In the age of COVID-19, one of the top 10 wearables of 2020 is an air purifier you strap on your face. Called the “Atmōs,” the mask claims to filter air 50-times better than top-grade masks. It has all the typical earmarks of wearable tech. It’s clunky, funny-looking, and expensive. It has a high-tech aesthetic, with sleek metallic lines, glowing lights, and a vaguely space-shippy vibe.
Bluetooth-connected, the Atmōs can casually spew data about the wearer to be parsed for corporate ends. Of course, it has received a ton of hype. Admiring articles from Fast Company, Forbes, and the BBC tout it as lifestyle protection against disease and pollution.
It’s also a case study that exemplifies issues identified by scholars who analyze wearable tech. The Atmōs pushes responsibility for socially caused data-exposure risk onto individuals. It assumes the wearer needs protection from the world. 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.
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.
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?
Issues relevant to sociologists arise most frequently from the use of self-tracking and embodied technologies. While offering the user new forms of personal control over self and body, these personal technologies also afford new avenues of corporate control. Bringing technology into constant and direct contact with the body makes the personal political. 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
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. 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.
At 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. Curiously, there has been a dearth of studies on wearables and race, a much-needed area of analysis. In what follows, I will briefly visit each of these areas, sketching an overview of issues highlighted by sociological analysis of wearable technologies.
Wearable Tech, the Body, and the Quantified Self
Of devices that facilitate body-self interaction, the Apple Watch and the Fitbit are the best-known examples—though the field has seen many different versions of self-tracking technology come and go. All areas of the body have been fair game, from smart rings and bracelets (Ōura; GripBeats; bellabeat) to devices tucked in one’s bra (Vitali), worn on one’s head (Muse; Philips’ SmartSleep; LIFTiD), or worn on one’s feet in the form of a Get Smart–like shoe.
With the emergence of vibrating, chirping, tapping, and other forms of human-machine interface, health is being reconfigured from a public good into a luxury commodity as entrepreneurs vying for new markets in “wellness” have explored strategies for human biological optimization and enhancement, hoping to commercialize many aspects of this process.
The Quantified Self (QS) community grew out of a small number of San Francisco-area meetups in the early 2000s. QSers tracked biometrics through cobbled-together systems of do-it-yourself body sensors connected, for instance, to Christmas lights that flickered with the wearer’s changing mood. Within a larger cultural move toward the uncritical acceptance of self-quantification as a means of self-optimization, QSers asked questions, posed problems, and hacked themselves in creative ways. In so doing, they contributed to debates about data and social justice, through carving out a space of empowerment via self-quantification and coordinated data collection for the benefit of the community.
Studies of the QS movement have outlined how data-mining personalization protocols have intensified internet and social media entanglements in the name of convenience and control. These studies identify how wearable tech pushes the envelopes of tracking and management, amplifying how technologically enmeshed bodies are nudged and cajoled, metered and managed, protected and surveilled, or coerced and connected.
Wearable Tech and Work: Where Living Becomes LivingTM
How can converting a body into data be considered a form of labor? Sociological analyses of work and labor have traditionally focused on the management of bodily labor power within coercive circumstances. The notion that merely moving around, breathing, eating, or sleeping can become a form of work has been somewhat controversial, yet this is the notion sociologists analyzing wearables have sought to examine.
The initial sociological inquiries into wearable tech found that the QS movement set in motion a complicated dance between empowerment through self-knowledge and dependence on tools that threaten the very privacy and ownership of this knowledge. Studies of commercial fitness trackers have made clear that data is a form of free labor, with the lion’s share of benefits from data mining going to corporations, not users. The proliferation of wearables, as they migrated beyond the wrist to colonize every inch of the body, has developed in an environment where collecting bodily data as a resource for profit has become normalized.
Researchers have repeatedly found that tracking technologies have deepened the murky intermingling of self-entrepreneurial impulses that benefit the wearer with forces coopting these efforts at self-care, thereby converting users and workers into body-factories.
Voluntary self-quantification rose with the tides of self-optimization, which sociologist Nikolas Rose identified as endemic to neoliberal forces contributing to the popularization of self-branding as a way of life. Within this social trend, the line between turning oneself into a project and the personal demands of seeking project-based work (or gig work) became increasingly blurred. Wearable devices’ relentless monitoring and metric conversion of bodily processes, not just while at work, served to strengthen these forces within what surveillance-studies scholar Jose van Dijck famously termed the “datafication of everyday life,” and within which I locate “glamour labor.”
