As the tech-visionaries always say, however, it has ever been thus. The more radical the innovation, the more inevitable the prophesies of doom and the more severe the envisioned losses. And the radical aura of this particular innovation is undeniable, immediately apparent, akin in that way to the original potency of “moving pictures” and “tele-vision.”

With Glass, a developmental logic built into the very nature of representational technologies may be reaching an intrinsic limit. The contact lens version of Glass is already on the drawing boards and chips implanted in our brains that conjure up "screens" in our heads may some day be possible and a lot of people find these prospects deeply disconcerting. We are entitled to wonder if—this time—opposition to technological innovation may prove to be more stubbornly grounded than it has been in the past. Is the resistance to Glass qualitatively different and more profound than practical concerns about safety and privacy?

* * *

This might be a good time to step back a bit and ask what kind of medium a screen is: what are its particular effects? When Marshall Mcluhan popularized media theory in the 1960s, under the oft-cited (much misunderstood) slogan, “the medium is the message,” he was calling attention to the fact that kinds of media, quite apart from content, have significant psycho-social consequences. He argued that reading and writing, for example, condition the mind to move sequentially, to follow a train of thought to a conclusion, to notice causal order in the workings of the world, as scientists do, and to impose order as well, as technologists and administrators do. In effect, he claimed that print literacy was ultimately responsible for the rise of modernity because the written/printed word is a stable thing, abiding in space. The spoken words through which traditional societies communicate pass away as they are being born. Modern progress was made possible by stable representations of the way things are and were. In non-literate societies there was no record, so there was no plan. In such a society, people could argue over who should succeed a deceased king. But no one would ever ask: what do we need these kings for in the first place?

So what corresponds, under the regime of multi-media, to oral ephemerality and literate stability? A tricky question because multi-media, in their plenitude, defy categorical conception. People didn’t stop talking when they began writing and they didn’t stop writing when they began telephoning and we are still talking and writing even as we skype and tweet. Under those circumstances what medium could possibly qualify as constitutive across the spectrum? The obvious answer is screens: screens as screens, regardless of what’s on them. This is the age of multiple screens of every conceivable size and shape, lodged in every nook and cranny, upon every feasible surface—and now Google Glass proposes to fuse the very world with a personal screen.