Extract

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CLOTHING

Content and extension: Clothing is an extension of the skin and its content is the person wearing them.

Cascade: The cascade is from human skin to animal skins to clothing and then from robes and togas to tailored clothing to accommodate the needs of equestrians.

LOM: Clothing enhances survival, obsolesces cold and nakedness, retrieves innocence and the Garden of Eden, reverses into the capriciousness and wastefulness of fashion, which, as Shakespeare noted, wear out more clothes than the wearer.

The “new media” play a large role in the design, manufacture, distribution, marketing, and sale of clothing. The nature of clothing itself, however, has not changed, with the exception of the direct intersection of clothing and the “new media” in terms of wearable computing where the computer becomes a literal extension of its user as defined by Steve Mann (1998), regarded by some as the father of wearable computing:

An important distinction between wearable computers and portable computers (handheld and laptop computers for example) is that the goal of wearable computing is to position or contextualize the computer in such a way that the human and ← 133 | 134 → computer are inextricably intertwined, so as to achieve Humanistic Intelligence—i.e. intelligence that arises by having the human being in the feedback loop of the computational process.

The advantage of the wearable computer is its perpetual availability 24–7 as an intelligence assistant...