“Glamour labor” is work that makes the body as available to, and modifiable by, technology as possible. Along with several scholars tracking the normalization of self-quantification and monitoring in an increasingly digitized world, I looked at a case study of workers who were becoming the harbingers of a society in which self-branding, self-promotion, and self-surveillance were becoming a way of life. I found that fashion models glamorized exposing every aspect of one’s work, life, and body to data metrics and actualization, making the idea of being “on” 24/7 seem attractive and fun. Wearing technology is the logical next step in the desire to optimize the body as fully as possible, making it available to the technological imperatives to improve, to be measured, and to connect—at all times.
Privacy and Surveillance Studies
As wearables augment data’s value, it has become urgently important to expose the exploitative origins of that value via concerted scholarship and public-facing inquiry. Surveillance studies has become a field in its own right, attracting scholars from a range of disciplines, including sociologists and those who take sociological concerns of public/private divides surrounding personhood to heart in their research. Along with scholars who have been sounding the alarm about the risk of possible data loss, leakage, or compromise inherent to wearable health technologies, others have highlighted how wearables play easily into forms of biopolitics, which connect micro-practices of individual control and empowerment with broader structures of management that tend to disempower the individual.
Women and Wearable Tech
In my research on wearables, I spoke to early adopters, hackers, technophiles, fashionistas, and design freaks in interviews and at fashion and technology gatherings, meetups, and summits. I asked attendees and participants about why and how gender shapes what we put onto—and into—the body. I too found the default male body shaped the “gendered affordances” of wearable tech, inflected by deep-seated cultural ambivalence about women in public space, women in relationships, and women in tech (Wissinger 2017a, 2017b). Body alarms and smart jewelry that dials 911 at the first sign of distress were typical of early iterations of wearables for women. (I’m using the term “women” here as it is used in marketing to women-identified persons; its gender normativity is clearly limiting and problematic). As one user-experience expert explained to me, technologies that assume women in public are all potential victims of violence come from “sort of an understandable first wave of things, but it is colored by ‘damsel in distress’ gender associations.” My research found little evidence that these technologies could readily move beyond gendered assumptions, inhibiting exploration of avenues for moving the field toward more equitable and socially just ends.
Wearable Tech and Race
While they are a relatively new phenomenon, several critical race studies of digital technology are building a much needed canon. Sociologist Ruha Benjamin coined the term the “New Jim Code”—a play on the term Jim Crow, referencing the laws and customs that reinforced racial segregation—to sum up her findings regarding racially biased algorithms, programming assumptions, and projected user behavior. Excepting Benjamin’s book, however, these works emanate from outside of the field of sociology.
In particular, “Jim Code” seems to have affected the availability of sociological research on wearable technology. Yet, sociologists are well positioned to address inequities baked into the design of wearable technology. Rather than leaving the work for Black sociologists, making race the focal point of technological usage and effects should be of primary concern for all researchers interested in investigating the social impacts of technologies such as wearables, which are so intimately connected to how the body is perceived, managed, and lived.
Conclusion: Creating Illegible Humans
Sociologists have come to see the value in studying digital technologies somewhat later than their colleagues in other fields. As digital sociologists Jessie Daniels, Karen Gregory, and Tressie McMillan Cottom have pointed out, “Sociology has been less concerned with redefining itself through its understanding of the digital, and has instead been content to cede its terrain” to a wide array of other disciplines, such as fashion studies, critical data studies, information studies, and communication and media studies, all of which have engaged quite readily with wearable tech. Traditionally, the discipline has operated on the assumption that there exist in the world distinct “ontological zones: that of human beings on the one hand; that of nonhumans on the other.” Wearable tech troubles these divides in a manner that questions some of the underlying precepts of sociological analysis, namely that human beings exist as a unit of study, which proper sociological methods can isolate from the writing, imaging, and knowledge technologies that make those humans legible in the first place.
Wearable tech presents a field ripe for sociological analysis, especially when it puts the social sorting mechanisms of race, class, and gender front and center. Identifying problems on the ground—as they are lived—with rigorously gathered empirical evidence for backup, sociologists have much to offer conversations about wearable technology and fights over data ownership, problems with privacy and surveillance, sexism in design, and racial inequities in the design and use of these devices that have promised empowerment to so many.
This essay summarizes arguments made in the following forthcoming chapter, and we thank Oxford University Press for permission to print them here:
Wissinger, E. “The Sociology of Self-Tracking and Embodied Technologies: How Does Technology Engage Gendered, Raced, and Datafied Bodies?” (forthcoming) in The Oxford Handbook of Digital Media Sociology, edited by D. Rohlinger and S. Sobieraj. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Any opinions expressed in the articles in this publication are those of the author and not the American Sociological Association.
