From Ticks and Tocks to Budges and Nudges

The Haptic Instant

Like conventional wristwatches, smartwatches are worn on the wrist throughout the day; they constitute one form of wearable technology, or “everywear” (Gilmore 2015; Greenfield 2006). Sensors and chips make them “smart,” allowing them to gather data and perform computational tasks. Many iterations in the 2012 to 2015 generation sync with smartphones via Bluetooth, pushing notifications such as text messages, e-mails, reminders, and phone calls to one’s wrist through a small vibration and a display screen. With some models, such as Apple Watch, users can respond to these notifications through voice dictation using a small microphone. In this sense, smartwatches appear quite similar to smartphones, but their overtly wearable nature creates a notable difference in how they provide certain forms of bodily orientation toward technology. This is not so much a difference in kind, as they are both communication technologies that offer similar sets of capacities, but rather a difference in degree or intensity regarding the technology’s proximity to the body (see further Deleuze 1988).

The haptic instant manifests when the smartwatch notifies the human body through some kind of touch. It is both the instant of informing (in that it presents facts, data, or some form of communication to the wearer) and also the instant of formation (in that it is when the body becomes most aware of the device). This wave of daily information, from social media alerts and professional e-mails to news headlines and sports scores, indicates a culture where computer information systems increasingly matter to the practices of everyday life, and where mechanically produced haptic sensations may be becoming central to the experiential sensations of this culture. Although the ties between in-formation and embodiment have been productively explored in the context of, among other objects, digital images (Hansen 2004), smartwatches emphasize a particular play between the haptic instant and the other components of the sensorium. For example, the Apple Watch’s use of a touchscreen makes it a digital communication technology reliant on the digit as much as the voice and the eye and the skin to optimally function (B. Peters 2014): vocally, the Apple Watch is capable of voice dictation and phone calls, its screen can display different text and graphical layouts of information that need to be seen, and the device can track biometric data such as heart rate as it rests against the skin. The haptic instant thus triggers a complex interplay between senses as information is received and processed through the smartwatch.

The haptic instant makes the instant felt in a way that is different from, say, the way in which digital clocks demarcate clean relationships between each second or minute. It provides, in other words, its own sensations of instantaneity tied more to touch than to sight. Following Vivian Sobchack’s (2004, 136) argument that technologies constitute figurations of bodily existence, the smartwatch helps constitute the body within an increasingly virtual culture, where information systems and screens play a key role in practices of sense making and way finding. Pokes against the skin, as when the wearer receives notifications from a Map application in the form of a string of taps alerting her or him to an upcoming turn, thus mark these devices as potentially orienting the wearer. They direct the body toward not only the device but also a subsequent response to the information displayed. Through the haptic instant, smartwatches facilitate a shift of the day’s progression from the clock’s regular, chronological increments toward the deluge of e-mails, phone calls, meetings, and other notifications that both clutter and guide everyday routines.

Wearable technology in general—including fitness trackers, recording devices, and biometric sensors—offers processes of human training as well as capabilities to attune the human body to larger, more abstract flows of society, economics, and labor in which it lives. Smartwatches, in other words, cultivate—specifically, an awareness of and engagement with the accumulating instants of everyday life by making otherwise virtual information felt through haptic beats against the skin. An etymological root of “watch” is found in the Old English waeccende, meaning “remaining awake.” Throughout the day, the smartwatch is always-on and always-on-the-wearer (Turkle 2008); it remains “awake,” or context aware, extending the capacity for watchfulness. To call smartwatches “watches” is thus to recognize that they may be accentuating specific meanings of an otherwise conventional, if not taken-for-granted, word. Where mechanical watches and clocks can convey, among other things, a synchronized global time (as charted in Ling 2012), the smartwatch corresponds to a perceived desire on the part of technology-manufacturing companies to feel otherwise abstract global flows of information against perhaps the most personal of all sites—one’s own body.

