I really enjoyed Lev Manovich’s “The poetics of augmented space” because I think it pointed out some of the good and bad of augmentation. I found his discussion of augmentation in art galleries, airports/train stations, contemporary architecture, retail spaces, etc. interesting because it made me think about how much augmented realities add to our lives. I also found it interesting to make the connection between augmentation and monitoring, and I don’t disagree with Manovich’s statement that augmentation means surveillance.

What I think, however, is that surveillance isn’t the only bad thing about augmentation nor is it the worst thing. What frightens me about things like wearable technology isn’t the privacy issue but the idea that reality isn’t good enough–that reality needs to be augmented at all times. There are times when augmented reality is powerful and effective, like in the “audio walks” mentioned in the article or other museum/education type experiences, but I think that there are times when reality should not be augmented. Even a cell phone augments your reality by connecting you to people who are far away, and many people can’t live without their cell phone within reach–hence the market for the Apple Watch. It should be concerning to cell phone users that their constant dependence on their phones means constant monitoring, but I think it should also be concerning as a mark of how detached from the physical world they need to be to just make it through the day.

I recently had a heated discussion with an artificial intelligence researcher who believed that we will, in the future, be able to upload our brains into a computer and live forever as a machine in a simulated world and that we need to make this happen to save people from death. I know that augmented reality is different than virtual reality, but sometimes talk like this makes me think, “What’s wrong with actual reality?”