I was talking to my mom on the phone last night, and she brought up something she had heard about on the news. It was related to the International Consumer Electronics Show, and it was “Internet something underwear.” Internet connected underwear? Internet-enabled underwear? She couldn’t remember, but she wanted some reassurance: this wasn’t something she really had to know about, was it? At that moment I felt pretty lucky to be walking around Elmhurst, Queens, freezing my hands off rather than being the one producing these kind of reports.
Every year hundreds of technology companies head to the Las Vegas Convention Center and reluctant journalists are compelled to produce articles and television segments that confuse people like my mother. This would have been the third year I headed out for the festivities but then came a polar vortex, a plane skidded off the runway at JFK, and I spent my Sunday watching the NFL playoffs and eating Mexican food at a friend’s house rather than flying across the country. I rescheduled a few interviews, made sure the press releases got forwarded, and don’t feel like I missed a whole lot.
There is inherent value in an event that brings together so many people from the same industry, but it’s not the news value. Even the concept that CES is over has been around for long enough that reporters struggle for new ways to whine about it. But I’ll try.
The action in the technology industry has long-since shifted to software, and the most important companies in tech make either token appearances, or don’t go at all. Many companies actively avoid announcing anything big at the show, because it will get lost in the noise. This means much of what’s left is pointless one-upmanship from the television manufacturers, recycled concepts that many people pretend weren’t also at last year’s show, and optimistic prototyping from companies that have little chance of following through. The problem with covering CES—especially if there’s a video camera involved—is that what is most viscerally interesting to cover is the least likely to be relevant. So we all pretend that enormous spherical televisions (not really) or forks for the quantified self (yes really) are “where tech is heading.”
The basic trends in the industry manage to be represented primarily in bizarro world form. Wearable computing, Internet-connected devices, and the future of television are worthy topics. But finding the wackiest examples of each thing is a pretty tiring exercise. So no, mom, don’t worry about that Internet underwear, whatever it was.
