Professional Documents
Culture Documents
research-article2016
Article
James N. Gilmore1
Abstract
This article uses the emergence of smartwatch models from 2012 to 2015including
the Pebble Watch, Android Wear, and Apple Watchto explore the relationship
between instants and information. Through a focus on the ways in which
smartwatches notify, buzz, and otherwise touch the skin, this article develops the
idea of the haptic instant as a key feature of this technology. The haptic instant, in
calling attention to the delivery of news alerts, e-mails, personal communication, and
other notifications to the wearers wrist, is part of the larger formation of bodies
capable of living in a culture increasingly reliant on computer information systems for
the management of daily life.
Keywords
technology, information, critical media studies, labor, new media theory, media use
In a February 2015 article for Forbes.com about the then-forthcoming Apple Watch,
Ewan Spence (2015) suggested the device was, in fact, not a smartwatch: Instead, the
Apple Watch is an idea. I would like to do Spence one better and argue that smartwatches (Apple Watch or otherwise) are not watches per se, although they use that
label. They are watches in that they are technologies with the capacity to serve as
timekeepers, but this is only onequite smallpart of their function. They are also
fitness trackers, gaming devices, organizers, and sensors. To call smartwatches
1Indiana
Corresponding Author:
James N. Gilmore, Department Communication and Culture, Indiana University, 800 E. Third Street,
Bloomington, IN 47405, USA.
Email: jamgilmo@indiana.edu
watches is something of a reduction, one that stems from, among other things, the
changing cultural associations of words. Much as the smartphone is still technically a
phone, in that it can make phone calls, it rearticulates the definition of a phone by
accessing the Internet and running an assortment of applications.1
In addition to keeping track of time, smartwatches keep track of information. This
entails not only gathering facts or collecting data but also how objects in the world
in-form the senses and give shape to things (J. D. Peters 1988, 12). A fragmented
amount of stuff floats through the wearers every day, requiring technologies capable
of ordering that stuff and giving form to ambient information, and, in turn, helping to
form bodies that are able to glance at, apprehend, and respond to that information in a
timely manner. As devices for monitoring and apprehending the flows of information
throughout any given day, smartwatches promote the instantspecifically, the instant
in which information arrives at the wearers wristas the predominant unit of time.
This article emphasizes the relationship between information and instant as it
manifests in the generation of smartwatches released from approximately 2012 to
2015 (including the crowd-funded Pebble Watch, Android Wear devices such as the
Samsung Galaxy Gear, and the Apple Watch). Throughout, this article often refers to
smartwatches directly as actors, but I do so synecdochically as a way to simplify a
wider set of relationships inherent in such a complex media communications technology. The devices themselves stand in for a larger technological ensemble including
metal, plastic, silicon, and other materials; laborers, both human and nonhuman,
responsible for their design and assembly; corporations including Apple, Pebble, and
Samsung; and the users and consumers of these devices.
The key feature of smartwatch technology, I argue, is their haptic instantsor the
pushing of information to the smartwatch through a series of budges, nudges, taps, or
other simulated haptic sensations. The haptic instant orients the wearer to particular
tasks, events, goals, or contextual information. The examples of communication and
labor emphasized in this article focus on ways these devices extend elements of ones
professional and personal lifesuch as work e-mails and text messages from friends
toward the body in ways that are perhaps intrusive, disruptive, or potentially intimate.
The smartwatchs emphasis on haptic sensations offers a rejoinder to the increasing
virtualization and computerization of routine, providing a tactile sensation to accompany such events as having ones Tweet liked by another user on Twitter.
As such, the smartwatch offers the capacity to transform the sensations that accompany the apprehension of information, making virtual information more felt and physical. Although these sensations certainly offer the wearer many affordances and,
perhaps, pleasures, the growing importance of managing information as a complementary practice to managing time also positions the smartwatch as, in part, a tool for the
formation of ever-productive bodies living and working in an increasingly virtual and
networked workplace. It permits, in other words, the demands of some forms of
labor to extend throughout the apparatuses of ones daily costume.
