Wearables, Week 1: Reflections on Reading
In Losing the Thread, Virginia Postrel goes deep into the historical relationship between textiles and technology, going so far to argue that textiles are the ultimate form of technology. I particularly liked her point that technology does not need to be some magical, fantastic sci-fi invention but something that can quietly evolve and thus seem intuitive and obvious. Perhaps because these things are seen as “natural” it gets confused with our tech/nature dichotomy?
As an anthropologist, I love examining what humans take for granted and what we see as spectacular and magical. It speaks a lot about what we imbue with meaning, and often what differentiates cultures and sub-cultures. I’m glad that Postrel pointed out that the fact that textiles have always been seen as part of the female domain and that perhaps this explains why they’ve never been as revered.
I also enjoyed how Postrel explored the links between language, textiles and technology. I knew of many of the metaphors, but I think my favorite piece of information was that the ancient Greeks worshiped Athena as the goddess of technē, the artifice of civilisation and techne is the basis of both the words textile and technology. Also the reiteration of the technical aspects of weaving and that weaving is the original binary system, at least 9,000 years old.
Textiles illustrate a more general point about technology. The more advanced a field is, the more blasé we are about its latest upgrades. Success breeds indifference.
This reading certainly got me more interested in thinking about the specifics of how fabric is made rather than only considering the construction of a garment. I confess, I watched a few youtube videos on drop spindling.
The second reading did more to illuminate the advances in smart textiles and electronics based materials and components used in wearables. The question of powering these smart textiles or harnessing/harvesting human/wearer potential is very interesting.