Content area
Full text
Introduction
The wearables industry is a growing area of personal computing. A Google N-gram search for the term “wearables” shows use rising in popularity since 2010s. In 2015, Gartner Inc.’s Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies report – an annual rating of technology industries that serves as a predictive tool for investors across business sectors – included wearables at the top of their hype cycle (at the “peak of inflated expectations”). The following year, Vandrico Inc., an industrial solutions company, collaborated with the professional services network Deloitte to create the Wearables Database, a popular marketing tool for purchasing wearables (the database currently lists over 400 devices from 266 companies). The industry shows no signs of slowing down.
Critical scholarship on the wearables market, quantified self and self-tracking movements has also grown in recent years (Young, 2012; Pedersen, 2013; Nafus, 2016; Neff and Nafus, 2016), leading to novel insights about ethical relationships with emerging forms of tactile, embodied computing (Pedersen, 2005). Such alternative approaches can be expected, as manufacturers push innovative applications for wearables in diverse domains of social activity, including recreational health and fitness (Yan et al., 2015; Canhoto and Arp, 2016; Pedersen and Ellison, 2016), organizational and scientific research (Esposito, 1997; Chai et al., 2014), safety and security (Tang, 2016; Kwee-Meier et al., 2016), libraries and archives (Bruno, 2015), theater and performance (Kozel, 2008) and fashion (Ryan, 2014; Berzowska, 2005). At least part of the reason for the increase in critical scholarship on wearables has to do with companies that enact political and discursive work when they market wearable technologies to individual consumers and social groups, establishing narratives built around calls for efficiency and innovation. The innovation-driven nature of the wearables market and concomitant expectations of maximal efficiency can mask complex sociotechnical tradeoffs that individuals are unable to navigate (Acquisti et al., 2015), including concessions related to privacy and data ownership.
This article proceeds in four parts. First, we highlight the discursive work of wearables and argue for the importance of tracking such work in the market because efficiency is used as a manipulative lure. To unpack this discursive manipulation, in the second part, we introduce the concept of embodied computing and explain how the term is preferable to...