Finally, my addiction to the “National Enquirer” has paid off! Because of my avid readership, I won a trivia contest during a seminar on Social Media by answering the following question: “What movie studio did Barry Diller head up in the 80’s?” “Paramount,” I said, my hand held high. “Correct,” hollered the seminar leader and handed me a small paper box, inside of which was something that looked like a weird little toy, or perhaps a large eraser. Turns out, it was a Poken.
What is a Poken, you ask? A “Poken” is a funny-looking 2GB memory gadget with a built-in radio frequency identity device (RFID). When two Pokens are pressed together they light up, indicating that an exchange of information has taken place. The “information” that is transferred has already been set up by the Poken owner on the
Poken website. The Poken is equipped with a USB connector so that when you return home from a party, you can just download all your Poken friends to your computer.
Poken was invented by a Swiss business school grad who was tired of having to keep track of all the business cards he would acquire at various meetings, so he developed a device “where we could customize our identity, choose our networks, and decide what and how much we wanted to share…” At that point in the text, my silly old-fashioned, un-cool self kicked in. Can’t you just share your information in person? Why do you need these funny-looking intermediaries? Leave it to a young male engineer to take the “personal” out of personal interactions.
From the Poken website, I read, “…we want you to spark conversations, and keep them going, in all kinds of ways and in your own personal style. we want you to express yourselves and who you are. we all accessorize our clothes, cars, phones, and even our pets; why not our information?” (please note: most of the text on the website is written in this hip lowercase kind of way.)
Accessorize my information? Customize my identity? Am I the only one who thinks this is funny and/or slightly mad? And, what if you lose your Poken, especially after you’ve acquired customized information from numbers of people? I don’t know about you, but I don’t need one more little physical object to keep track of. And what if Poken is stolen? In a culture where information is king, you just know that roving bands of Poken thieves will soon emerge to lie in wait and pinch your Poken. Then, you’ve compromised not only your precious information, but that of others as well.
Don’t you just want to grab these young engineers by the lapels and shout, “Consequences, my son, these things have consequences!” Anyone with an RFID scanner within twenty feet of you has access to ALL of the info on your Poken. We’re getting into Big Brother thriller territory here, I’m afraid.
To me, the sad part about all of this new “social media” technology is that we have at once too much information at our fingertips and not enough in our hearts. Oh, sure, you might learn the bits and bytes of a potential friend or mate from his Poken, but you’ll never access the heart and soul of him unless the two of you spend considerable in-the-flesh time. How else will you know how his skin feels next to yours, or what kind of aftershave he uses, or how his crooked smile charms you to your core? What used to be the rich fun of walking, talking, and laughing in person has been transmogrified into the faux-intimacy of tweeting, poking, facebooking.
I have to tell you that if I meet you at a party and you ask me if I want to Poken, don’t be surprised if I give you a hug instead.
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Rosie Sorenson is an award-wining writer whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, and other publications. Her new photo essay book, They Had Me at Meow: Tails of Love from the Homeless Cats of Buster Hollow, is about her thirteen years of loving and being loved by a colony of smart, funny feral cats. To learn more and to purchase the book, please visit her website: www.theyhadmeatmeow.com.
