Wearable Technology & Dehumanisation

Strolling aimlessly through the city at Christmas always provided certain contentment absent from the year’s otherwise banal months.

A sensory overload – dense smells, burnt orange glows, the plastic snow of shop windows though cliché provided an intrinsic connection with those you walked the streets with. It may have been a connection forged through some cleverly marketed Christmas cheer, but it was one that brought young and old, friend and stranger together.

But this year was different. On returning home my only recollection was stumbling into the hoards of shoppers whilst checking Facebook streams and Twitter feeds. Gone was the connection that Christmas instilled, and in its place was an insulate bubble surrounding every shopper; one reminiscent of Automobile Monthly’s UniPod concept of the 1960’s. Paradoxical it may be, but social media has stripped our ability to be social beings.

Interestingly, this is not a new phenomenon. Concerned by how Sony’s new portable audio device was disconnecting others in the cityscape, Japanese music scholar Shuhei Hosokawa theorized ‘The Walkman Theory’ in 1981. This concluded that while ones attention is fair game when walking down the street, listening to music on a portable device makes you look busy already. Therefore, those who might otherwise be willing to interrupt are thus deterred from interaction by the fact that there’s a good chance they won’t even be heard, rendering their effort futile or worse—embarrassing.

The introduction of wearable technology has the potential to only exacerbate the ‘Walkman Effect.’ The invention of social media and subsequent arrival of the smartphone forced us to adapt to a means of communication that was artificial – an adaption that has since developed into an addiction severe enough for several government authorities to recognise social media addiction as an official condition

It seems that a constant exposure to wearable technology has the potential to rewire our brains in a way that prevents us from acting and displaying social gestures intrinsic to human life.

The introduction of wearable technology such as the iWatch and Google Glass will only serve to exacerbate our current dehumanisation. Unlike the smartphone which can be placed out of harms way in a pocket or handbag, wearable tech will always be in our line of sight – our constant shadow will be an inescapable stream of social media updates, news reports and chat windows. Society will be better read, sure, but it will come at the cost of our capacity to communicate as a normal society.

Face to face communication will suffer while our ability to read human emotion will deplete, reflecting on Jürgen Habermas musings that technology will cause the fragility of human nature to deteriorate, in effect dehumanizing society.

This raises several questions about our future. Will we communicate to our voice controlled wearable technologies more than those we love? Will our thoughts become as sterile as the devices we have become addicted to? It seems that a constant exposure to wearable technology has the potential to rewire our brains in a way that prevents us from acting and displaying  social gestures intrinsic to human life.

Technology has already enforced such change. The introduction of word processors in the early 90’s  corrected the grammatical and spellings errors of the typist – in effect wiping the human brains ability to spell correctly, or self correct those mistakes.

Our brain’s unerring ability to adapt to the new and erase the seemingly worthless presents the most imposing barrier to wearable tech – will we embrace a device that has the potential to remove us from what and who we are a people?

[1] Bostrom, Nick. “In Defence of Posthuman Dignity.”  Bioethics, Vol. 19, No. 3 (2007). 202-214. Print.

[2] Dutcher, Michele. Google GLASS – Advancement or Dehumanization? Michele Dutcher at TEDxAlbany 2013. N.p., 2013. Film.

[3] Hosokawa, Shuhei. “The Walkman Effect.” Popular Music 4 (1984): 165–180. Print.

[4] Mahdawi, Arwa. “The Unhealthy Side of Wearable Fitness Devices.” The Guardian 3 Jan. 2014. The Guardian. Web. 15 Dec. 2014.

[5] Scoble, Robert. “10 Reasons Why Google Glass Is Doomed.” Entrepreneur. N.p., n.d. Web. 15 Dec. 2014.