Maggie Mort, Celia Roberts, and Adrian Mackenzie
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- January 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781447348665
- eISBN:
- 9781447348689
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Policy Press
- DOI:
- 10.1332/policypress/9781447348665.001.0001
- Subject:
- Public Health and Epidemiology, Public Health
Biosensors and biosensing practices collect and share living data, data concerning changes in body states. Health biosensing emerges where devices, health experience, scientific and medical ...
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Biosensors and biosensing practices collect and share living data, data concerning changes in body states. Health biosensing emerges where devices, health experience, scientific and medical knowledges and online platforms meet around bodies. This book contrasts forms of health biosensing in significant life events ranging from conception to ageing. It explores practicalities, histories and promises of fertility and hormonal biosensing, stress biosensing, DNA genotyping platforms, and old-age biosensing. While the biosensing industries promote promise-horizons of the ‘soon’, ethnographic stories of failure and disappointment abound. ‘Living data’ may be about health for many people, but still happens mostly outside biomedicine or clinical practice. Yet biosensing has the potential to change human bodies and lives in barely imagined ways. This book argues for thinking about biosensing platforms and bodies together to understand that potential and to recognise harms and limitations.Less
Biosensors and biosensing practices collect and share living data, data concerning changes in body states. Health biosensing emerges where devices, health experience, scientific and medical knowledges and online platforms meet around bodies. This book contrasts forms of health biosensing in significant life events ranging from conception to ageing. It explores practicalities, histories and promises of fertility and hormonal biosensing, stress biosensing, DNA genotyping platforms, and old-age biosensing. While the biosensing industries promote promise-horizons of the ‘soon’, ethnographic stories of failure and disappointment abound. ‘Living data’ may be about health for many people, but still happens mostly outside biomedicine or clinical practice. Yet biosensing has the potential to change human bodies and lives in barely imagined ways. This book argues for thinking about biosensing platforms and bodies together to understand that potential and to recognise harms and limitations.
Dawn Nafus (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780262034173
- eISBN:
- 9780262334549
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
- DOI:
- 10.7551/mitpress/9780262034173.001.0001
- Subject:
- Information Science, Communications
Today anyone can purchase technology that can track, quantify, and measure the body and its environment. Wearable or portable sensors detect heart rates, glucose levels, steps taken, water quality, ...
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Today anyone can purchase technology that can track, quantify, and measure the body and its environment. Wearable or portable sensors detect heart rates, glucose levels, steps taken, water quality, genomes, and microbiomes, and turn them into electronic data. Is this phenomenon empowering, or a new form of social control? Who volunteers to enumerate bodily experiences, and who is forced to do so? Who interprets the resulting data? How does all this affect the relationship between medical practice and self care, between scientific and lay knowledge? Quantified examines these and other issues that arise when biosensing technologies become part of everyday life. The book offers a range of perspectives, with views from the social sciences, cultural studies, journalism, industry, and the nonprofit world. The contributors consider data, personhood, and the urge to self-quantify; legal, commercial, and medical issues, including privacy, the outsourcing of medical advice, and self-tracking as a “paraclinical” practice; and technical concerns, including interoperability, sociotechnical calibration, alternative views of data, and new space for design. Contributors: Marc Böhlen, Geoffrey C. Bowker, Sophie Day, Anna de Paula Hanika, Deborah Estrin, Brittany Fiore-Gartland, Dana Greenfield, Judith Gregory, Mette Kragh-Furbo, Celia Lury, Adrian Mackenzie, Rajiv Mehta, Maggie Mort, Dawn Nafus, Gina Neff, Helen Nissenbaum, Heather Patterson, Celia Roberts, Jamie Sherman, Alex Taylor, Gary WolfLess
