An interesting article from the Neiman Journalism Lab — a thoughtful and forward-looking place — gets at a real opportunity for wearables: to move the focus of users away from their phones and toward something more accessible.
Fiona Spruill suggests that news organizations start thinking about wearables as a means both to gather information and to publish it.
Our dependence on these devices for everything from news to social interaction to shopping to directions is so powerful that there is a need to distill the most vital information and bring it closer to the body, reducing the need to look at our phones all the time. That’s how I think about smartwatches and the problem they’re solving. It’s not that everyone has a burning desire for their watches to be smarter. And reading long articles on your wrist or through Google Glass doesn’t seem appealing either. That’s not what this is about. It’s the merging of the wearable devices with the phone that offers exciting possibilities.
She goes on to praise the screen of the Fitbit Force and the the notifications feature of the Pebble watch as ways to get people’s noses out of their phones. There’s nothing news-y here, but it’s encouraging to see how industries outside of tech are starting to think about the possibilities inherent in wearables.
