All Your Data Are Belong to Us: Attitudes in Design Cultures Where Wearables are Moving Toward Biotech

• In Event: Data Bodies at Work

Abstract

Gender, fashion, and data are key tools for assessing the social impact of wearable technology as it moves from the electronic to the biological, and to explore issues of data privacy and gendered personhood arising from biotech’s growing integration into embodied technology. My research examines the convergence of the physical, digital, and biological in the realm of wearable technology. Thus far, I have uncovered problematic assumptions about gender within the field of tech development, ongoing battles over individual versus corporate data ownership that lead to problems with data vulnerability, as well as fashionably seductive practices that put user data at risk in our current ‘click click gimme gimme’ culture. Yet practitioners in the field continue to claim that these new technologies are not like the old, and users will not have to worry about data exploitation and gendered attitudes built into their technology. This paper draws on interview and participant observation with early adopters, hackers, technophiles, fashionistas, and design freaks to map the environment in which wearable biotech is being developed, in which practitioners make these claims. The data reveal ongoing attitudes that normalize taking up bodily data as a resource for profit, and found little evidence that these technologies could move beyond gendered assumptions that so far have limited this technology’s potential. The paper concludes with a brief exploration of avenues for moving the field toward more equitable and socially just ends.

Author

• Elizabeth Wissinger, City University Of New York Graduate Center/BMCC