Wearable technology takes the digitization-embodiment nexus to a notably intense level, exacerbating issues of data ownership, privacy, and the forceable racing and gendering of bodies.Īt stake in the realm of wearable tech are the emergence and cultural meaning of the Quantified Self movement (e.g., groups of people united in their belief that self-mastery and empowerment can be achieved through self-tracking) the rise of wearables at work in the form of enforced data gathering and the subsequent labor questions it entails the threat of corporate profiteering from personal data gathered through surveillance hidden as personal empowerment and connection and the mismatch of wearables and women, where researchers uncovered sexism about female-identified people baked into the design of the devices themselves.
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Wearables are among several technologies that privacy specialist Bruce Schneier termed an “intimate form of surveillance.” There is a constant trade-off between exposing data about one’s physical state, location, and proclivities in exchange for, say, free access to an internet search to locate the nearest donut shop, and followed by increased motivation to work off the donuts that leads to strapping on a fitness tracker. Even as it offers the wearer intimate details about body and self, it exposes these same details to unchecked corporate data mining and behavioral control
Bringing technology into constant and direct contact with the body makes the personal political. While offering the user new forms of personal control over self and body, these personal technologies also afford new avenues of corporate control. Issues relevant to sociologists arise most frequently from the use of self-tracking and embodied technologies. However, since wearable tech’s hybrid nature can defy categorization, we must first delineate what, exactly, we mean by the term “wearable tech.” Are we talking about garments? Gadgets? Medical devices? Computers? Should a study of technology worn on the body exclude technologies inserted into the body? Is “ embodied technology” a better term? Why should sociologists care about wearable tech? When we look at wearables as facilitators of body/self-interactions, data-gathering devices that open the body to concerns about big data, and designed devices that sometimes offer highly gendered and raced functions and content as “neutral,” we can see how wearables trouble boundaries that sociologists frequently seek to map and analyze: work/leisure, public/private, nature/culture, body/self. It is designed more for show than for the actual comfort of the person using it-and its functioning benefits the company that manufactured it as much as, if not more than, the wearer. It assumes the wearer needs protection from the world. The Atmōs pushes responsibility for socially caused data-exposure risk onto individuals. It’s also a case study that exemplifies issues identified by scholars who analyze wearable tech. Admiring articles from Fast Company, Forbes, and the BBC tout it as lifestyle protection against disease and pollution. Of course, it has received a ton of hype. It has a high-tech aesthetic, with sleek metallic lines, glowing lights, and a vaguely space-shippy vibe.īluetooth-connected, the Atmōs can casually spew data about the wearer to be parsed for corporate ends. It’s clunky, funny-looking, and expensive. It has all the typical earmarks of wearable tech. Called the “ Atmōs,” the mask claims to filter air 50-times better than top-grade masks. In the age of COVID-19, one of the top 10 wearables of 2020 is an air purifier you strap on your face.
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