As the flow of certain forms of information become detectable on one’s wrist, haptic instants facilitate a shifting “temporality,” in Sarah Sharma’s (2014) use of the word. For Sharma, “Temporalities are not times; like continually broken clocks, they must be reset again and again” through the coordination of lived experience (pp. 8–9). Haptic instants are, like many other practices of timekeeping and organization, designed to help bodies coordinate and orient themselves. Each haptic instant provides an opportunity for the body to “reset” and refocus on the information being pushed to the wrist. This continuous mode of coordination permits the sensorium to come into contact with that which may otherwise remain unrealized. For example, while an e-mail lacks the tactility of an envelope and a paper letter, the haptic instant still allows receiving mail to “feel” a particular way, while simultaneously instilling a temporality predicated on the coordinating effects of touch. The haptic instant creates a physical sensation that accompanies virtual activities.

From Telling Time to Sensing Instants

The watch—and, by extension, the clock—has long been a contingent and multiply articulated technology. The telling of time—from counting minutes to signaling the progression of hours through chimes—is largely a social convention that sediments after protracted negotiations between, among other domains, religious and cultural understandings of nature’s cycles (Glennie and Thrift 2009; Zerubavel 1985). Timekeeping technologies are also part of this process, and are thus constitutive of changing social and cultural dynamics. The establishment of global time zones occurred alongside the expansion of industry, the capacity for individual travel, and the trans-continental shipment and circulation of goods in the nineteenth century. Simultaneously, the emergence of electric-based communication technologies such as the telegraph offered a number of management techniques for ensuring temporal synchronicity across space (Carey 1992). Historically, then, technological changes, cultural changes, and changes in the everyday experience of time and space all interrelate. Technologies provide discrete sets of possibilities for producing experiences of time, and the production of these experiences is both part of and a response to changing experiences of culture.

As much as timekeeping technologies exemplify “logistical media” (J. D. Peters 2013), in that they can be used to arrange and orient people in time and space, each timekeeping technology additionally offers its own mixture of sensorial experiences. For instance, the clock tower allows time to be seen (through its hands), heard (through its chimes), and even felt (if the gong is strong enough). Be it in the observances of the sun’s movement, or the warmth of the day, or the chiming of the towers, or the hands of a pocket watch, there is a fundamentally multisensorial apprehension to a day. The pocket watch, as a contrasting example, makes time a more visual phenomenon than bell towers by emphasizing the clock face as opposed to chimes, not to mention a more tactile or graspable experience.

The haptic instants of smartwatches are less bound to a clockwork progression, and they point to the changing nature of logistics away from astronomical orientations of time and more toward managing the logistical processes of communication. They occur whenever information the wearer has deemed important “touches” her or him, marking a potential shift in how time and information are processed and understood. For instance, while the wearer exists in locatable, physical space and time, the technology she or he wears ensures that information can be constantly “pushed” to her or him from a cellular or WiFi network. The pushing of information in this way has become an increasingly common aspect of both work and social communications, such that time is sensed not only through predictable ticks and chimes but also through the haptic instant’s accompanying buzzes and bumps throughout the day.

This increased preoccupation with the instant has developed throughout twentieth-century mass culture. To offer just one example of this, Rachel Bowlby (2001) has traced the desire for the “instant” through mass goods of the 1950s, including “instant” coffee. These “instant things,” in Bowlby’s terms, shift temporal associations away from the longer sequences of their production and toward the possibility of their consumption without any real sort of temporal investment (p. 176). Smartwatches, as another mass-produced technology, offer a way to manage this ongoing erosion of “sequences” into “instants,” where the day is defined as much by the passing of hours as by a varying procession of reminders, tasks, and alerts. The haptic instant manages this parade of messages and notifications that make up the flow of daily communication and work.

