IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Summer 2014 - 16

VIEWPOINT

Are Wearables
Really Ready to Wear?

he introduction and announcement of
Google Glass on April 4, 2012, changed the
landscape of computing for the everyday
person. Afterwards, for a full year before
the first developers' release in May of 2013, Glass was
a figment of our collective imagination. Google Glass
promised a "wearable" eye display for the masses that
would revolutionize smartphone culture. Our reaction was both amazement and fear because Google
claimed that Glass was to become so intimately intertwined with our daily life. We were struck by Glass's
promises, implying nearly instantaneous digital communication. It would give us direct visual access to
our friends, schedules, location information, and the
Internet, to name only a few of the tantalizing features. No more clunky phones. In a somewhat more
understated way, Glass's announcement also exuded
something of a superhero aura. While partly a fabrication of the marketing material, Glass made us feel
as if life would thenceforth be newer, better, cooler,
smarter. Simultaneously, we were terrified (and still
are!) over the potential for such a technology to rob us
of our privacy and dehumanize everyday life.
Are wearables really ready to wear? The hype
surrounding the massive 2014 Consumer Electronic
Show (CES) celebrated Glass, and many other wearable prototypes with wild enthusiasm, even though
many (including Glass) have not yet been released to
all consumers. However, what is overwhelming is our
general acceptance that Glass is a mass social phenomenon that will take shape. Since its announcement
in 2012, Glass has been accepted for better or worse
as a given with as much certainty as the setting sun.
And it is precisely this blind dedication that is cause
for concern. Have we completely lost confidence in
our ability to control the idea of our digital lives?
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2014.2319911
Date of publication: 4 June 2014

ISABEL PEDERSEN

Technology will march on seems to be our mantra.
Emergent digital media, like Glass, are invented,
designed, adopted, and even celebrated before society
is able to understand their impact on lives, culture,
values, art, politics, privacy, and social practices.
How do these beliefs about technology enter culture? Western society has fantasized about technologically enhanced human superheroes across, for
example, a wide spectrum of film enterprises for a
long time. Iron Man's exoskeleton enhances Tony
Stark to the point that he is nearly invincible. The batcave spawns a significant arsenal of gadgets powerful enough to transform Bruce Wayne into Batman.
Hal Jordan's powerful ring makes him not only strong
when he is the Green Lantern, but also able to alter
the time-space continuum. As mortals, each relies on
body-worn technologies to make himself superhuman, better-than-human, or essentially, transhuman.
No doubt, the celebration of these characters is very
much bound up in the explosion of superhero films
we are experiencing with DC comics' and Marvel's
constant film franchise releases.
However, popular culture is not only entertainment. It reflects the deeply entrenched values that we
hold as a society fueling us to accept certain technologies. A salient example is President Barack Obama's
joke during a press release announcing some technological innovations on February 25, 2014, when he
said of the u.S. government, "We are building Iron
Man" [1]. What could be more compelling?
The popular turn to wearable technologies in particular is yoked to this kind of societal adoration of
the "superhuman." Progress is bound up in a desire to
vault humanity's perceived limitations.
But there is more to this story. Wearable technology grasps for superhero scenarios because it does
not have past models that are evocative enough to
make sense of this new paradigm. Desktop computers sprang from the idea of typewriters. Smartphones
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