Today anyone can purchase technology that can track, quantify, and measure the body and its environment. Wearable or portable sensors detect heart rates, glucose levels, steps taken, water quality, genomes, and microbiomes, and turn them into electronic data. Is this phenomenon empowering, or a new form of social control? Who volunteers to enumerate bodily experiences, and who is forced to do so? Who interprets the resulting data? How does all this affect the relationship between medical practice and self care, between scientific and lay knowledge? Quantified examines these and other issues that arise when biosensing technologies become part of everyday life. The book offers a range of perspectives, with views from the social sciences, cultural studies, journalism, industry, and the nonprofit world. The contributors consider data, personhood, and the urge to self-quantify; legal, commercial, and medical issues, including privacy, the outsourcing of medical advice, and self-tracking as a “paraclinical” practice; and technical concerns, including interoperability, sociotechnical calibration, alternative views of data, and new space for design. Contributors: Marc Böhlen, Geoffrey C. Bowker, Sophie Day, Anna de Paula Hanika, Deborah Estrin, Brittany Fiore-Gartland, Dana Greenfield, Judith Gregory, Mette Kragh-Furbo, Celia Lury, Adrian Mackenzie, Rajiv Mehta, Maggie Mort, Dawn Nafus, Gina Neff, Helen Nissenbaum, Heather Patterson, Celia Roberts, Jamie Sherman, Alex Taylor, Gary Wolf
Sun-ha Hong
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781479860234
- eISBN:
- 9781479855759
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479860234.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Technology and Society
What counts as knowledge in the age of big data and smart machines? Technologies of datafication renew the long modern promise of turning bodies into facts. They seek to take human intentions, ...
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What counts as knowledge in the age of big data and smart machines? Technologies of datafication renew the long modern promise of turning bodies into facts. They seek to take human intentions, emotions, and behavior and to turn these messy realities into discrete and stable truths. But in pursuing better knowledge, technology is reshaping in its image what counts as knowledge. The push for algorithmic certainty sets loose an expansive array of incomplete archives, speculative judgments, and simulated futures. Too often, data generates speculation as much as it does information. Technologies of Speculation traces this twisted symbiosis of knowledge and uncertainty in emerging state and self-surveillance technologies. It tells the story of vast dragnet systems constructed to predict the next terrorist and of how familiar forms of prejudice seep into the data by the back door. In software placeholders, such as “Mohammed Badguy,” the fantasy of pure data collides with the old specter of national purity. It shows how smart machines for ubiquitous, automated self-tracking, manufacturing knowledge, paradoxically lie beyond the human senses. This data is increasingly being taken up by employers, insurers, and courts of law, creating imperfect proxies through which my truth can be overruled. This book argues that as datafication transforms what counts as knowledge, it is dismantling the long-standing link between knowledge and human reason, rational publics, and free individuals. If data promises objective knowledge, then we must ask in return, Knowledge by and for whom; enabling what forms of life for the human subject?Less
What counts as knowledge in the age of big data and smart machines? Technologies of datafication renew the long modern promise of turning bodies into facts. They seek to take human intentions, emotions, and behavior and to turn these messy realities into discrete and stable truths. But in pursuing better knowledge, technology is reshaping in its image what counts as knowledge. The push for algorithmic certainty sets loose an expansive array of incomplete archives, speculative judgments, and simulated futures. Too often, data generates speculation as much as it does information. Technologies of Speculation traces this twisted symbiosis of knowledge and uncertainty in emerging state and self-surveillance technologies. It tells the story of vast dragnet systems constructed to predict the next terrorist and of how familiar forms of prejudice seep into the data by the back door. In software placeholders, such as “Mohammed Badguy,” the fantasy of pure data collides with the old specter of national purity. It shows how smart machines for ubiquitous, automated self-tracking, manufacturing knowledge, paradoxically lie beyond the human senses. This data is increasingly being taken up by employers, insurers, and courts of law, creating imperfect proxies through which my truth can be overruled. This book argues that as datafication transforms what counts as knowledge, it is dismantling the long-standing link between knowledge and human reason, rational publics, and free individuals. If data promises objective knowledge, then we must ask in return, Knowledge by and for whom; enabling what forms of life for the human subject?
