Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Pinger

We get name tags at church. This Sunday, I put "Gustavus Adolphus" on my tag, in the hopes that someone would see it and say something like "Oh, you're into European history too?" and go on from there. I determined that the conjunction of sets of "People Who Notice Name Tags" and "People Who Speak Up" consists of one member, who is not also a member of "People Who Recognize Gustavus Adolphus". But I tried.

What we need is a phone app that will let you put in topics that you're interested in, and your photo, and then scan the area around you for people who have that same topic on their list. If you get a hit, you see that person's photo and can go strike up a conversation. (And they see your photo, or whatever photo you've loaded).

I recall reading a science fiction story with an idea for that device, which I believe was called a "pinger", but I can't remember what story. It sounds like a Larry Niven kind of thing to come up with, but for some reason I think it was someone else.
Posted by Laserlight at 11:14 PM
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4 comments:

McBugBear said...

Watch or read "Logan's Run".

January 28, 2011 at 8:59 AM
Blair Ivey said...

There's already an 'app' for this. It's called. 'talking to people'. My Goodness. We don't need a technological intervention for everything. What you're describing would do nothing more than further isolate people according to interest. You can learn a lot talking to people with interests outside your own. You may even discover new connections from disparate fields.

January 30, 2011 at 4:14 AM
Laserlight said...

Not everyone is good at, or comfortable with, walking up to a stranger and starting a conversation. With this product, you'd still have to do that, but at least you'd have something to talk about.

January 30, 2011 at 7:54 AM
Anonymous said...

I disagree with Blair. And not because I'm a fan of apps.

The only isolation now or if such an app existed would be one of choice. You are in now way prevented from striking up a conversation with someone with whom you may have not much in common by any such app. So I see no isolation being enforced upon anyone.

Further, although you can speak to people who might not share your interests, I spend a big portion of my week talking to those sorts of people socially at work or in day to day life. It might be nice to actually find a few more people (I'm lucky actually, and largely thanks to the Internet, in that regard) to talk to with similar interests.

You should talk to a range of people, but that range should include those with whom you share interests. Searching those out is not inherently a bad thing unless that is the only people you seek out or talk to but I highly doubt Chris was suggesting that or that this would be the situation.

I am sure such an application could be abused by predators, however. Today's generation are insufficiently paranoid about the actual risks of modern mobile technologies.

I think that you might have wanted to go with Napoleon Bonaparte or Horatio Nelson. Those might have more traction with the masses, justly or not, than Gustavus.

January 30, 2011 at 10:22 AM

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