Gung-ho over GADGETS

Hi-tech gizmos spell attitude, style and megabucks for the computer-fed generation, which wants nothing more than tomorrow’s technology today, says Srabanti Chakrabarti

Let’s begin with a hypothetical situation. Imagine yourself walking down a busy street, 10 years down the line. You come across someone who looks familiar, but can’t remember where you met him or her last. Or even the name! Or what the person does. All that you remember is that the person was someone important.

Familiar situation, right? And an embarrassing one as well. Now, if only you had access to those pair
of glasses`85

Pair of glasses? How is memory linked to eyesight, you might be thinking. Well, we are talking about a special pair of glasses with a scanner attached to it. In this situation, the moment you see the person, the glasses will take a photograph of the person and send the image to a server over the Net. The server, in turn, would crosscheck the image with a database (which has photographs of every single person you have met ever since you started wearing the glasses) and if it finds a match, it will immediately send a message back to the glass with details – name, profession and the last time you met the person. The glass in turn alerts you about the person, lest you forget and helps you escape the embarrassing situation.

And if you think this is too technical for you, how about wearing a chameleon scarf? A scarf that changes its colours according to the dress you wear. Developed by Akira Wakita and colleagues at Keio University in Tokyo, Japan, the scarf consists of a sensor and a number of light-emitting diodes. The sensor analyses the colour of the rest of your clothing and then feeds it back to the embedded computer in the scarf. The best-match colour for the scarf is arrived at after analysing the sensor’s results. So you can be rest assured that the all-colour scarf will save you the bother of colour coordination while making you look good.

Sounds unbelievable? Welcome to the world of wearable computers – the rage of the world in the days to come. If it was Girgio Armani and Versace who set the fashion trends for the world till now, in the days to come it will be the nerds burning midnight oil in MIT or Caltech who will design and define what you will wear.

And the revolution has already started. If you dig into consumer study reports, you will find how buying trends amongst teenagers have changed. While earlier the must-have list included shoes, clothes and fashionable jewellery, now the items to go for are iPods, cell phones and portable video players.

But what is it about gizmos that has the entire world going crazy for them? What is it about gadgets that has teenagers lose sleep over them?

If you think about it deeply, you will find that it is to do with social changes and the availability of certain objects of desire. A trend, if you look at the psychological aspect, stems from desire. And a desire, in turn, originates from lack of easy availability of a certain object. And that is the root cause behind the success of gizmos and gadgets as a trend. Being no different from the rest, fashion trends have also been driven by the psychological need of the individual.

Even a couple of decades back, a wristwatch was the ultimate status symbol. Sporting one on your wrist meant you had arrived to take on the world. Or a Mont Blanc, for that matter. Having it in your pocket meant you were from that elite club of people who could afford one. The reason was simple – not easy affordability and availability.

Things have changed now. Courtesy technology and Chinese manufacturing methodologies, a good-looking wristwatch will not cost you more than a couple of hundred rupees. Agreed, it won’t be of a good brand, still it will be a wristwatch and a good-looking one at that. And thus, the uniqueness associated with wearing a wristwatch has ceased to exist.

Ditto with a fountain pen. Finding it difficult to survive the onslaught of ballpoint pens and disposable Bics, the craze for stylish pens has almost died a natural death. Come to think of it, the situation is somewhat similar with clothes as well. Mass production and export-rejects have flooded the markets today, leading to availability of fashionable clothes at minimal costs.

In other words, all those items that homo sapiens in this blue planet craved for even a decade or two back, have become so easily available that they are no longer considered unique or top the list of objects of desire. Thus, the search for a new status symbol or fashion trend. And what better an object than the biggest dream machine of our age — technology.

Come to the present, and the resultant analysis will also yield similar results. The top needs of the hour are communication and entertainment. Thanks to our jet-set lifestyle, the definition of both has changed. A postcard every week to your parents is not enough – an SMS or a phone call every day is a must. And thus the cellphone is the most used and important gadget one carries today. And the moment cellphone becomes a trend, the thirst for a better-than-the-rest model increases. And what happens is evident from the bulging bottom lines of the cellphone companies.

Similarly, entertainment no longer means just going out for a weekly movie or sitting with your family and chatting. No one seems to have the time for it. So punch in whatever little entertainment you can while you are travelling to work or college. And what better way to do that than with the fashionable iPod or any other wearable musical gadget. The iPod video being another top contender — you can watch movies while on the move as well.

If you are beginning to think that this trend is limited to teenagers, you are mistaken. The middle-aged senior executive is also not unaffected by this trend. Yes, of course, the suit you wear and the car you drive are important – but more than that it is the laptop you use, the wireless connectivity you have on your laptop and the Blackberry you carry that defines your status in today’s world.

If you don’t check your Blackberry once every 15 minutes for an email or if you do not receive an email for more than an hour, as US comedian and talk show host David Letterman would put it, "You ain’t happening."

If you are not convinced, take a drive on any busy thoroughfare in any of the metros during rush hour, you will see executives sitting in chauffeur-driven sedans with the reading light on, and working on their laptops. What’s new you may ask, isn’t that what laptops are meant for? Well, yes, but a closer look at the laptop would reveal the fact that they are using the wireless connectivity card to get on to the Net and will proudly display the websites they are visiting and how they are connected even while on the road.

But, perhaps, it’s just a matter of time before even these style icons will phase out and something else will come along. As a Beatles song screamed few decades back — Times they’re a changin