Of course, these devices aren’t just tools - they’re windows. They bring the world to us, into the workplace, and the home, and even the palm of your hand. They’re a wonder, but also a danger.
With each type of device, we sacrifice a little more of the world immediately around us in exchange for the virtual one. Desktop computers are things of total immersion, where we’re almost piloting a machine. Laptops let us enter that machine from a wider variety of starting locations, and perhaps let us climb out more easily. Then we have mobile devices, which superimpose the digital world as a semi-transparent overlay on every part of our lives.
We’ve been trained by these objects. We’re presented with stimuli, and we display conditioned behaviour. Notifications and interruptions permeate the membrane between actual life, and our electronic existence - and our devices are the conduits.
A few days ago, I began wearing an Apple Watch, and I did so with some unease.
My fear was that a wearable would be the most intrusive of all devices, bringing trespass even to situations where my phone was away, and I was engaged in other activities - eating up the last remaining uninterrupted portions of my life.
I was surprised to find that, instead, the Watch helped me regain lost ground.
The problem with notifications is that they occupy the junction of several unhealthy human characteristics: social pressure of timely response, a need for diversion, and our constant thirst for novelty. Mobile devices exacerbate that issue by letting us succumb to all of those at any moment. That’s not a good thing. I’m constantly horrified that much of Microsoft’s advertising seems to presuppose that working twenty-four hours per day is mankind’s long-sought nirvana.
Perhaps we are beginning to see the solution to the puzzle around wearables: do we need another device?
For years, our mobile applications have been so rich and fully-featured that we can spend hours using them - and so we do. They’re already our preferred form of interaction with computing devices, the internet, and each other. And the truth is, we’ve been lying to ourselves about the freedom they bring.
If you’re like me, you probably hate when people phone you instead of texting or emailing. It’s intrusive, it demands an immediate response, and it ties you up for minutes at a time. I have better things to do! Let me deal with your needs once I’ve met my own.
But we treat all of our notifications like phone calls. A mention on Twitter becomes a check of your tweet stream, and a response, and a few favourites or retweets. An incoming email might mutate into checking the web site in the sender’s signature, or any embedded links in the message, and indeed writing a reply. An iMessage gets an immediate response even though you can defer it, complete with half a minute of fumbling around for the perfect emoji.
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I’m making full use of the Watch, including all the much-touted stuff like fitness tracking, sending sketches and taps to other wearers, and controlling the music in my office from my wrist. But the revelation for me has been how this little gadget - so very clearly a 1.0 product - has changed my relationship with my other devices.
In the same way that the iPhone was the first phone to really start eating away at what we used computers for, the Watch is the first wearable that’s lessened the amount of time I spend with my phone. For much of my day, the iPhone has become a sort of server, sitting quietly in a pocket, facilitating my interactions with its little brother.
