Vine, a Twitter-owned video app since 2012, allowed users to create six-second video loops. “Vine stars,” who cleverly used the app for optical illusions or comedy, emerged as popular online figures. After years of losing ground to Instagram‘s competing video app, inaugurated in 2013, Vine has recently shut down. The demise of Vine and the layoffs at Twitter are not a portent of good things to come for the tech company. Still, the continued success of ultra-short-form video on Instagram …
Lesson Plan: Wearable Devices as Personal Archives
This lesson plan invites students to reimagine wearable devices, like smartphones, as digital archives we carry with us. By examining the information we collect in our smartphones, students learn that we can now capture both aggregate data and subjective experiences like never before in history. Two class meetings In each group of four to five, at least three students must have smartphones. Instructor may have a computer and projector to model the assignment. Students and instructors must know how to …
Teaching Wearables and Metadata: An Introduction
This semester, Team Wearables is committed to providing faculty interested in digital rhetoric and pedagogy with lesson plans that get at the heart of academic issues surrounding the proliferation of wearable devices. Our first set of lessons this semester focuses on one particularly salient issue concerning the examination of wearable technology today: metadata. Metadata isn’t a recent phenomenon. The Dewey Decimal System creates metadata so that the books, journals, and periodicals we need are easier to find in our libraries. …
Lesson Plan: Wearable Tech and Metadata
These modules introduce the importance of ‘metadata’ to undergraduate students. They create a necessary link between metadata and contemporary ‘Wearable Tech’. Understanding how metadata is created and used helps students realize the ramifications of its existence, including its influence on the process of digital writing. Learning Objectives One class period, but the lesson is modulated to fit into already existing lessons as the instructor wishes The articles listed, the link to Project ‘Seen’, a computer and smartphone None The lesson …
Lesson Plan: Data, Privacy and Identity on Facebook
In “Information Revelation and Internet Privacy Concerns on Social Network Sites: A Case Study of Facebook” (2009), Alyson Young and Anabel Quan-Haase argued that “despite concerns raised about the disclosure of personal information on social network sites, research has demonstrated that users continue to disclose personal information.” In recent years, Facebook has expanded greatly — both in user numbers and in their range of applications, especially those available for mobile technologies. Used on wearable devices like smartphones and smart watches, …
Lesson Plan: Thyncing about Technology & Emotion
Cranial Electrotherapy Stimulation (CES) has been accepted within medical fields as an effective and safe form of treatment for depression, anxiety and insomnia. Recently, there have been multiple personal-use devices released that appropriate these neuroscientific findings and are being marketed as a way of combating stress, anxiety and insomnia that is safer and more effective than prescription medication or substance use (coffee, alcohol etc). Thync is the first such device that is wearable, portable and controlled through an iOS app, …
Wearable Technology: Rhetoric, Habit and the Apple Watch
For the past few weeks, I have been wearing an Apple Watch, in an effort to survey the efficacy and implications of wearable technologies. Devices whose “primary functionality requires that they be connected to bodies” (Gouge & Jones, 201), have become the object of study and criticism within the field of rhetorical studies, as they are argued to exist “between media you carry, and media you become”, while integrating a computer “with one’s physical, political, social, and ontological makeup” (Gouge …
Augmented Reality Has Arrived and It’s Ready to Be Analyzed! Well, Almost.
Lately, augmented reality has been making a lot of headlines in the tech world. This week, for instance, Microsoft revealed its HoloLens, a visual headset that allows people to interact with and manipulate complex, projected visuals. In a promo for the HoloLens, a woman wearing the headset customizes a Volvo car before buying it, building it up from the nuts and bolts with gestures as simple as pressing her thumb and forefinger together. It isn’t quite the tech we see Robert …
Augmented Reality and Smartphones: Friends or Foes?
Pardon the spatial-rhetorics wordplay here, but I am increasingly getting the sense that the topic at the center of this locative media research group—augmented reality—feels simultaneously like unfamiliar and familiar territory. I have spent a substantial amount of time researching and reflecting on locative media, especially thanks to my time in Dr. Casey Boyle’s Fall 2014 course “Spatial Rhetorics and Locative Media.” There we’d often discuss the ways in which mobile technologies affect perceptions of embodiment and place, and, as …
Does Augmented Reality Diminish our Humanity?
Augmented reality, still in the nascent stages of technological development but quickly gaining traction, attempts to alter the way we interact with the world as we know it. Ideally, devices and apps that help to “augment” our reality will help us accomplish tasks that we wouldn’t be able to accomplish otherwise. The Google Glass experiment is probably one of the most famously publicized recent attempts at bringing augmented reality to the general population through wearable technology.