeing, showing outside temperature, infrared vision, displaying ID of the persons around you, photo camera, webcam… Of course all of this while being permanently connected to the wireless internet that would be available from anywhere on the planet.

Crazy to think about all this. But we are actually not that far from there. Who ever goes out without their cellphone? Not me. Just in case! My sister even has it next to her while we are eating. Just in case. In Paris metro, a lot of people play either with their cellphone and the embedded photo camera, or a mp3 player, or a pda, or a portable game consol, or several of these.

Now if you don’t mind, I need to go buy a baguette, and I’ll get my digital camera with me, just in case I’d pass someone talking alone in the street while I’m listening to my iPod.