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TVNXXX10.1177/1527476416658962Television & New MediaGilmore

Article

From Ticks and Tocks to


Budges and Nudges: The
Smartwatch and the Haptics
of Informatic Culture

Television & New Media


114
The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/1527476416658962
tvn.sagepub.com

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

University, Bloomington, USA

Corresponding Author:
James N. Gilmore, Department Communication and Culture, Indiana University, 800 E. Third Street,
Bloomington, IN 47405, USA.
Email: jamgilmo@indiana.edu

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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.

The Haptic Instant


Like conventional wristwatches, smartwatches are worn on the wrist throughout the
day; they constitute one form of wearable technology, or everywear (Gilmore 2015;
Greenfield 2006). Sensors and chips make them smart, allowing them to gather data
and perform computational tasks. Many iterations in the 2012 to 2015 generation sync
with smartphones via Bluetooth, pushing notifications such as text messages, e-mails,
reminders, and phone calls to ones wrist through a small vibration and a display
screen. With some models, such as Apple Watch, users can respond to these notifications through voice dictation using a small microphone. In this sense, smartwatches
appear quite similar to smartphones, but their overtly wearable nature creates a notable
difference in how they provide certain forms of bodily orientation toward technology.
This is not so much a difference in kind, as they are both communication technologies
that offer similar sets of capacities, but rather a difference in degree or intensity regarding the technologys proximity to the body (see further Deleuze 1988).
The haptic instant manifests when the smartwatch notifies the human body through
some kind of touch. It is both the instant of informing (in that it presents facts, data,
or some form of communication to the wearer) and also the instant of formation (in
that it is when the body becomes most aware of the device). This wave of daily information, from social media alerts and professional e-mails to news headlines and
sports scores, indicates a culture where computer information systems increasingly
matter to the practices of everyday life, and where mechanically produced haptic
sensations may be becoming central to the experiential sensations of this culture.
Although the ties between in-formation and embodiment have been productively
explored in the context of, among other objects, digital images (Hansen 2004), smartwatches emphasize a particular play between the haptic instant and the other components of the sensorium. For example, the Apple Watchs use of a touchscreen makes
it a digital communication technology reliant on the digit as much as the voice and
the eye and the skin to optimally function (B. Peters 2014): vocally, the Apple Watch
is capable of voice dictation and phone calls, its screen can display different text and

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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

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predicated on the coordinating effects of touch. The haptic instant creates a physical
sensation that accompanies virtual activities.

From Telling Time to Sensing Instants


The watchand, by extension, the clockhas long been a contingent and multiply
articulated technology. The telling of timefrom counting minutes to signaling the
progression of hours through chimesis largely a social convention that sediments
after protracted negotiations between, among other domains, religious and cultural
understandings of natures cycles (Glennie and Thrift 2009; Zerubavel 1985).
Timekeeping technologies are also part of this process, and are thus constitutive of
changing social and cultural dynamics. The establishment of global time zones
occurred alongside the expansion of industry, the capacity for individual travel, and
the trans-continental shipment and circulation of goods in the nineteenth century.
Simultaneously, the emergence of electric-based communication technologies such as
the telegraph offered a number of management techniques for ensuring temporal synchronicity across space (Carey 1992). Historically, then, technological changes, cultural changes, and changes in the everyday experience of time and space all interrelate.
Technologies provide discrete sets of possibilities for producing experiences of time,
and the production of these experiences is both part of and a response to changing
experiences of culture.
As much as timekeeping technologies exemplify logistical media (J. D. Peters
2013), in that they can be used to arrange and orient people in time and space, each
timekeeping technology additionally offers its own mixture of sensorial experiences.
For instance, the clock tower allows time to be seen (through its hands), heard (through
its chimes), and even felt (if the gong is strong enough). Be it in the observances of the
suns movement, or the warmth of the day, or the chiming of the towers, or the hands
of a pocket watch, there is a fundamentally multisensorial apprehension to a day. The
pocket watch, as a contrasting example, makes time a more visual phenomenon than
bell towers by emphasizing the clock face as opposed to chimes, not to mention a more
tactile or graspable experience.
The haptic instants of smartwatches are less bound to a clockwork progression, and
they point to the changing nature of logistics away from astronomical orientations of
time and more toward managing the logistical processes of communication. They
occur whenever information the wearer has deemed important touches her or him,
marking a potential shift in how time and information are processed and understood.
For instance, while the wearer exists in locatable, physical space and time, the technology she or he wears ensures that information can be constantly pushed to her or him
from a cellular or WiFi network. The pushing of information in this way has become
an increasingly common aspect of both work and social communications, such that
time is sensed not only through predictable ticks and chimes but also through the haptic instants accompanying buzzes and bumps throughout the day.
This increased preoccupation with the instant has developed throughout twentiethcentury mass culture. To offer just one example of this, Rachel Bowlby (2001) has

