Wearable Technologies and Invention

• In Event: Mobile Innovation and Advertising

Abstract

In this essay, we identify two frameworks for a rhetorical understanding of “wearing” wearable devices: screened wearing and diffractive wearing. These two frameworks can give wearers and scholars alike ways of thinking beyond the value of wearing as an activity that tracks “objective” data about bodies or helps wearers conform to fixed categories and methods of identification. A rhetorical understanding of wearing ought, we argue, to look beyond this reductive calculus. By naming and defining the logics and practices of screened and diffractive wearing, we aim to energize a conversation about wearable rhetorics that is capable of extending prior discussions of our interactions with wearable devices by enabling an understanding of the limitations of the preset identifications made available by the logic of what we term screened wearing as well as the inventional opportunities of wearables in particular rhetorical situations enabled by diffractive wearing.

Authors

• Catherine Gouge, West Virginia U

• John Jones, The Ohio State University