Wearing The Enemy
A look into the negative psychological and physical effects of wearable technology.
The evolution of humans and tech will never end, and that means the progression of humans and their further integration with tech never can either–if we are not careful that will do more danger than good. Today more than ever, it is incredibly important that we look at the danger’s technology is already creating for us and correct them.
In this essay “wearable tech” is classified as any technology worn for aesthetic purposes and to serve a function. Currently, the majority of people use wearable tech to improve our lives; we use devices like Apple and Samsung watches to keep track of our calories, location and health in general and we use devices like the Snap Spectacles ‘which record and post directly to our personal accounts on their respective app bringing a possibility of joy to western consumers. In the future, as our technology progresses and can contribute to more aspects of our lives, it is up to us as consumers to decide if it will be a healthy or unhealthy tool. To understand how to go forward in the progression of wearable tech, we must look at their negative effects and realize how they can hurt anyone so that we can proceed with caution. While wearable techs provide a great number of positive effects like worldwide connections or making information available at any moment, there are also many negative psychological and physical effects.
Wearable tech is dangerous because of the potential psychological effects they can have on consumers who suffer from eating disorders, low self-esteem, and compulsive disorders. These specific negatives mainly stem from devices that track things like weight, speed, and general health. Rikke Duus and Mike Cooray are social scientists for CNN. Focusing on 100 women and their relationship with their Fitbits, Duus and Cooray found that many women were negatively pressured to reach unhealthy goals and found that their Fitbits became an enemy rather than something positive. This example shows with actual statistics from research conducted on 100 women just how much a single piece of wearable tech can take control of a person’s life.
This example shows how quickly your tech can change from a positive tool to a negative one. This has personally happened to me and too millions of other people who have all used things like Fitbits to track calories and workouts to an unhealthy extreme. This unhealthy behavior from the “enemy” devices push consumers until they ignore their body signals to reach that last goal of the day or week. Of course, fitness trackers do help most people, but for some, this dangerous culture negatively affects their sense of self-worth and can even cause negative mental effects such as body dysmorphia and eating disorders.
In addition, in Adam Alters’s Irresistible, a research book about technology’s relationship with addiction. Alter writes about Leslie Sim, a specialist in adolescent Psychiatry and Psychology, Sim patient 10-year-old client who has an obsessive fear that he will slow down if he ever stops running. This fear has made him almost unable to stop moving, and constantly track himself on products like a Fitbit.
“Sim’s patient was obviously in psychological distress”
The above quote shows just how vulnerable young people are in today’s world, where children are getting tech devices earlier and earlier. This different type of vulnerability proves that no one is really safe from their possible negative effects, especially as wearables’ popularity continues to grow. These stories are important because hearing about how young a child can be affected continues to show how dangerous these devices are especially on the youngest generation of wearable tech users.
This problem also alludes to tech addiction, and just how many specifically teens, are affected by this. In a Common Sense Media research study the CSN group found that “50 percent of teens ‘feel addicted’ to mobile devices, and 59 percent of their parents agree that their kids are addicted”. As someone who has 6 younger siblings, this topic specifically worries me and is one of the main reasons that I find this topic so important to talk about. My point is that while wearable tech is only one of hundreds of reasons that people end up with eating or compulsive disorders it is still a most important aspect to look at and understand so that we can fix it. In conclusion connecting and proving the definite correlation between wearable technology and the negative psychological effects shows how a consumer’s tech can create psychological disorders in anybody, leaving no one safe if we do not try and solve the problem we are making.
In addition to the psychological effects, wearable tech can also be harmful because of the unresearched physical effects, including radiation and over-exertion. In 2015 The World Health Organization (also known as WHO) conducted a peer-reviewed study on cellphone safety the panel concluded in 2011, that cellphones were “possibly carcinogenic” and that the devices could be as harmful as “certain dry-cleaning chemicals and pesticides”. This first piece of evidence from WHO shows a very straightforward example of the possible carcinogens that we already know to come with regular cellphones. Even though there has long been the knowledge that technology produces harmful radiation, we continue to strap more and more of it to ourselves, making the health risks greater. If we were to research more into this problem and eventually solve it, that would be just one less way of getting cancer which in the long term could save millions given the fact that technology isn’t going anywhere but cancer is something that scientists are striving to eliminate every day.
Secondly Using Adam Alter’s book, Irresistible again, Alter discusses another example of a negative physical effects produced by wearable tech. One of the researchers in the book is Katherine Schreiber a former workout addict who writes about her experience and others; Schreiber has experienced at first-hand obsessive goal monitoring. Schreiber explains that goal monitoring has a nasty habit of dehumanizing a person and dissociating them from their body during the workout, leaving you to mindlessly fulfill whatever your tracker tells you to do. Because of this mindlessness, Schreiber fractured her foot because she chose to overwork her body to reach her goal. From this example, we see just one more way that wearable techs, that are meant to specifically help you in your exercise cannot only distract but injure you. In this case, it was a fractured foot, but for others, it can be much more serious all because they chose to listen to a fitness tracker instead of their own body.
My point is not that we will all fall victim to obsessive goal fulfilling but that it is a very common and possible thing that will only happen more often as wearable technology becomes more popular. Looking at both the short-term physical effects like injuring your foot due to obsessive goal-reaching as well as the long-term effects like radiation causing cancer for your body 20 years down the line, it is clear to see why more research and effort must be put into studying wearable technology and their negative effects.
There are of course strong pros for why we should use wearable technology to improve our daily lives, but it is also important that the possible psychological cons like eating and compulsive disorders as well as the possible physical cons like radiation and injuring yourself are understood fully. If not, like all those who smoked before we understood its dangers and now have lung cancer, the generation of tech will be in constant emotional and physical pain that no one can escape.
