Can Wearable Tech Bring Order to Our Lives?
By James N. Gilmore, author of Bringers of Order: Wearable Technologies and the Manufacturing of Everyday Life
I started writing about wearable technologies in the early-to-mid 2010s. I was fascinated with fitness trackers (like Fitbit) and smartwatches (like Apple Watch). Through my use of these devices, reading news reports about their uptake, and seeing representations of them proliferate across popular culture and advertising, I saw a shift in how technologies invited people to rethink everyday practice. These practices seemed to be redefining our sense of everyday life into something calculable, analyzable. In a word: knowable. My book’s title, Bringers of Order, comes from the keynote address for the first MIT symposium on wearable computing. In this address, Professor Alexander Pentland suggested the goal of these devices might be to “help bring some order to life.”.
But what, exactly, does ‘order’ mean? When we talk about ‘order’ in relationship to wearables, is it about everyday patterns of organization, such as the cultivation and maintenance of habits? Or does it indicate broader power structures that wind their way around the corners of everyday life, changing its fabric into something entirely different? Throughout Bringers of Order, I suggest that we pay more attention to how technologies may be part of ordering processes that promote surveillance strategies and a misplaced faith in devices’ capacity to meaningfully solve a variety of social problems.
The book’s subtitle calls this out as “the manufacturing of everyday life.” I am less concerned with individual habits and more concerned with how different institutions—including government agencies, insurance companies, schools, and technology manufacturers—deploy wearable technologies in a desire to learn more (and, in their arguments, learn better) about what people do and how they live.
While they may be ‘accurate’ in many ways, trouble can arise when we treat technologies as capable of accessing some kind of hidden truth. One example in the book is collegiate student athletes in the United States, who wear an array of devices as part of training, conditioning, and recovery. This doesn’t necessarily stop at the training facilities though: some athletes are asked to use a sleep monitoring system under the guise of helping coaches assess their quality of sleep. This system also allows players to be surveilled, ensuring they meet curfews and abide by team rules.
This pattern of what I and others call “solutionism” becomes a problem when we put the expectations onto technology to help solve problems. In the mid-2010s, there was sizeable energy around body-worn cameras to help solve problems with police brutality and growing tensions between police departments and communities around the United States. Cameras were supposed to provide transparency. One chapter of my book charts a case study of a community in South Carolina where laws and policies have been crafted that make it difficult—if not impossible—for journalists and citizens to obtain this footage.
The patterns I trace across Bringers of Order demonstrate an ongoing divide between how organizations talk about what technologies can do or might do, and what they do in practice. Bridging this divide will take continued analysis to better understand how devices work, the policies that govern them, and how manufactured data might be used against us. If we are going to allow technologies to bring something that can loosely be called “order” to our lives, then we need to better understand what these technologies do, how they do it, and what their limitations are. Only then can we start to feel empowered to make an order on our own terms.