‘One Day…': Google 's Project Glass, integral reality and predictive advertising

Abstract

In the spring of 2012, Google unveiled ‘Project Glass' with the promise to deliver an augmented reality head-mounted display device to the masses. Its YouTube video ‘One Day…', viewed more than 20 million times, promotes a utopian vision of what life will be like once this prototype becomes available to everyone. Using a critical humanities approach, this paper uses this event as a site to consider the implications of predictive advertising as a rising cultural phenomenon within the public imagination. Predictive advertising can be described as a new hybrid form of communication, which capitalizes both on the enigmatic appeal of futuristic techno-fantasies and the realism of the advertisement as a reference to an external fact. This rhetorical manoeuvre resembles Jean Baudrillard's assertions that culture has fallen victim to ‘integral reality' whereby real and imaginary are no longer distinct. We pinpoint this transformation within this age of network culture and mass adoption of new mobile and wearable devices, suggesting that ‘announcing the future' is an activity that rightfully deserves a genre of its own under the label predictive advertising.

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