Smartwatches are devices that further entwine the relationships between communication and labor, manifesting notifications, reminders, text messages, and
e-mails as vibrations against the skin. Although they push the processes of work and
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communicating against the body, the transformations the haptic instant offer are
not radically new to human experience but are rather part of a longer trajectory of
apparatuses that are designed to orient, signal, and direct the flow of ones actions
throughout any given day. Although there is, at the time of this writing, much speculation on whether or not the consumer base for smartwatches can extend beyond
tech-savvy demographics who are more predisposed to buy new gadgets, Pebble
continues to expand its line of watches through crowdfunding support (Orf 2016),
and Apples Watch outpaced the companys iPhone in their respective first years of
sale (Wakabayashi 2016). Regardless of its inevitable success or failure, the smartwatchs emergence in this moment offers a number of propositions for assessing the
ways wearable technologies extend existing practices of daily life against the skin,
creating a measure of contact that accompanies otherwise virtual processes of message delivery and notification management.
graphical layouts of information that need to be seen, and the device can track biometric data such as heart rate as it rests against the skin. The haptic instant thus triggers a complex interplay between senses as information is received and processed
through the smartwatch.
The haptic instant makes the instant felt in a way that is different from, say, the way
in which digital clocks demarcate clean relationships between each second or minute.
It provides, in other words, its own sensations of instantaneity tied more to touch than
to sight. Following Vivian Sobchacks (2004, 136) argument that technologies constitute figurations of bodily existence, the smartwatch helps constitute the body within an
increasingly virtual culture, where information systems and screens play a key role in
practices of sense making and way finding. Pokes against the skin, as when the wearer
receives notifications from a Map application in the form of a string of taps alerting
her or him to an upcoming turn, thus mark these devices as potentially orienting the
wearer. They direct the body toward not only the device but also a subsequent response
to the information displayed. Through the haptic instant, smartwatches facilitate a shift
of the days progression from the clocks regular, chronological increments toward the
deluge of e-mails, phone calls, meetings, and other notifications that both clutter and
guide everyday routines.
Wearable technology in generalincluding fitness trackers, recording devices, and
biometric sensorsoffers processes of human training as well as capabilities to attune
the human body to larger, more abstract flows of society, economics, and labor in
which it lives. Smartwatches, in other words, cultivatespecifically, an awareness of
and engagement with the accumulating instants of everyday life by making otherwise
virtual information felt through haptic beats against the skin. An etymological root of
watch is found in the Old English waeccende, meaning remaining awake.
Throughout the day, the smartwatch is always-on and always-on-the-wearer (Turkle
2008); it remains awake, or context aware, extending the capacity for watchfulness.
To call smartwatches watches is thus to recognize that they may be accentuating
specific meanings of an otherwise conventional, if not taken-for-granted, word. Where
mechanical watches and clocks can convey, among other things, a synchronized global
time (as charted in Ling 2012), the smartwatch corresponds to a perceived desire on
the part of technology-manufacturing companies to feel otherwise abstract global
flows of information against perhaps the most personal of all sitesones own body.
As the flow of certain forms of information become detectable on ones wrist, haptic instants facilitate a shifting temporality, in Sarah Sharmas (2014) use of the
word. For Sharma, Temporalities are not times; like continually broken clocks, they
must be reset again and again through the coordination of lived experience (pp. 89).
Haptic instants are, like many other practices of timekeeping and organization,
designed to help bodies coordinate and orient themselves. Each haptic instant provides
an opportunity for the body to reset and refocus on the information being pushed to
the wrist. This continuous mode of coordination permits the sensorium to come into
contact with that which may otherwise remain unrealized. For example, while an
e-mail lacks the tactility of an envelope and a paper letter, the haptic instant still allows
receiving mail to feel a particular way, while simultaneously instilling a temporality
Gilmore
predicated on the coordinating effects of touch. The haptic instant creates a physical
sensation that accompanies virtual activities.
traced the desire for the instant through mass goods of the 1950s, including instant
coffee. These instant things, in Bowlbys terms, shift temporal associations away
from the longer sequences of their production and toward the possibility of their consumption without any real sort of temporal investment (p. 176). Smartwatches, as
another mass-produced technology, offer a way to manage this ongoing erosion of
sequences into instants, where the day is defined as much by the passing of hours
as by a varying procession of reminders, tasks, and alerts. The haptic instant manages
this parade of messages and notifications that make up the flow of daily communication and work.
Much like how the instant has a longer cultural history that is being reconfigured
in the present moment through an assortment of technologies and practices, the computational watch emerged over the last quarter of the twentieth century, even though
many earlier attempts did not receive the journalistic fanfare of the 2012 to 2015 generation. In 1975, Pulsars calculator watch was, in a sense, among the first smartwatches, as the calculator provides one way to process and manage certain forms of
numerical information. Since 1975, a number of watchmakers and technology companies have attempted to incorporate additional computational processes and information storage techniques into watch design. For example, the 1994 Timex Datalink
included features that became essential to smartwatches twenty years later: syncing
contacts, appointments, and lists from a personal computer, and loadable WristApps
like a golf scorekeeper. As a television commercial for the product explained, the
watch used light beams to transfer dates and data from your computer to your wrist
(Ellis 2015). The promise here, as with the Apple Watch in 2015, is a device that places
information pertaining to the routines of everyday life onto the wrist, accessible at a
glance. In effect, this practice of glancing at particular types of information decenters
traditional timekeeping, and thus the traditional utility of a watch, by offering different
forms of data for the wearer to view.
