Don’t worry, the Apple Watch won’t change your life… unless you want it to

A few months ago I bought a “smartwatch”. I did so because there was increasing media hype about these devices and I don’t write about kit that I haven’t owned and used in anger. The model I chose was a Pebble Steel, for several reasons: it was originally funded by a Kickstarter campaign; a geek friend already had one; and, well, it looked interesting. Now, several months on, I am back to wearing my old analogue watch. The Pebble experiment turned out to be instructive. The watch was well made and well presented. It had reasonable battery life and the software was easy to install on my iPhone. The bluetooth link was reliable. Its timekeeping was accurate, and it could display the time in a variety of ways, some of them humorous. One could download a variety of virtual watch-faces, and so on.

So why is it not still on my wrist? Well, basically most of its “features” were of little or no actual use to me; and for much of the time, even apps that I would have found useful – such as having the watch vibrate when a text message arrived – turned out to be flaky: sometimes they worked; more often they didn’t. Which of course led to the thought that if anybody can make the smartwatch into a successful consumer product that “just works” it would be Apple. And indeed it was amusing to note how many people who, upon seeing the Pebble on my wrist, would ask me: “Is that the new Apple Watch?”

Well, now the Apple Watch is here and we will find out if the world really was waiting for a proper smartwatch to arrive. And of course there’s lots of speculation about what that might mean for the future of civilisation, etc. Philosopher Julian Baggini had a lovely piece about this in the Guardian. “The Apple Watch,” he writes, “will make mainstream the hitherto minority obsession with the ‘quantified self’. This is an approach to living which encourages the relentless gathering of data about everything related to our wellbeing, from health and fitness indicators like heart rate and cholesterol levels, to time spent on social media or learning new skills. All this data is supposedly used to make us leaner, fitter, happier, more efficient.”

There’s a whiff of technological determinism – ie the idea that technology drives history – about all this (though Baggini, to be fair, is not a determinist). And it’s ironic that the latest gadget to trigger deterministic musings is supposedly a “timepiece” launched at a time when there is a widespread perception that the pace of life is not only faster but accelerating.

This is really an old story that goes back at least to Lewis Mumford’s identification of the mechanical clock as the real driver of the industrial revolution. The speed of industrialised society became identified with progress. And so it is today: this is the era, after all, when people talk about being “cash-rich but time-poor” – when “busyness” has become synonymous with virtue, and when only losers have time on their hands.

Conventional wisdom has it that the root cause of all this acceleration is technology, particularly computers, the internet and smartphones. A bracing antidote to this deterministic claptrap has recently emerged from the recesses of LSE, where sociologist Judy Wajcman works. In a splendid new book, Pressed for Time: the Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism, she takes on – and mostly demolishes – the conventional narrative about the acceleration of life in a digital world.

This narrative may well hold for the small elites who work in the tech industries, and those in the media who worship them, but as soon as you get out into the real world the picture changes. The consensus among time-use researchers, for example, is that “leisure time has, if anything, increased”. Americans may complain ever more stridently that they are overworked, but the data suggest that “average weekly employment hours changed minimally between the 1970s and the 2010s”. And so on.

What Professor Wajcman shows is not that technology doesn’t have an impact on society, but that the relationship between technology and society is complex, circular and symbiotic. Information technology does enable us to do many things more efficiently than before, but we adjust to that by raising our expectations of what we can do. Wajcman argues that we are not actually hostages to our smartphones and that our perceived sense of being pressed for time is actually the result of priorities that are set by us, not by our technology. I’m sure she’s right. In which case the main use of the Apple Watch will be to tell us how far we’ve fallen behind our schedules.