Celia Roberts, Adrian Mackenzie, Maggie Mort, Theresa Atkinson, Mette Kragh-Furbo, and Joann Wilkinson
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- January 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781447348665
- eISBN:
- 9781447348689
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Policy Press
- DOI:
- 10.1332/policypress/9781447348665.003.0005
- Subject:
- Public Health and Epidemiology, Public Health
How does biosensing reach into the lives of older people living at home? Here we examine care monitoring systems for older people, or telecare, as this has become known. We focus in particular on the ...
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How does biosensing reach into the lives of older people living at home? Here we examine care monitoring systems for older people, or telecare, as this has become known. We focus in particular on the wearable falls detector, an alarm device which triggers, it is claimed, when a person trips or falls. We explore findings from ethnographies of home telecare and from citizens’ panel debates on how individuals and families live with such systems, and how falls detectors are constructed as workable. Following individuals' interactions with telecare we question the notion of self-tracking, preferring the term dys-tracking as better reflecting their relationship with automated devices. Falls detectors are technically highly complex, collecting data difficult to interpret. Ageing bodies are invariably assessed as low functioning and intrinsically at risk. Views from our citizens’ panels however, show a more active and imaginative constituency where practices of self-care exist alongside remote-care systems.Less
How does biosensing reach into the lives of older people living at home? Here we examine care monitoring systems for older people, or telecare, as this has become known. We focus in particular on the wearable falls detector, an alarm device which triggers, it is claimed, when a person trips or falls. We explore findings from ethnographies of home telecare and from citizens’ panel debates on how individuals and families live with such systems, and how falls detectors are constructed as workable. Following individuals' interactions with telecare we question the notion of self-tracking, preferring the term dys-tracking as better reflecting their relationship with automated devices. Falls detectors are technically highly complex, collecting data difficult to interpret. Ageing bodies are invariably assessed as low functioning and intrinsically at risk. Views from our citizens’ panels however, show a more active and imaginative constituency where practices of self-care exist alongside remote-care systems.
Celia Roberts, Adrian Mackenzie, Maggie Mort, Theresa Atkinson, Mette Kragh-Furbo, and Joann Wilkinson
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- January 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781447348665
- eISBN:
- 9781447348689
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Policy Press
- DOI:
- 10.1332/policypress/9781447348665.003.0006
- Subject:
- Public Health and Epidemiology, Public Health
Biosensing in all its forms has strong connections to the promise-horizon of the ‘soon.’ But stories of failure, disappointment and limitation abound. We need to bring the body – or the bio in all ...
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Biosensing in all its forms has strong connections to the promise-horizon of the ‘soon.’ But stories of failure, disappointment and limitation abound. We need to bring the body – or the bio in all its senses – full centre when discussing biosensing platforms. Moving across the life course - from childhood, through the so-called ‘reproductive years’ into older age, we have highlighted the significance of geographical, historical and social location. Biosensing may be about health for many people but as yet has little to do with biomedicine. Yet it has the potential to change human bodies and lives, in barely imagined ways. Policy makers and practitioners of all kinds could do well to devote time and resources to listening to and engaging with ‘the word on the street,’ as filtered through social science. People of all ages and backgrounds are thinking about, using and/or encountering biosensing, and they have much to say about it.Less
Biosensing in all its forms has strong connections to the promise-horizon of the ‘soon.’ But stories of failure, disappointment and limitation abound. We need to bring the body – or the bio in all its senses – full centre when discussing biosensing platforms. Moving across the life course - from childhood, through the so-called ‘reproductive years’ into older age, we have highlighted the significance of geographical, historical and social location. Biosensing may be about health for many people but as yet has little to do with biomedicine. Yet it has the potential to change human bodies and lives, in barely imagined ways. Policy makers and practitioners of all kinds could do well to devote time and resources to listening to and engaging with ‘the word on the street,’ as filtered through social science. People of all ages and backgrounds are thinking about, using and/or encountering biosensing, and they have much to say about it.
