Google makes waves of progress
Every day I check my email, hoping a certain message is there.
No, it’s not an acceptance letter, a message from my boss or a shipping confirmation for those amazing shoes I just ordered.
It’s my Google Wave invitation — and it still hasn’t come.
Of course, I could get one on eBay for upwards of $200, as some of the world’s most affluent techie dorks have done. I could give my email to a website that promises me one, inevitably filling my inbox with offers from beta programs I don’t care about. I could retweet @GoogleWaveNow, spamming my followers and hoping to be randomly chosen as a winner (OK, maybe I already did that). Or I could wait patiently like the rest of the world until the communication system changes my life forever.
When it comes to understanding Google Wave, this patience is a virtue. Hardly anyone who is not a web developer or super-geek knows what the tool is, and that’s because the only way to really understand it is to: a) Wait for an invite and see for yourself, or b) Watch an hour and a half-long video.
The video, which can easily be found by Googling “Google Wave,” is from the Google conference this past May. It shows a complete walk-through of the platform and is chock-full of corny one-liners from its creators.
After suffering through one too many awkward silences resulting from developer and Software Engineering Manager Lars Rasmussen’s bad jokes, you can finally understand what the system does — and it truly is exciting.
The creators describe Google Wave as what email would look like were it invented today, as opposed to in the 1960s, before the advents of SMS, instant messaging, wikis, blogs or other media-sharing tools. The program attempts to combine a number of the Internet’s best features into one, and, from the video, Google Wave seems to do a really, really good job.
The crowd “oohs” and “aahs” as the developers demonstrate messaging through Google Wave, which is like email made simple and, most importantly, instant. The system works faster than an IM, basically sending each character as it is typed. Of course, you can turn this function off, but Google Wave has gone out of its way to allow for this immediate mode of communication to happen when both users are online.
This instant element is one of Google Wave’s biggest advances, though, personally, it scares me a little. While immediacy is pretty fantastic when sending pictures and attaching files, I find communicating with sentences and paragraphs effective enough. I also average more typos than your standard computer lover, and I try not to burden my contacts with the usual “teh” in my email’s first draft.
Got typos? Google Wave has got a solution. With a statistical spell checker that accounts for grammar, language and common usage patterns, there is no need for patrons to concern themselves with the order of letters in a word. According to a video about Google Wave’s natural language processing, Google feels that, “if people could just loosen up a little bit and type five times faster, then that’s 5 percent less time that they’d spend typing.”
Wait a minute: Is taking our time such a bad thing? Apparently yes, as every technological advance we have seen has had some basis in improving our efficiency. From the wheel to the Internet, each step forward has been concerned with saving time, consolidating efficiency or being the most productive for the least amount of effort. The purpose of progress has been to simplify our lives and create free time, only to fill that free time with higher expectations and demands. Google Wave perfectly exemplifies this paradox of convenience many of us love to hate.
Soon, the whole world will start using Google Wave or some version of it. We will never have to wait longer than 10 seconds for multimedia content or one second for text communication. We will think, “Oh, now that I can make plans instantly, I have so much time to kill!” We will kill that time by making more plans and executing them as quickly as possible. Expectations of quality and speed will rise across the board, and, before we know it, we will be characters in the movie Wall-E — victims of instant gratification who can’t even spell words on our own.
Is Google Wave the cause for this apocalypse of intellectualism? Not exactly. It’s merely another step in the logical direction of a society that just can’t quit improving. And whether this is a good or a bad thing … I’ll let you know when I get that invite.
Jen Winston is a junior majoring in communication. Her column, “The Memeing of Life,” runs Tuesdays.