Wearable Technology in the Production, Diffusion, and Active Use of Ubiquitous Knowledge

Human history is a history of technology and mediations. The emergence of ever more sophisticated and functional technologies and related forms of mediation have created new relationships between real, virtual, and augmented experiences. Advances have favoured the creation of relational environments that extend beyond their intended design and application (Ingold 2004), which in turn has substantialized a different culture of interaction between individuals and contexts (e.g. Mazzoli 2011). The weaving of these contexts is, after language, the most powerful grammar at the base of interactions between individuals and their environments. We are now witnessing the creation of ecosystems steeped in higher-performing technology, though that technology is less visible. Between the 1950s and the 1980's (Negroponte 1995), the idea of "ubiquity," which was already latent, became an object of study. Lifton and Paradiso (2009) define ubiquity as the possibility to merge real and virtual contexts. However, McLuhan (1964, 79) had previously suggested a predecessor to ubiquity, which he referred to as a form of "technology of explicitness" which enable a "translation of immediate sense experience into vocal symbols [so that] the entire world can be evoked and retrieved at any instant".