This may the single stupidest communications technology idea of all time. I’m talking historic, epic, colossal in its level of “You’ve got to be kidding me”. The most frightening part is that there is absolutely no doubt, not the tiniest little speck of uncertainty that this thing will sell and people with follow it.
Sony, a major technology corporation which certainly MUST have better things to do with its time, has created a prototype for the “Cat@Log”, a cat collar with a still camera, GPS, accelerometer, and Bluetooth, all of which will allow, I can barely bring myself to say this, up to the minute Twittering of everything your cat is doing.
Yes, I’m absolutely serious. The software is designed so that all the information is uploaded via the Bluetooth to the computer and then transferred to tweets. What happens is that various feline routines then trigger one of a series of pre-programmed tweets that are posted for the world to do whatever with. The stated purpose of the technology is to help owners understand their pets better. Now I’ve owned both cats and dogs in my lifetime. At the moment there are two cats who live at my house. In my experience the understanding of the two domestic animals can best be expressed by the old joke that says when a dog looks at its human it sees God, when a cat looks at its human it sees staff. Pretty simple, pretty straight forward.
As I read the article I was even more astounded to discover that this isn’t the first project of this kind. Apparently a dairy farmer worked with another company to use similar technology to allow his dairy herd to tweet. Based a variety of information stored in the central computer the farmer is tweeted on whether any given individual in the herd is ready to be milked. That makes a bit more sense to me although the image of a dairy farmer checking his herd’s Twitter feed on his smartphone at the entrance to the barn is a little tough for me to wrap my brain around.
The stuff that I would really want to know about, like the cat is shredding the curtains or the cat has left you a small present in your shoe, probably aren’t among the standardized phrases. Then it finally hit me. The single fact that makes this entire thing idiotic. This will be the single most common tweet for every cat. Do you know what cats spend the majority of their day doing? Any cat owner can tell you. What cats do most, is sleep.
I don’t need technology to tell me that.
Call that the View From the Phlipside.
"The View From the Phlipside" airs on WRFA-LP Jamestown NY. You can listen to WRFA online HERE
Copyright - Jay Phillippi 2010
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