“Vision Machine”

What could hap­pen if there was the facil­i­ty to share your vision, lit­er­al­ly, with every­one else in the world? How would that change the way peo­ple see each oth­er and inter­act? How could that change the world? How could some­one else use that pow­er of com­mu­ni­ca­tion not to increase com­mu­ni­ca­tion but to lim­it it?

That’s the ques­tion posed in “Vision Machine”.

in 2061, the Sprout com­pa­ny releas­es its next “Big Thing” :the iEye:

… a pair of glass­es that turns your eye into a video cam­era … and your brain into a dig­i­tal edit­ing and spe­cial effects suite. All you have to do is imag­ine it … and it hap­pens.

Now you can effort­less­ly record and edit your per­son­al expe­ri­ences, thoughts, dreams and sto­ries as nev­er before … and then instant­ly dis­trib­ute the result­ing media to mil­lions of oth­er iEyes, … You can link your iEyes … look at the world through oth­er users’ eyes.

The pos­si­bil­i­ties here are only lim­it­ed to the users’ imag­i­na­tions, and vast seg­ments of the world’s pop­u­la­tion are quick­ly tak­ing advan­tage of the sit­u­a­tion. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the pos­si­bil­i­ties for tak­ing the next step from shar­ing visions to con­trol­ling the visions, and there­by con­trol­ling the peo­ple see­ing those visions, is one that more than a few pow­er­ful peo­ple start tak­ing advan­tage of.

Its a very well told and well drawn com­ic, worth investigating.

Com­men­tary: There is one thing that does­n’t work out here: not every­one is visu­al­ly imag­i­na­tive. In fact, from my train­ing in hyp­no­sis induc­tions, there are rough­ly three types of imag­i­na­tive peo­ple: visu­al, audi­to­ry and kines­thet­ic. (I am audi­to­ry.) I would doubt that non-visu­al peo­ple would have the same abil­i­ty as visu­al peo­ple. Still, though, that is some­thing that does­n’t have to be dealt with as part of the over­all premise.

I do have one quib­ble, though: the set­ting is the year 2061, yet every­thing thing still looks 2011. Fifty years is far too long a peri­od for there not to be major changes in soci­ety, archi­tec­ture. etc. Maybe mak­ing it 2021 would have been more logical.