Gilmore
disciplined) to glance at my wrist with every haptic buzz, but I became more adept at
managing these glances and responses to the tiny display screen, quickly dismissing
unimportant updates from Twitter or turning toward my phone to respond to an important work e-mail. This management became more pronounced when using the Apple
Watch, which allows me to glance at information from a number of apps with the
flick of a finger. I could, for instance, check the score of a baseball game, a grocery list,
and my heart rate with a few quick flicks and glances. This ability to personalize and
manage the sorts of information accessible from the wrist resonates with the relationship between costume and custom, both of which are derived from the Latin consuetudo, meaning the act of habituating. Smartwatchesand wearable technology
more generallyare thus part of a process of adorning oneself with habits (Striphas
2011). Although the linguistic development of consuetudo has generated a number of
words, the smartwatch offers an opportunity to see how the forking paths of this word
might be returned to their origin to grasp another implication of the word habitso
critical in discussions of everyday life (as in Felski 1999/2000)in the context of
wearable technology.
Through this process of costuming and habituating, the smartwatch facilitates a
dialectic between distraction and attention in its attempts to congregate the dispersed
pop-up information and notifications of everyday life (Rutsky 2002). The buzzes to
the wrist may distract the wearer from aspects of ones physical surroundings while
also offering continued orientation to the progression of non-corporeal occurrences
that are equally important over the course of a day. Smartwatches are, in principle, able
to overcome at least some of the perils of information overload and distraction precisely because practices of multi-screen multitasking have become ordinary for many
users of digital communication technologies (Hassoun 2015). The smartwatch, like
the smartphone, is designed to perform what might be thought of as relational work,
binding the wearer into purportedly easier ways of interfacing with the world in which
she or he moves, works, and lives through such operations as hands-free, voicedictated actions. Successfully coordinating the smartwatchs use, in other words,
would allow the wearer to balance their physical and virtual relationships to the world.
Smartwatches thus extend the practices begun by smartphones through situating the
often-related signals, flows, and communications of everyday practice against the
skin. Through applications like Apple Paywhich allow wearers to perform frictionless credit card transactions by placing their Apple Watch against select credit card
readersthe wrist becomes a site for extending, managing, and performing everyday
practices such as commerce.
This relational information management intervenes in the form of overload Mark
Andrejevic (2013) terms infoglut. According to Andrejevic, the proliferation of portable, networked, interactive devices has corresponded to a rise in mediated information pulsing through ones daily routine (p. 14). For example, the Apple Watch offers
calendar apps, reminders, and to-do lists, while the Pebble Time smartwatch incorporates a series of timelines for managing daily and weekly reminders. These applications use visual markers of linear time, such as calendars, to organize infoglut.
However, these endless lists, reminders, and calendars may create their own form of
Gilmore
series of more aggressive bumps against the wrist for the duration of what would
otherwise be the phones ring.
Apples development of the neologism taptica combination of tap and
hapticbegs a consideration of the words importance in conjunction with this
device. The etymology of haptic encompasses the Greek haptikos, meaning to
touch or grasp, and also haptein, meaning to fasten. The smartwatch embodies both
senses of the word. Once fastened, the smartwatch touches the wearer to grasp and
direct her or his attention in some way. Buzzes, taps, beats, and other forms of vibration are used for information notification, alerting one to achievements in fitness
tracking, serving as alarms, and offering forms of interpersonal communication
between smartwatch wearers.
One Apple Watch commercial from the products initial launch, titled Us, imagines the importance of haptic instants for interpersonal communication (Apple 2015c).
The commercial oscillates between individuals physically communicatingspeaking
directly to or physically touching one anotherand individuals using the smartwatch
as an intermediary to send messages, drawings, or even heartbeats to other Watch
wearers. Where Malcolm McCullough (2013, 288) explains the rise of digital communication technologies such as mobile phones through a desire to hear one another
living, the promise of the smartwatchs more haptic modes of communicating
especially the transmission of biometric information such as heartbeatsis that people
can feel one another living, albeit through a technological proxy. An additional commercial, titled Rise, demonstrates taptics capacity to orient wearers. The commercial,
largely designed to showcase the devices notification capabilities, repeatedly shows
individuals interrupting various tasksincluding sleeping, drinking coffee, reading,
and walkingto look at alarms, calendar events, and phone calls on their wrist display
(Apple 2015b). Tapticsand their mechanical recreation of sensationsbecome key
ways of knowing and being with smartwatch technology.