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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.

The Instant Touch


Because smartwatches rely on a somewhat intimate relationship with the body, it is
necessary to ground their analysis in approaches capable of unpacking the phenomenological dimensions of experience. This section begins, then, with a brief reflection
on my own experiences with these devices before connecting it to a more theoretical
consideration of how their haptic engagements afford particular understandings of
instants. The point of this reflection is not to over-generalize the experience of technology but rather to offer one set of experiences through which to frame the concepts
developed within this article.
My first week owning a Pebble Watch was fraught. The constant vibrating on my
wrist caused many distractions, absorbing me in a stream of notifications and reminders pulsing from my smartphones assortedand easier to ignoreapplications.
Roughly two weeks in to my experience with Pebble, I noticed a change in my disposition toward the device. As my wrist became accustomed to wearing it, I adapted to this
new mode of receiving and processing information. I still felt compelled (or, perhaps,

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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

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overload, so that keeping track of keeping track threatens to become an overwhelming


practice (Chatfield 2015).
The smartwatch applications associated with information management also entail
rhythms that pulsate through daily life. Henri Lefebvres (2004) concept of rhythmanalysisa hermeneutics of rhythms and beats that make up the corporeal, natural,
and industrial worldoffers generative directions for understanding the smartwatch
as a haptic information-management device. For Lefebvre (2004), the body requires
techniques to grasp the fleeting rhythms of everyday life. He writes, to grasp a
rhythm it is necessary to have been grasped by it (p. 24, emphasis in original). In
some senses, the rhythmanalytical potential of smartwatches is clear (though maybe
not as Lefebvre had intended): not only do their sensors monitor bodies rhythms,
from heartbeats to movement and more, but they also provide literal beats for attending to and managing information. These beats are not necessarily rhythms in the
traditional sense, because they are not patterned. These devices permit the wearer to
experience, understand, and comport elements of her or his own bodysuch as heart
ratethrough engineered beats and pulses, in addition to elements of the professional
and social world in which she or he lives. Smartwatches haptic instants function
much the same way as metronomes allow musicians to train their playing to given
tempos; again, this instantiates a temporality predicated on continually becoming
oriented toward information.

Feeling and In-forming


Dynamics of touch help direct the potentially overwhelming nature of keeping track
through many forms of digital communication technologies. From the touchscreens of
nearly all smartphones and tablets to the phenomenon of phantom cellphone vibrations (Miller 2014), the experiences of these technologies occur through sensations of
touching and being touched. Smartwatches are felt in various ways, such as through
the materials of their straps and their weight, but also through regular tapping and
buzzing. The prominence of these sensations extends and intensifies through haptic
instants, which offer one means to feel communication with another human body,
even when both parties are a considerable distance from one another.
Although some smartwatches, such as Pebble, primarily use a uniform buzzing
sensation to signal all incoming notifications, Apple Watch incorporates what the
company calls taptic engines to create variable taps and buzzes for different sorts
of information, as well as pushing back at the wearer when she or he applies a certain
amount of force (Hall 2014). In its promotional discourse for the first generation of
the Watch, Apple stressed taptic engines as a form of intimacy. For instance, users can
send taps. Because your friend is wearing an Apple Watch, hell feel the same tap
pattern on their [sic] wrist (Apple 2015a) in a mode of communication the company
calls Digital Touch. Apple Watch increasingly allows for a range of biometric and
haptic data to be shared between users, and for different levels and intensities of tapping and buzzing to signify different sorts of information (Pierce 2015). For instance,
receiving a reminder results in two slight taps, while a phone call entails a repeated