Jamie Sherman
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780262034173
- eISBN:
- 9780262334549
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
- DOI:
- 10.7551/mitpress/9780262034173.003.0002
- Subject:
- Information Science, Communications
This chapter draws on Benjamin’s discussion of accelerating mechanisms of image capture and distribution in the early 20th Century as a lens through which to view the contemporary acceleration of ...
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This chapter draws on Benjamin’s discussion of accelerating mechanisms of image capture and distribution in the early 20th Century as a lens through which to view the contemporary acceleration of data and self-quantification. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork within the Quantified Self community, it suggests that self-tracking data constructs and fixes experience through the selection and recording of what is and is not counted. It argues that the commensurability of data works at a conceptual level to move beyond the individual person and the idiosyncrasies of both the data projects and the data collection streams, becoming stories in which we both render and recognize ourselves in new ways. Finally, it questions whether these new modes of self-rendering in which commensurability moves from epistemology into ontology signifies a domain shift analogous to, and as significant as, the movement of art into politics and economics documented by Benjamin.Less
This chapter draws on Benjamin’s discussion of accelerating mechanisms of image capture and distribution in the early 20th Century as a lens through which to view the contemporary acceleration of data and self-quantification. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork within the Quantified Self community, it suggests that self-tracking data constructs and fixes experience through the selection and recording of what is and is not counted. It argues that the commensurability of data works at a conceptual level to move beyond the individual person and the idiosyncrasies of both the data projects and the data collection streams, becoming stories in which we both render and recognize ourselves in new ways. Finally, it questions whether these new modes of self-rendering in which commensurability moves from epistemology into ontology signifies a domain shift analogous to, and as significant as, the movement of art into politics and economics documented by Benjamin.
Elizabeth A. Wissinger
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780814794180
- eISBN:
- 9780814794197
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9780814794180.003.0011
- Subject:
- Sociology, Gender and Sexuality
In this chapter, I situate the book’s findings about modeling, embodiment, and technology in the debates about affect stirred up by the age of the blink. It considers the theoretical ramifications of ...
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In this chapter, I situate the book’s findings about modeling, embodiment, and technology in the debates about affect stirred up by the age of the blink. It considers the theoretical ramifications of imaging regimes, glamour labor, digital culture, affectivity, and technological changes in early 21st century. Placing questions raised by looking at modeling work and its cultural impact addresses debates about the differences between affect and emotion. The chapter also treats debates in neuroscience about affect and affect studies, discussing the theories of Massumi, Thrift, Leys, Ledoux, and James-Lange.Less
In this chapter, I situate the book’s findings about modeling, embodiment, and technology in the debates about affect stirred up by the age of the blink. It considers the theoretical ramifications of imaging regimes, glamour labor, digital culture, affectivity, and technological changes in early 21st century. Placing questions raised by looking at modeling work and its cultural impact addresses debates about the differences between affect and emotion. The chapter also treats debates in neuroscience about affect and affect studies, discussing the theories of Massumi, Thrift, Leys, Ledoux, and James-Lange.
Barbara L. Marshall
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781447335917
- eISBN:
- 9781447335955
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Policy Press
- DOI:
- 10.1332/policypress/9781447335917.003.0011
- Subject:
- Sociology, Gerontology and Ageing
This chapter considers the ways that embodied aging may be produced through wearable self-tracking technologies. With physical activity now promoted as key to the prevention of many age-related ...
