Wearing Your Computer on Your Sleeve
Technology often has a way of fixing the problems it creates. Here's one that needs solving. — The invention of the smartphone has created a world where millions of people stroll through life constantly staring into a mobile device, like Narcissus at the edge of a pond.
Context & Ripple Effects
The column picks up a thread the Times itself started in 2009, when it traced how the cellphone was rewiring navigation and daily routine: the device that put computing in every pocket also put millions of people face-down in a screen. Framing the problem with the Narcissus image, the argument is that technology tends to fix what it breaks — and the fix here is moving the computer off the hand and onto the body.
How far along that idea already was shows in the pickup: 9to5Google ran the story the same day under a pointed frame — that Google X's wearable effort is not an iPod Nano-style accessory but a heads-up display built into glasses. A newspaper column about a vague category thus landed, within hours, attached to a specific named project and a specific form factor.
First-order effects
- Google's secretive X lab gains a public narrative it did not write: press coverage now describes its wearable as eyewear with a heads-up display, setting expectations before any product announcement.
Second-order effects
- Device makers face a fork the column sharpens — whether body-worn computing ships as a fashion accessory strapped to an existing gadget or as a new display class like glasses — and whichever path leads, the smartphone screen stops being the default endpoint for glanceable information.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the industry's center of gravity shifts from the pocket to the body: interface design, social norms around always-on attention, and the 'yet another device' purchase hurdle all get re-litigated around wearables rather than phones.
The trend: Personal computing is migrating from the handheld screen to body-worn interfaces, with the display form factor — wrist versus glasses — still contested.