Much like how the “instant” has a longer cultural history that is being reconfigured in the present moment through an assortment of technologies and practices, the computational watch emerged over the last quarter of the twentieth century, even though many earlier attempts did not receive the journalistic fanfare of the 2012 to 2015 generation. In 1975, Pulsar’s calculator watch was, in a sense, among the first smartwatches, as the calculator provides one way to process and manage certain forms of numerical information. Since 1975, a number of watchmakers and technology companies have attempted to incorporate additional computational processes and information storage techniques into watch design. For example, the 1994 Timex Datalink included features that became essential to smartwatches twenty years later: syncing contacts, appointments, and lists from a personal computer, and loadable “WristApps” like a golf scorekeeper. As a television commercial for the product explained, the watch used “light beams to transfer dates and data from your computer to your wrist” (Ellis 2015). The promise here, as with the Apple Watch in 2015, is a device that places information pertaining to the routines of everyday life onto the wrist, accessible at a glance. In effect, this practice of glancing at particular types of information decenters traditional timekeeping, and thus the traditional utility of a watch, by offering different forms of data for the wearer to view.

The Instant Touch

Because smartwatches rely on a somewhat intimate relationship with the body, it is necessary to ground their analysis in approaches capable of unpacking the phenomenological dimensions of experience. This section begins, then, with a brief reflection on my own experiences with these devices before connecting it to a more theoretical consideration of how their haptic engagements afford particular understandings of “instants.” The point of this reflection is not to over-generalize the experience of technology but rather to offer one set of experiences through which to frame the concepts developed within this article.

My first week owning a Pebble Watch was fraught. The constant vibrating on my wrist caused many distractions, absorbing me in a stream of notifications and reminders pulsing from my smartphone’s assorted—and easier to ignore—applications. Roughly two weeks in to my experience with Pebble, I noticed a change in my disposition toward the device. As my wrist became accustomed to wearing it, I adapted to this new mode of receiving and processing information. I still felt compelled (or, perhaps, disciplined) to glance at my wrist with every haptic buzz, but I became more adept at managing these glances and responses to the tiny display screen, quickly dismissing unimportant updates from Twitter or turning toward my phone to respond to an important work e-mail. This management became more pronounced when using the Apple Watch, which allows me to “glance” at information from a number of apps with the flick of a finger. I could, for instance, check the score of a baseball game, a grocery list, and my heart rate with a few quick flicks and glances. This ability to personalize and manage the sorts of information accessible from the wrist resonates with the relationship between “costume” and “custom,” both of which are derived from the Latin consuetudo, meaning the act of habituating. Smartwatches—and wearable technology more generally—are thus part of a process of adorning oneself with habits (Striphas 2011). Although the linguistic development of consuetudo has generated a number of words, the smartwatch offers an opportunity to see how the forking paths of this word might be returned to their origin to grasp another implication of the word “habit”—so critical in discussions of everyday life (as in Felski 1999/2000)—in the context of wearable technology.

Through this process of costuming and habituating, the smartwatch facilitates a dialectic between distraction and attention in its attempts to congregate the dispersed “pop-up” information and notifications of everyday life (Rutsky 2002). The buzzes to the wrist may distract the wearer from aspects of one’s physical surroundings while also offering continued orientation to the progression of non-corporeal occurrences that are equally important over the course of a day. Smartwatches are, in principle, able to overcome at least some of the perils of information overload and distraction precisely because practices of multi-screen multitasking have become ordinary for many users of digital communication technologies (Hassoun 2015). The smartwatch, like the smartphone, is designed to perform what might be thought of as “relational” work, binding the wearer into purportedly easier ways of interfacing with the world in which she or he moves, works, and lives through such operations as hands-free, voice-dictated actions. Successfully coordinating the smartwatch’s use, in other words, would allow the wearer to balance their physical and virtual relationships to the world. Smartwatches thus extend the practices begun by smartphones through situating the often-related signals, flows, and communications of everyday practice against the skin. Through applications like Apple Pay—which allow wearers to perform frictionless credit card transactions by placing their Apple Watch against select credit card readers—the wrist becomes a site for extending, managing, and performing everyday practices such as commerce.

