I came across this blogpost/essay on Reddit (sorry). The essay is ostensibly about the Casio F-91W, but also about the oppressiveness of the internet of things and how technology often demands so much of our attention. I thought the Lemmy community might appreciate the sentiment.
Watches were and are so stupid. Why not just strap my phone to my forearm?
In my opinion, wearing a watch is a way to accessorize and add a little bit of individual style. It’s also nice to just not have to look at your phone for something. This is especially true since there is often so many other things happening on a smart phone competing for attention.
Is this a serious question or sarcastic?
It’s only stupid if you can’t find it for sale already:
Disagree, cases-in-point: modern popular country music, elective cosmetic surgery, corrupt political organizations, cybertrucks, ai subscriptions, light beer, etc.
Consider environments where the need to monitor time is invariable, yet smartphones are prohibited on grounds of security, safety or for some other reason. It’s an industry norm to prohibit smartphones in warehouses, a common place of employment throughout industrialized-nations. I’m sure you could think of others if pressed.
From your comment I think you’re referring to wrist-watches. My understanding of the wrist-watches’ popularity is that it was a remnant of the war economy. The military needed personnel to keep track of time; pilots in particular needed wrist-watches for navigation. After the war those factories that mass produced for national militaries still existed and found a bludgeoning middle-class market to sell their gluts: the fashion wrist-watch. The population were conditioned to wear them during war and that behaviour carried on after. I think a similar thing happened with belts too.
It’s rather amusing to consider that pocket-watches have now made a comeback, only they’ve changed form and now offer other functions. Nearly everyone has a pocket-watch; it’s rectangular rather than circular in shape now. Certainly bigger than they used to be. ;)
I used to have one. It hurt my wrist. I don’t need to know what the time is at all in that sort of physical attachment. The clock is on the wall, my phone and my desktop. I don’t need to have a rando company gather data about my physical activities all day long so I can get a pretty graph while they sell information about my health to insurance companies so they can raise my premium based of my couch potatoes. Like seriously nah. I also don’t need to call a guy or AI from my wrist like Michael Knight.
You are thinking about smart watches and not watches, watches just tell you the time and have an alarm.