Looking to care or caring to look? Technology and the rise of spectacular nursing.

New technologies, such as ultrasonography and vital function monitoring, have made nursing care more spectacular. Nurses now watch, in addition to watching over, their patients. Nursing practice increasingly shapes and is shaped by simulations and representations of the real. Visualist technologies represent a new way of knowing in nursing and a new area of nursing informatics. They also raise all the esthetic, political, and ethical dilemmas associated with looking. They raise the question: Do nurses look to care, or care to look?