The Transgressive Early Adopter: Being a Google Glass Explorer

Abstract

With the advent of commercially available wearable computing devices, our technologically driven marketplaces accelerate an increasingly designed, mediated, and networked lifestyle where connected sensors, cameras, and display screens embed themselves onto our bodies rather than merely resting in our pockets and palms. This first phase of wearable computers includes bracelets containing sensors and wireless radios to track motion and activity toward a “quantified self” through data and personal context,
mostly towards fitness and health objectives. Far less discreetly, Google Glass, the eyewear device with an integrated camera and a prism display positioned above the line of sight is perhaps the most startling and controversial new product that tests the boundaries of wearable utility and social acceptability. At the time of this writing, only hand-selected “Glass Explorers” are able to purchase the device as Google market-tests the product with “influencers” and early adopters. The author was accepted as an evaluation user of Glass and offers a personal and critical analysis of the experience here as a way of pointing towards a near future of increasingly wearable computing that infiltrates the body and its relationship to our social and spatial contexts.