At one point in one’s life, one will walk into a burger joint—one with 30-dollar burgers, a neon sign and entree names that belong on the back of Too Faced packaging—and be met with a little box of TV static instead of a menu. If this is your first time being alive, you might look at your waitress with confusion, before she kindly explains to you that you have to scan the code with your camera and it will show you the menu. So, you pull out your phone and scan the code. It doesn’t work. The dim lighting in the establishment is making it impossible for your phone to read the code. Your date sits across from you, looking more and more embarrassed at your lack of technical prowess. Eventually, the waitress suggests your date use their phone flashlight to illuminate the code. So, now, you’re shining a bright light in this dim restaurant, and everyone is looking at you, and there is no way you’re getting a second date. Still, your phone just loads; the restaurant doesn’t have wi-fi. You simply get up and walk out of the restaurant and do not stop walking. If this has happened to you, then you understand a simple truth about the world: QR codes are poorly executed tools of laziness and are antithetical to actual innovation and creativity.
One wouldn’t be remiss to question where these abominations of ink and links came from. According to an article on the history of QR codes from The Mainichi, Japan’s national daily newspaper, QR codes, or Quick Response Codes, were invented in 1994 by a team of researchers headed by Masahiro Hara. Hara and his team were working for the Denso Wave automotive products company. The team created QR codes in order to track automobile parts. These codes outperform their predecessor, the barcode, due to their increased information capacity and the faster rate at which they can be read. These abominations then managed to sneak out of the factories they were designed for and into the hands of the general public.
Denso Wave decided that QR codes should be available to anyone who wanted to use them and released the specifications publicly. The patent was still held by the company, with the promise not to exercise it. Denso Wave wanted as many people as possible to use the code. This helped to turn the QR code into a “public code.” However, the company held on to the production rights for the scanners, causing a restriction on how universal the codes could truly be.
This status as the code system of the people only expanded after the first cell phone with QR code scanning capabilities was released by Sharp in 2002. Every other cell phone manufacturer soon followed suit, allowing anyone to scan and read a QR code. The use of QR codes continued to rise over the next two decades as companies realized some of the potential of these fuzzy boxes.
QR codes didn’t truly explode in popularity until 2020. Now, one might be thinking I can’t possibly understand how QR codes were popularized in 2020; whatever could’ve happened. One would have to be dead, a recently revived spirit or an idiot to think that, but one could. When Covid-19 began its rampage across the U.S., businesses were met with a choice: adapt (and bribe the government a little bit) or die. So, restaurants across America replaced their germ-ridden menus with QR codes. Now, no one even had to touch the gross menu to order their food. Except one did still have to pick up the little sign sitting in the center of the table.
The physical problem of hands isn’t the only looming issue.
If you have been to a city bigger than Hooker, Oklahoma, you have seen random sketchy pieces of paper with QR codes taped to every light pole and electric box. These codes are an attempt to defraud anyone unlucky enough to scan one. Due to the code’s ability to quickly send a user to a given URL, scammers are able to make codes that send the user to websites that scrape their data or install malware on their devices. Scammers can make these websites look legit using a tactic known as phishing, or making their website and web address look similar to a trusted site. One might not even know they have been the victim of a phishing scam until they get a fraudulent purchase warning from their banks. These kinds of codes can be placed as stickers on top of any QR code. This isn’t even to mention the problem of QR codes being created through third-party websites that often make one pay or have their QR code expire at an arbitrary time.
Beyond the security concerns, QR codes are having an active effect on our society as a whole, an impact that must be properly understood. It isn’t uncommon to find flyers that were once covered in art and drew the eye, replaced with QR codes on white paper. QR codes have become a replacement for actual art and information on signs. Instead of menus or flyers or even interesting advertisements, they have been replaced with ugly black and white boxes. These once physical, artistic objects have been digitized in a way that has caused “ads” to be simply links to a company’s website.
While having to look at these codes can give anyone a headache, that isn’t where the social problems end. QR codes necessitate a device to read them. This means that one cannot leave their house without a device in hand without risking being unable to eat at some places or access information on local events. Even if one does have a cell phone on them, one then has to take out their phone, causing one to be more cognizant of their phone and more likely to pull it out again. In a world where devices have embedded themselves in every aspect of life under the guise of “improvement,” some things don’t need to be digitized.
How many “revolutionary” new technological innovations need to overtake the public sphere before disappearing into a middle ground of minimal functionality, before we realize nothing is actually that innovative right now? QR codes are useful for keeping track of automobile parts, they are useful for attaching links to videos, but they are not a replacement for every piece of paper. Personally, I would rather type in the address of a website than scan a QR code.
(Photo by Kampus Production: https://www.pexels.com/photo/person-taking-photo-of-the-qr-code-7289717/)
