Saturday, December 5th, 2015
To begin, what are the jobs that watches are hired to do? They vary by person, but they can be condensed to the following:
Self-Satisfaction
The ownership and use of a watch produces self-satisfaction in two ways, through a sense of style and status. A watch, like all clothing and jewelry, reflects the owner’s sense of style and thus reveals some aspect of their personality. We communicate, either consciously or unconsciously, through what we choose to put on our bodies. But this isn’t just done for the benefit of others, we derive pleasure from what these signs say about us and our sense of self-worth. Through clothing and jewelry we can feel good about ourselves, or at the very least comfortable with how we come across to others.
As a social animal, we also draw utility and self-satisfaction from our rank, and jewelry like a watch sends a powerful signal about where we stand.
Connectedness
Functionally, a watch serves as a timekeeping device, with some watches having additional complications that give an even more fine grain view into time (for example, the phases of the moon or the day of the month). But what is time? No, really, what is it? Physicists don’t know, they only have hypotheses. Some hypotheses suggest that maybe actually everything that is happening, or has happened, or will happen, is actually happening right now, in one stretched out moment.
So, that dog won’t hunt. But we can talk about time as a social construct and as a tool for orienting ourselves in the world, and this is where we get to connectedness.
Time, seen in its social aspect, is a mutually agreed upon convention that allows us to get things done more or less harmoniously and without too much chaos. It is a form of connection with other people and a watch facilitates that connection, acting almost as a tether.
Time also orients us to the world, specifically to the rotation of the world on its axis and to its revolution around the sun, which determines the seasons. And some people also like to keep track of where the moon is in its revolution around our planet.
To lose track of time is to become untethered from the social and natural fabric that otherwise permeates our passage through the world. You wear a watch to prevent that from happening. And sometimes you choose to take off your watch to enable that untethering.
This is “connectedness”: a sense of being grounded in the temporal and social relations that define us.
What about the smartwatch then? What are its jobs? Everything mentioned above clearly can be done by a smartwatch. Its feature set can be quite long, but this doesn’t quite get at the jobs it is hired to do.
I propose that the smartwatch expands upon that sense of connectedness with the social and natural world provided by a watch by adding two additional dimensions: our health and our digital lives (which includes messaging).
The smartwatch’s position on the wrist makes it uniquely suited to being the device that monitors our health and produces mindfulness about our bodies. In effect, it is bringing connectedness to a corporeal level, extending the mission of a regular watch beyond the social and temporal.
And it does the same for our digital lives, allowing connectedness to that dimension without necessarily immersing ourselves in it. And it reduces the anxiety that might arise from simply disconnecting entirely. Where the smartphone provides connectivity and immersion, the smartwatch offers connectedness and glanceability.
If you don’t see specific examples of smartwatch usage here, it’s for a reason. Just as the utility and pleasure of a watch is something beyond what its “feature set” encapsulates, so is a smartwatch a subtle and experiential device. It’s an accumulation of moments and glances in many different contexts that builds to a whole greater than the sum of its parts. It is hard to imagine and easy to dismiss without trying (just as it must have seemed “silly” to have a clock in your house when the village church bell tolls out the hour; or to have a watch on your wrist when you can just pull out the one in your pocket).
And sometimes a smartwatch can just be something that’s nice to look at on our wrist. But that’s something it has a ways to work on yet.