This relational information management intervenes in the form of overload Mark Andrejevic (2013) terms infoglut. According to Andrejevic, the “proliferation of portable, networked, interactive devices” has corresponded to a rise in mediated information pulsing through one’s daily routine (p. 14). For example, the Apple Watch offers calendar apps, reminders, and to-do lists, while the Pebble Time smartwatch incorporates a series of “timelines” for managing daily and weekly reminders. These applications use visual markers of linear time, such as calendars, to organize infoglut. However, these “endless” lists, reminders, and calendars may create their own form of overload, so that keeping track of keeping track threatens to become an overwhelming practice (Chatfield 2015).

The smartwatch applications associated with information management also entail rhythms that pulsate through daily life. Henri Lefebvre’s (2004) concept of rhythmanalysis—a hermeneutics of rhythms and beats that make up the corporeal, natural, and industrial world—offers generative directions for understanding the smartwatch as a haptic information-management device. For Lefebvre (2004), the body requires techniques to grasp the fleeting rhythms of everyday life. He writes, “to grasp a rhythm it is necessary to have been grasped by it” (p. 24, emphasis in original). In some senses, the rhythmanalytical potential of smartwatches is clear (though maybe not as Lefebvre had intended): not only do their sensors monitor bodies’ rhythms, from heartbeats to movement and more, but they also provide literal beats for attending to and managing information. These beats are not necessarily “rhythms” in the traditional sense, because they are not patterned. These devices permit the wearer to experience, understand, and comport elements of her or his own body—such as heart rate—through engineered beats and pulses, in addition to elements of the professional and social world in which she or he lives. Smartwatches’ haptic instants function much the same way as metronomes allow musicians to train their playing to given tempos; again, this instantiates a temporality predicated on continually becoming oriented toward information.

Feeling and In-forming

Dynamics of “touch” help direct the potentially overwhelming nature of keeping track through many forms of digital communication technologies. From the touchscreens of nearly all smartphones and tablets to the phenomenon of “phantom cellphone vibrations” (Miller 2014), the experiences of these technologies occur through sensations of touching and being touched. Smartwatches are felt in various ways, such as through the materials of their straps and their weight, but also through regular tapping and buzzing. The prominence of these sensations extends and intensifies through haptic instants, which offer one means to “feel” communication with another human body, even when both parties are a considerable distance from one another.

Although some smartwatches, such as Pebble, primarily use a uniform buzzing sensation to signal all incoming notifications, Apple Watch incorporates what the company calls “taptic engines” to create variable taps and buzzes for different sorts of information, as well as pushing back at the wearer when she or he applies a certain amount of force (Hall 2014). In its promotional discourse for the first generation of the Watch, Apple stressed taptic engines as a form of intimacy. For instance, users can “send taps. Because your friend is wearing an Apple Watch, he’ll feel the same tap pattern on their [sic] wrist” (Apple 2015a) in a mode of communication the company calls Digital Touch. Apple Watch increasingly allows for a range of biometric and haptic data to be shared between users, and for different levels and intensities of tapping and buzzing to signify different sorts of information (Pierce 2015). For instance, receiving a “reminder” results in two slight taps, while a phone call entails a repeated series of more aggressive bumps against the wrist for the duration of what would otherwise be the phone’s ring.

Apple’s development of the neologism “taptic”—a combination of “tap” and “haptic”—begs a consideration of the word’s importance in conjunction with this device. The etymology of “haptic” encompasses the Greek haptikos, meaning to touch or grasp, and also haptein, meaning to fasten. The smartwatch embodies both senses of the word. Once fastened, the smartwatch “touches” the wearer to grasp and direct her or his attention in some way. Buzzes, taps, beats, and other forms of vibration are used for information notification, alerting one to achievements in fitness tracking, serving as alarms, and offering forms of interpersonal communication between smartwatch wearers.

