Wearable Computers and the Desire Not to Be Seen

• In Event: Innovating, Interrupting & Regenerating the Human-Technology Frontier - III

Abstract

In recent years data – big and small – has emerged as the way to get to know the world as it really is. The generalized belief – popularized in the media and technoscientific writing - is that with data we can see things that would otherwise go unnoticed: in our bodies, activities and the world itself. Yet, despite the hype, the rhetoric that envelops data recovers and repeats earlier promises made by those who claimed to speak for ‘the information age’. This paper attempts to draw out these historical contingencies: the ways in which promissory discourses are recurrent even when their technological substrate has changed. More precisely, this paper draws upon a case study of the implementation of wearable technologies in the workplace, conducted in the early 2000’s, to shed light on the experiences of becoming information and the movements of resistance to being seen. It shows how being seen – and being seen as information – involves a semantic and ontological shift in which identities are transformed and entities are created. This, in turn, may help shed light on the implications of the current data and quantification movements.

Author

• Ana Viseu, Universidade Europeia