• by Joe Mandese , September 10, 2014

"The wristwatch made the idea of not knowing what time it was seem bizarre; in five years it might seem bizarre not to know how many calories you’ve eaten today, or what your resting heart rate is,” Time magazine's Lev Grossman and Matt Vella write in the “Never Offline” cover story on newsstands Friday. The issue, which features an image of a power-to-the-people like clenched fist attached to a post-wearables wrist that has been transformed into an organic screen, makes a visually engaging point about the new age of hyper-connectivity being wrought by Apple and others.

“Wearables also ask you to give up control,” the Time writers note, adding: “Your phone will start telling you what you should and shouldn’t eat and how far you should run. It’s going to get in between you and your body and mediate that relationship. Wearables will make your physical self visible to the virtual world in the form of information, an indelible digital body-print, and that information is going to behave like any other information behaves these days. It will be copied and circulated. It will go places you don’t expect. People will use that information to track you and market to you. It will be bought and sold and leaked — imagine a data-spill comparable to the recent iCloud leak, only with Apple Watch data instead of naked selfies. "