One Apple Watch commercial from the product’s initial launch, titled “Us,” imagines the importance of haptic instants for interpersonal communication (Apple 2015c). The commercial oscillates between individuals physically communicating—speaking directly to or physically touching one another—and individuals using the smartwatch as an intermediary to send messages, drawings, or even heartbeats to other Watch wearers. Where Malcolm McCullough (2013, 288) explains the rise of digital communication technologies such as mobile phones through a desire “to hear one another living,” the promise of the smartwatch’s more haptic modes of communicating—especially the transmission of biometric information such as heartbeats—is that people can feel one another living, albeit through a technological proxy. An additional commercial, titled “Rise,” demonstrates taptics’ capacity to orient wearers. The commercial, largely designed to showcase the device’s notification capabilities, repeatedly shows individuals interrupting various tasks—including sleeping, drinking coffee, reading, and walking—to look at alarms, calendar events, and phone calls on their wrist display (Apple 2015b). Taptics—and their mechanical recreation of sensations—become key ways of knowing and being with smartwatch technology.

The incorporation of haptic instants into practices of “keeping track” resonates with claims about how information flows are largely immaterial in nature, and how part of the work of media technologies is to give material form to these flows to allow bodies to interact with information (Munster 2011). Initial reviews of the Apple Watch seized on this relationship between the corporeal and incorporeal. Farhad Manjoo (2015), in the New York Times, proclaimed, “the Watch became something like a natural extension of my body—a direct link, in a way that I’ve never felt before, from the digital world to my brain.” Here, the emphasis on corporeality resonates with technology’s in-forming capabilities, helping to shape the body’s relationship with otherwise virtual information and experiences. The wearer engages the technology in a continued process of touching and tweaking, from swiping through news headlines to checking items off a to-do list.

This mechanized touch may provide a sort of comfort, a means to form and reform one’s relationship with daily stimuli as computer information systems become primary mediators for all sorts of practices. In Apple’s marketing discourse, for instance, the ability to “send taps” becomes a way for dispersed bodies to intimately connect through the wrist-worn proxy. However, this also implicates the wearer in the disciplinary capacities of this ongoing touch; in calling attention to itself, the instant touch’s demands for recognition in-form a body that must always be aware of, if not able to respond to, the information pushed to the body.

Information Discipline

Although smartwatches may be valuable ways to push information to wearers throughout the day, it may ultimately be the devices’ ability to gather information through its sensors—biometric or otherwise—and its calls to interact with and respond to pushed information that make it a technology capable of tethering wearers to corporate ideologies desiring greater information on the habits of consumers and workers alike. Smartwatch sensors, such as heart rate monitors, provide potentially useful information to the wearer, but this information can also become useful to companies, employers, and governments striving to take advantage of this emergent “sensor society” (Andrejevic and Burdon 2015). The smartwatch, for all its capacities to help the wearer navigate potential information overload, is also a device that draws the wearer into larger structures of corporate tracking.

The haptic features of other wearables foreground the disciplinary impulse these devices often cultivate. The Lumo Lift, for instance, is worn against the body to monitor posture, and sends a small buzz to the skin every time it detects slouching; here, haptic buzzing “trains” the body, “using hardware sensors and algorithms to measure your body’s alignment” and tracking frequencies of deviation from “proper” posture (Mitroff 2014). Pavlok sends small electric shocks to the skin for violating behaviors the wearer marks as negative, and allows one’s friends to monitor that behavior and send shocks through a connected smartphone application. With these wearables, touching, buzzing, and shocking are used for goals such as normalizing comportment. The haptic instant becomes more a means of forming bodies that are perceived as more capable of performing and being in the world. The ethic of self-care Michel Foucault (1986) analyzed is here modified; while people may choose to wear these technologies, the mechanics of care are transferred to the technologies themselves, using them as a means to manage the body’s function.

Wrist-worn wearables do not only participate in the disciplining of bodies through comportment, but they also extend and reformulate E. P. Thompson’s (1967) famous notion of “time-discipline” to affect the ways in which bodies do work. For Thompson, the shift in daily work from task orientation to timed labor marked a transformation of time into currency, accompanied by techniques for monitoring efficiency, such as the timesheet. Scholars such as Jonathan Crary (2013) have updated Thompson’s notion of time discipline in the context of twenty-first-century global labor, which, according to Crary, is in the process of normalizing environments of incessant and unlimited labor. Fastening a smartwatch to the body potentially tethers the individual to ideologies of unending and maximally efficient work, where employees can always be reached by phone—and now, by watch—to answer calls and receive e-mails, and where technologies associated with labor increasingly “creep” into the purportedly leisured spaces of daily life (Gregg 2011). Here, time discipline may well be being subsumed by information discipline, or a need to efficiently respond to and interact with information throughout one’s day.

