I am in the process of completing an article and am now thinking about to which journal I will submit it, so I thought I'd put out a teaser of its structure and seek opinions/interest. It is broadly about the future of wearable/implantable technology and takes the period of working with Google Glass as an insight into this world, drawing on a range of datasets. It is based on 2 years of work with Glass from 2013-2015 and the article is likely to be about 10,000 words. I'm expecting to finish it over the summer and am interested in editors who might like to receive a submission. If that's you, please get in touch. And here's a link to some of the more informal experiments, along with a talk I gave at Google HQ about the subject.

 

 

Ok Glass?  
The Aspirations and Anxieties of the
Google Glass Generation. 

Abstract

This article explores the two-year period in which Google Glass was promoted publicly and released commercially on an Open Beta ‘explorer’ basis (2013-2015). It examines the aspirations of the developers and advocates and the anxieties of of (potential) user groups and eventual reactions of new users, to understand how people imagine the impact of and experience wearable technologies. The research draws on six datasets, which consist of YouTube videos, tweets from Twitter, and video recordings of user, to create an impression of what took place around the emergence of Glass. Together, the datasets create a complex device ethnography of Glass, which speak to its imagined transformative potential and a future where wearable technologies generally, which foreground a new research agenda for digital culture scholars.

 

Introduction

The Limits of Digital Design

Methodology

Background on the Google Glass Experiments

How Glass Worked

What Could Glass Do?

Findings

What Google Wanted from Glass

How ‘Explorers’ Used Glass

How Customers Imagined Glass

How Parody Explained User Anxieties

What People Saw Through Glass

The First 10 Seconds of Glass Experience

Discussion

Google Glass: The Story so Far

Conclusion: Was Google Glass a Failure?