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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

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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

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subsumed by information discipline, or a need to efficiently respond to and interact


with information throughout ones day.
In this context, every haptic instant threatens to act as a control mechanism for
monitoring and securing the practices of a spatially dispersed work force united
through these emergent forms of communication (as in Deleuze 1992). A number of
institutions and developers have created applications designed, in part, to contain and
direct the smartwatch toward economic and managerial imperatives. The smartwatchcompatible application BetterWorks, for example, allows companies to set goals, and
then for usersbe they employees or bossesto check in on them with just a glance
at their wrist (Dormehl 2015). This app borrows the goal-setting tactics of many fitness trackers, but it also allows companies to monitor and track labor from afar. This
extends Thompsons logic of the timesheet. No longer do workers clock in and clock
out, providing two definitive information points for mapping workflow. BetterWorks
and similar work-management applications make workers check in at a number of
instants, disciplining them toward more productive and persistent labor management within regimes of flexible labor (Titlow 2015). These applications imagine a
modality of workplace governance where computational processes and data mining
can tune and hone worker performance into efficient individual output.
The extensions of Thompsons formulation of time discipline into a potential
information discipline resonate with work on digital labor. Where a growing number
of scholars have attended to the expansion of work processes into social activity, collapsing the distance between sites of labor and sites of leisure (for instance, Fuchs
2015), the smartwatchs mode of haptic engagement suggests that any instant can
potentially become a moment requiring attention, labor, and production. The shifting
articulation of watch to which this article has attended thus also relates to shifting
conceptions of productivity.

Conclusion: Touch as Tension


In all of the varied haptic instants this article has discussed, the act of touching is also
being rearticulated to form certain experiences. These experiences are not only influenced by the cultural, social, institutional, and other powers and structures that comprise the world, but also constituted through the materials of the devices themselves,
and the ways in which they touch and are touched. Through smartwatches, the instant
becomes a source of tension. These devices must be understood as both providing
potentially valuable modes of apprehending the information floating through the
wearers every day, and subjecting the wearer to demands that insist on continued
labor and physical discipline.
The Apple Watch offers, somewhat paradoxically, more touch and less touch. It
instills different ways to feel and to touch precisely because it participates in a culture
that values computer information systems capable of virtualizing many everyday practices, such as shopping and communicating. The haptic instant offers a set of possibilities for living in this culture. The smartwatch can provide wearers graspable ways to
feel technologically (Sobchack 2004, 141) by fastening and being grasped by

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Television & New Media

wearable technology, even though they may be participating in practicessuch as


buying a product through online retailer Amazonthat requires no actual encounter
with another person or other material object. Although instants have perhaps always
been integral to how individuals organize the discrete and collective periods of their
everyday lives, these haptic instants entail tensions between possibilityof different
forms of communicationand constraintof the effects of maximizing worker
efficiency.
This article has emphasized communication, through elements such as Apples taptic engines, and labor, through elements such as the BetterWorks application, as two
elements of experience that the haptic instant is able to exploit. The structure of this
article has, in itself, accounted for this tension, moving as it does from a more phenomenological account of these buzzes and nudges, and toward a more critical account of
how they might discipline dispersed workers. The smartwatch is thus one of the latest
in a long history of devices that help constitute the unending, processual formation of
human bodies.
With smartwatches, one chooses to fasten the materials of informatic culture against
the skin. This choice reflects a perceived desireeven if it seems, at the time of this
writing, limited to a smaller, tech-savvy segment of the populationto extend computer information systems toward the scale of the body, making them not just holdable (as with a tablet), but felt and connected to the pulsing rhythms of the world. This
perceived desire for felt-ness emerges from the potential loss of physical orientation in
an increasingly virtualized world, and the ability of haptic technologies to recover the
daily loss of contact and tactility in many everyday practices, even if only for an
instant. The processes of formation through haptic instants offer one way for the
human body to adapt to and live in a culture that increasingly prizes computational,
automated, and virtual ways of being in the world.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.

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).

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