In this context, every haptic instant threatens to act as a control mechanism for monitoring and securing the practices of a spatially dispersed work force united through these emergent forms of communication (as in Deleuze 1992). A number of institutions and developers have created applications designed, in part, to contain and direct the smartwatch toward economic and managerial imperatives. The smartwatch-compatible application BetterWorks, for example, “allows companies to set goals, and then for users—be they employees or bosses—to check in on them with just a glance at their wrist” (Dormehl 2015). This app borrows the goal-setting tactics of many fitness trackers, but it also allows companies to monitor and track labor from afar. This extends Thompson’s logic of the timesheet. No longer do workers clock in and clock out, providing two definitive information points for mapping workflow. BetterWorks and similar work-management applications make workers “check in” at a number of instants, disciplining them toward more “productive” and persistent labor management within regimes of flexible labor (Titlow 2015). These applications imagine a modality of workplace governance where computational processes and data mining can tune and hone worker performance into efficient individual output.

The extensions of Thompson’s formulation of “time discipline” into a potential “information discipline” resonate with work on digital labor. Where a growing number of scholars have attended to the expansion of work processes into social activity, collapsing the distance between sites of labor and sites of leisure (for instance, Fuchs 2015), the smartwatch’s mode of haptic engagement suggests that any “instant” can potentially become a moment requiring attention, labor, and production. The shifting articulation of “watch” to which this article has attended thus also relates to shifting conceptions of productivity.

Conclusion: Touch as Tension

In all of the varied haptic instants this article has discussed, the act of touching is also being rearticulated to form certain experiences. These experiences are not only influenced by the cultural, social, institutional, and other powers and structures that comprise the world, but also constituted through the materials of the devices themselves, and the ways in which they touch and are touched. Through smartwatches, the “instant” becomes a source of tension. These devices must be understood as both providing potentially valuable modes of apprehending the information floating through the wearer’s every day, and subjecting the wearer to demands that insist on continued labor and physical discipline.

The Apple Watch offers, somewhat paradoxically, more touch and less touch. It instills different ways to feel and to touch precisely because it participates in a culture that values computer information systems capable of virtualizing many everyday practices, such as shopping and communicating. The haptic instant offers a set of possibilities for living in this culture. The smartwatch can provide wearers graspable ways to “feel technologically” (Sobchack 2004, 141) by fastening and being grasped by wearable technology, even though they may be participating in practices—such as buying a product through online retailer Amazon—that requires no actual encounter with another person or other material object. Although instants have perhaps always been integral to how individuals organize the discrete and collective periods of their everyday lives, these haptic instants entail tensions between possibility—of different forms of communication—and constraint—of the effects of maximizing worker efficiency.

This article has emphasized communication, through elements such as Apple’s taptic engines, and labor, through elements such as the BetterWorks application, as two elements of experience that the haptic instant is able to exploit. The structure of this article has, in itself, accounted for this tension, moving as it does from a more phenomenological account of these buzzes and nudges, and toward a more critical account of how they might discipline dispersed workers. The smartwatch is thus one of the latest in a long history of devices that help constitute the unending, processual formation of human bodies.

With smartwatches, one chooses to fasten the materials of informatic culture against the skin. This choice reflects a perceived desire—even if it seems, at the time of this writing, limited to a smaller, “tech-savvy” segment of the population—to extend computer information systems toward the scale of the body, making them not just hold-able (as with a tablet), but felt and connected to the pulsing rhythms of the world. This perceived desire for felt-ness emerges from the potential loss of physical orientation in an increasingly virtualized world, and the ability of haptic technologies to recover the daily loss of contact and tactility in many everyday practices, even if only for an instant. The processes of formation through haptic instants offer one way for the human body to adapt to and live in a culture that increasingly prizes computational, automated, and virtual ways of being in the world.