The incorporation of haptic instants into practices of keeping track resonates with
claims about how information flows are largely immaterial in nature, and how part of
the work of media technologies is to give material form to these flows to allow bodies
to interact with information (Munster 2011). Initial reviews of the Apple Watch seized
on this relationship between the corporeal and incorporeal. Farhad Manjoo (2015), in
the New York Times, proclaimed, the Watch became something like a natural extension of my bodya direct link, in a way that Ive never felt before, from the digital
world to my brain. Here, the emphasis on corporeality resonates with technologys
in-forming capabilities, helping to shape the bodys relationship with otherwise virtual
information and experiences. The wearer engages the technology in a continued process of touching and tweaking, from swiping through news headlines to checking
items off a to-do list.
This mechanized touch may provide a sort of comfort, a means to form and reform
ones relationship with daily stimuli as computer information systems become primary mediators for all sorts of practices. In Apples marketing discourse, for instance,
the ability to send taps becomes a way for dispersed bodies to intimately connect
through the wrist-worn proxy. However, this also implicates the wearer in the
10
disciplinary capacities of this ongoing touch; in calling attention to itself, the instant
touchs demands for recognition in-form a body that must always be aware of, if not
able to respond to, the information pushed to the body.
Information Discipline
Although smartwatches may be valuable ways to push information to wearers throughout the day, it may ultimately be the devices ability to gather information through its
sensorsbiometric or otherwiseand its calls to interact with and respond to pushed
information that make it a technology capable of tethering wearers to corporate ideologies desiring greater information on the habits of consumers and workers alike.
Smartwatch sensors, such as heart rate monitors, provide potentially useful information to the wearer, but this information can also become useful to companies, employers, and governments striving to take advantage of this emergent sensor society
(Andrejevic and Burdon 2015). The smartwatch, for all its capacities to help the wearer
navigate potential information overload, is also a device that draws the wearer into
larger structures of corporate tracking.
The haptic features of other wearables foreground the disciplinary impulse these
devices often cultivate. The Lumo Lift, for instance, is worn against the body to monitor posture, and sends a small buzz to the skin every time it detects slouching; here,
haptic buzzing trains the body, using hardware sensors and algorithms to measure
your bodys alignment and tracking frequencies of deviation from proper posture
(Mitroff 2014). Pavlok sends small electric shocks to the skin for violating behaviors
the wearer marks as negative, and allows ones friends to monitor that behavior and
send shocks through a connected smartphone application. With these wearables,
touching, buzzing, and shocking are used for goals such as normalizing comportment.
The haptic instant becomes more a means of forming bodies that are perceived as more
capable of performing and being in the world. The ethic of self-care Michel Foucault
(1986) analyzed is here modified; while people may choose to wear these technologies, the mechanics of care are transferred to the technologies themselves, using them
as a means to manage the bodys function.
Wrist-worn wearables do not only participate in the disciplining of bodies through
comportment, but they also extend and reformulate E. P. Thompsons (1967) famous
notion of time-discipline to affect the ways in which bodies do work. For Thompson,
the shift in daily work from task orientation to timed labor marked a transformation of
time into currency, accompanied by techniques for monitoring efficiency, such as the
timesheet. Scholars such as Jonathan Crary (2013) have updated Thompsons notion
of time discipline in the context of twenty-first-century global labor, which, according
to Crary, is in the process of normalizing environments of incessant and unlimited
labor. Fastening a smartwatch to the body potentially tethers the individual to ideologies of unending and maximally efficient work, where employees can always be
reached by phoneand now, by watchto answer calls and receive e-mails, and
where technologies associated with labor increasingly creep into the purportedly
leisured spaces of daily life (Gregg 2011). Here, time discipline may well be being
11
Gilmore
12
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
Note
1. Histories of communication technologies in their emergent moments (as in Marvin 1988)
routinely stress how these technologies are understood through their relationship with
other extant technologies.
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Author Biography
James N. Gilmore is a doctoral candidate in Indiana Universitys Department of Communication
and Culture. His publications include the anthology Superhero Synergies: Comic Book
Characters Go Digital (Rowman and Littlefield, 2014).