• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, March 10, 2015

Do you ever worry that there just isn’t enough digital media in your life? Sure, we all do! Fortunately for us, Apple’s new smartwatch will make sure that we never have to experience another moment of quiet introspection again, by filling our days and nights with an endless stream of alerts, updates, and notifications -- all conveniently located on your wrist, making them well-nigh inescapable! 

Seriously, though: The Apple Watch is obviously a remarkable piece of design and engineering, and it doubtless offers an array of useful functions -- but even for a technology-infatuated society, are we sure this is a step we want to take? I have a few reservations about the Watch, but they all basically boil down to one safe bet: It will further enable our own worst tendencies.

I think we’ve already pretty well demonstrated our collective inability to set boundaries around communications technology in our personal lives. We wander the streets absorbed in our smartphones, whip them out during dinner, use them on the toilet, check them during sex, and then again first thing when we wake up. Social media, texting, casual games, news, porn, whatever -- you name it and it’s there, all at the swipe of a thumb.

Now the digital world is colonizing what's basically the most high value real estate on the human body, as far as visibility and attention goes: the lower arm, next to our hands, which as tool-making human beings we constantly use to interact with the world, and are therefore closely intertwined with our cognition and other senses. And if the location wasn’t enough, the Apple Watch can actually give you a little tap every time you get an alert, adding yet another form of stimulus (or distraction). Get ready to say goodbye to what’s left of your non-digital life.

The counter-argument, of course, is that you don’t have to enable the alerts and updates -- just shut them off if you don’t want them, you hand-wringing ninny. To which I would respond: Yeah, right! The whole point, as demonstrated by our behavior with smartphones, is that we do want the alerts, because they fill our time and distract us when we’re bored or idle -- an easy fix that allows us to avoid the more challenging task of figuring out how to be alone with ourselves and our thoughts, to simply relax and be in the real world, not an illusory virtual world where technology collapses space and social networks into a single, all-encompassing, fevered miasma of buzzing, beeping insanity.

In short, if this is where the future is headed, I’m getting off here.