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This chapter considers the ways that embodied aging may be produced through wearable self-tracking technologies. With physical activity now promoted as key to the prevention of many age-related problems, and as inactivity becomes framed as irresponsible, the market for devices to both measure and motivate activity has expanded. While research in the biomedical and exercise sciences focuses on how self-tracking devices can enhance interventions aimed at behavior modification with older adults, this chapter draw on interviews with older users to argue that we need to attend more carefully to how the data produced by self-tracking circulates through the networks of technologies, relationships and regimes of expertise that are embedded in everyday social worlds.Less
This chapter considers the ways that embodied aging may be produced through wearable self-tracking technologies. With physical activity now promoted as key to the prevention of many age-related problems, and as inactivity becomes framed as irresponsible, the market for devices to both measure and motivate activity has expanded. While research in the biomedical and exercise sciences focuses on how self-tracking devices can enhance interventions aimed at behavior modification with older adults, this chapter draw on interviews with older users to argue that we need to attend more carefully to how the data produced by self-tracking circulates through the networks of technologies, relationships and regimes of expertise that are embedded in everyday social worlds.
Shannon Vallor
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780190498511
- eISBN:
- 9780190498542
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190498511.003.0009
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Moral Philosophy, General
Chapter 8 explores the ethical challenges presented by today’s emerging technologies for digital surveillance and self-tracking. Keeping technomoral virtues such as honesty, self-control, ...
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Chapter 8 explores the ethical challenges presented by today’s emerging technologies for digital surveillance and self-tracking. Keeping technomoral virtues such as honesty, self-control, flexibility, justice, and perspective in view, this chapter examines ideals of transparency and control in contemporary discourse on the new world of dataveillance that enables a sousveillance society, one in which even the watchers are watched. Moreover, our lives are increasingly shaped by self-surveillance, self-tracking, and nudging, practices borne of wearable digital monitors and other ‘smart’ devices that let us analyze virtually every aspect of our bodies, our habits, and our days. These new modes of seeking the good life, crystallized in the emerging “Quantified Self” movement, are contrasted with traditional methods of self-examination and cultivation. The former are shown to promote a dangerously impoverished view of self-care and improvement, one that bypasses the genuine potential of surveillance technologies to promote human flourishing.Less
Chapter 8 explores the ethical challenges presented by today’s emerging technologies for digital surveillance and self-tracking. Keeping technomoral virtues such as honesty, self-control, flexibility, justice, and perspective in view, this chapter examines ideals of transparency and control in contemporary discourse on the new world of dataveillance that enables a sousveillance society, one in which even the watchers are watched. Moreover, our lives are increasingly shaped by self-surveillance, self-tracking, and nudging, practices borne of wearable digital monitors and other ‘smart’ devices that let us analyze virtually every aspect of our bodies, our habits, and our days. These new modes of seeking the good life, crystallized in the emerging “Quantified Self” movement, are contrasted with traditional methods of self-examination and cultivation. The former are shown to promote a dangerously impoverished view of self-care and improvement, one that bypasses the genuine potential of surveillance technologies to promote human flourishing.
Sun-ha Hong
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781479860234
- eISBN:
- 9781479855759
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479860234.003.0005
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Technology and Society
Today, machines observe, record, and sense the world—not just for us but also often instead of us and indifferently to our meaning. The intertwined problems of technological knowledge and (our) ...
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Today, machines observe, record, and sense the world—not just for us but also often instead of us and indifferently to our meaning. The intertwined problems of technological knowledge and (our) knowledge of technology manifest in the growing industry of smart machines, the Internet of Things, and other means for self-tracking. The automation of the care of the self is buoyed by a popular fantasy of data’s intimacy, of machines that know you better than yourself. Yet as the technology becomes normalized, the hacker ethic gives way to a market-driven shift in which more and more of “my” personal truth is colonized by machines (and the people behind the machines) that I cannot question.Less
Today, machines observe, record, and sense the world—not just for us but also often instead of us and indifferently to our meaning. The intertwined problems of technological knowledge and (our) knowledge of technology manifest in the growing industry of smart machines, the Internet of Things, and other means for self-tracking. The automation of the care of the self is buoyed by a popular fantasy of data’s intimacy, of machines that know you better than yourself. Yet as the technology becomes normalized, the hacker ethic gives way to a market-driven shift in which more and more of “my” personal truth is colonized by machines (and the people behind the machines) that I cannot question.