Ready to wear (or not): Examining the rhetorical impact of proposed wearable devices

Future, wearable, digital devices are constantly emerging and celebrated in the mainstream news media. We are gradually embracing the idea that our future digital life will involve watch computers, heads-up displays, brain-computer interfaces, body sensors, and digital tattoos, to name a few examples. In keeping with the Google Glass phenomenon, these devices are often talked about long before they are available for purchase or use. In a sense, digital media are invented, designed, adopted and even celebrated before society is able to understand their impact on lives, culture, art, privacy, and social practices. More so, society clings to the belief that their emergence is imminent, creating an aura that impedes our assessment of them. Based on an ongoing project that uses digital rhetoric and digital humanities methodologies to explore wearables and their invention, this paper argues that emergent technology can spawn dehumanizing representations while it strives for the opposite, more human-centric interaction with computers. As we design digital devices to augment our physical existence, how are we altering the way people conceptualize so many other aspects of humanity such as creativity, analytical reasoning, nostalgia, imagination, and privacy. When mainstream media celebrate technology such as Google Glass and so many other new wearable devices, we need to take a much closer look at how they frame us, our culture, our society. This research uses a humanities model to uncover assumptions made in the language of invention in order to reveal how humans are conceptualized and misconceptualized. As future-proposed technology marches on, we need to understand the concepts driving the devices that inventors create, but also the social structuring and identity-building that humans endure in this process.