An image of Facebook founder worthy of a science fiction movie Sunday taken on the eve of the opening of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, fascinated or frightened many users.
the not sure, triumphant smile, Mark Zuckerberg, the man with the 1.5 billion friends, and sitting through a blind crowd. Those who compose it have a virtual reality helmet screwed on the skull, immersed in another world, and do not see the boss of Facebook wander among them. The photo, published Sunday, February 21 on the Facebook account of Mark Zuckerberg, a was massively shared on social networks.
The communication campaign launched by Samsung and Facebook on the eve of the opening of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the international exhibition dedicated to mobile, works great: the people present at the event, removing their helmets, discover with amazement and delight the unexpected presence of the Web superstar and strafed it with their cameras . Before Mark Zuckerberg boasts, on stage, the capacity of virtual reality and immersive pictures of the Galaxy S7, the latest model from Samsung
But on the Internet, the reactions are very different. Many Internet users, shared photography by Mark Zuckerberg is chilling. “ Mark – it does not seem strange to you to be the one to walk with your own eyes, while all others are zombies in the Matrix ?” Asks a Facebook user, whose questions raised over 3800 “likes”. Another, whose commentary was also approved by 2200 Internet users, raises other concerns:
“I do not want to live in such a world. I want to touch a flower that blooms and feel. I want to shake someone in my arms and tell her that I love her, face to face. I want to watch the sunset with a tear streaming down my cheek. I want to feel the breeze on my face, smell the aroma of a meal is being prepared, I want to feel connected, humanely. I do not want to sit in a gray suit for someone to explain what’s cool in an illuminated air-conditioned hall that led electronic devices record every movement of my eyes, human being is to be free. “
If the photo has caused many negative reactions, but also because it evokes a series of iconic images from popular culture. Starting with Matrix trilogy in which humanity, made a slave by artificial intelligences, lives in tanks, the brain permanently connected to a virtual universe which is none other than the Earth.
the helmet evokes widely brainwashing – imaged by way of striking Satnley Kubrick in Clockwork Orange
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others also seen in this image the dystopian world of the film Johnny Mnemonic (1995), in which access to the “Net” is done through a virtual reality helmet – and whose images are often diverted. Or the universe evoked by Ernest Cline in Player One (Michel Lafon, 2013) anticipation structure located in 2044 in a world where most interactions, school to commercial transactions are made through virtual reality headsets
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More recently, and in a syle less dramatic but nonetheless critical, the film animation Wall-E also portrayed a future in which obese human remain stuck in their office staring at a screen throughout their lives.
Ironically, the image also evokes a well-known advertising technology lovers: 1984 – not the novel by George Orwell, but the spot broadcast by Apple to promote the first Macintosh. Seating arrangement, the central figure up aisle … If, unlike heroin advertising, Zuckerberg has of course launched a hammer on stage at Mobile World Congress, the two images match.
fear of headphones
Virtual reality is scary as it fascinates. Helmeted, users seem absorbed in another world, seems to have lost touch with reality. In the photo, Mark Zuckerberg appears to be the only human being “conscious” in a room full of men lost in a virtual world. “ This photo is an allegory of our future? “asks a user on Twitter. “ People in a virtual reality, and leaders who walk beside us. “
This iconography is not new. By the early 1980s, William Gibson, founder of cyberpunk movement and a contemporary science fiction writers the most prominent, already described a ‘cyberspace’, ‘ consensual hallucination “in which sails by directly connecting his brain to “console”. The idea came to him, he has explained many times, watching teenagers playing in the arcade:
“I was walking in Vancouver, and I remember walking past an arcade, which at the time was new, and I saw kids playing in one of those old consoles plywood. The games had graphics that represent space and the prospects of very primitive way. Some games did not even effect of perspective, but trying to make a multi-dimensional environment. Even with these primitive graphics, kids who played there were physically involved in a way so intense that it seemed they wanted to be inside the game (…). The real world was gone for them – he had lost all importance. They were in this conceptual space, and the machine before them was the new best of worlds. “
But the fear of a” virtual world “absorbent humanity does not date from the appearance of the computer. Alternately, television, radio, and before them the airport novels or comics, have all been accused of attracting people into dangerous artificial paradise – necessarily damaging to public morality and health, when n ‘ were not suspected of diverting the working masses of their work …
in 2014, a photograph showing a train car in the 1960s experienced a second youth, being massively circulated on social networks with the caption ” all this technology makes us antisocial . ” In the picture, all passengers are immersed, not in reading a cell phone screen, but in a newspaper – a unanimity which is also explained by the fact that it was taken shortly after the Kennedy assassination
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the virtual reality helmet is certainly more insulation than a newspaper or a phone, but if the deployment of virtual reality worries you, you may be reassured by the fact that the Oculus VR, the pioneer of virtual reality helmets bought by Facebook, announced in early January an introductory price that is not to everyone: count 700 euros for future lost in the artificial paradise, even if the Gear VR Samsung, less powerful, will be offered to buyers who pre-order the Samsung S7 …
Read also: Why the Oculus Rift, the helmet Virtual reality may fail commercially
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