thank you all for coming i'm confined to my mic here so i have to be very unmobile i would like to talk today about webcamming as a practice and the promises of webcamming this paper is in the framework of a larger project that looks at the ways in which the internet has transformed pornography and has transformed it from a a literary genre into a form of communication interactive and online always on and webcamming is one of the manifestations is one of the avenues to create a an online relationship an online connection that can and indeed has often a an erotic or a sexual component so and then the question arises what is a webcamming as a form of of sex work if it's not prostitution and by the way by the way when i say prostitution i look at it as a positive thing not shameful or or a social problem though though prostitution can be a social problem or pornography i mean it's somewhere in between and that's why it's tolerated also legally when people perform sexually the law does not really is isn't welldefined on what's going on when people perform sexually in webcamming so the starting point in my discussion is the the debate between cyber skeptics and cyber utopians as you probably know this is a major i mean really defines the way we look at the internet the internet started with a whole list of cyber utopians listing all the virtues and benefits of this new invention for humanity and as we go on a growing list of cyber skeptics that have brought us to today and the way we view the internet and its ills and problems affecting society affecting politics affecting our social lives affecting the way in which we interact or do not interact and the watershed point in the history of the internet is when it became commercialized so in one thousand nine hundred and eighty five and then more prominently in one thousand nine hundred and ninety one when commercial interests where business interests have entered this cyberspace and have remarkably transformed it into a business driven a business driven space so webcamming was available before it became exploited by websites like live jasmine or i'm live to create wealth for the platform owners so very briefly these are platforms that still exist the owners are immensely wealthy just as an example live jasmine is owned by a hungarian he's the wealthiest hungarian on the planet owning this one single platform and what this does is really is a is a particular example of how commercial interests transform what we do or what we did online even before there were commercial commercial interest or money involved so people could webcam for various purposes but on such platforms i mean the owners of those platforms they've created an exploitative platform that uses people in countries without a lot of other opportunities for livelihoods like the philippines romania where a large number of performers through webcamming work for their livelihoods on these websites they receive a very small percentage of the of the payments for their performances they end the most dehumanizing aspect is a ranking system so a performer on these platforms have to comply with the viewer's pleasure because they know that they are going to be ranked and many of them so this is based on investigations into this on into this sphere they are coerced in situations of oneonone viewer and performer they are actually coercing to doing things that they don't want to do and oftentimes they do it at home in the presence of others for lack of privacy and this is an extremely concerning there's more and more evidence that this is a very very i mean an undignified practice for those who are pushed into this kind of practice also there is a whole system of recruiting these performers and hiring them in such a way that the owners of the platforms are not incriminated incriminated in any way so this is a very it's a dark side but a typical side of globalized economy where hightech hightech companies who actually working as virtual pimps do this kind of operation but they are they have legal means to distance themselves from any repercussions and the only way to push them into admitting what they're doing including their employees is to shame them by investigative journalism and that's actually happening but then chatter bait showed up and chatter bait i mean it looks similar visually when you look at the homepage of chatter bait and those websites and it was launched in two thousand and eleven interestingly it's a colombian owned company it's not an american hightech company it's a company that evolved in the periphery and outside of the silicon valley or outside of the west if you will and when i started observing chatter bait two and a half years ago it ranked three hundred and eighty eight on alexa right now it ranks one hundred and forty four so this means it's a it's a huge success it is a commercial platform in other words the owners of the platform share fifty of the proceeds but there are vital differences between chatter bait and the other platforms the commercial platforms number one the performers are autonomous and they they are they voluntarily perform they're not hired by anyone there's no intermediary who coerces them or finds devious ways to have them perform and and it raises a question i mean of the autonomy and the will to actually engage in such performance also chatter bait is completely free free to watch and free to participate you can tip so the whole there's a whole question about the nature of tipping as a form of payment what is tipping is it a form of recognition is it just another way of making money i mean i think this is an important question chatter bait operates on tipping so some of the viewers have can buy tokens which they can use for tipping while other performers don't need to tip number three there is a sharing economy aspect to chatter bait in the sense that some of the performances can be i mean some of the performances can go into a private mode excuse me some of the performances could go into a private mode but the chat part of the screen remains open for everyone so what you get is you get into the room but you can't see what's happening and the sharing works in sharing information on what's happening hopefully what's happening for those who can watch those who have paid a ticket and hopefully have others buy a ticket and join and also chatter bait involves microcommunities so some of the performers and i've followed those over time some of the performers developed microcommunities i mean fans who follow them and there's a and it's interactive it's interactive in a way that governed by the owners of the platform is not meant to be abusive and can't be abusive i mean it's a multiple viewer situation where the performers can can block viewers who are abusive this way or another so i'm asking myself oh okay i want to say one more thing there is a growing there are two aspects of chatter bait that highlight the problem of money when money enters interactions such as this so sexual interactions or eroticize interactions number one there is a marked difference between countries that have economic opportunities for people and countries that don't and people that perform and come from such countries you could see that the need for the supplemental income changes the nature of the performance so they're willing to do more or willing to appear more say on a daily basis as opposed to performers who come from countries like the united states for example who just sporadically appear say once a week twice a week three times a week you can see other countries where people show their performances even twice a day so that's one difference another difference is once chatter bait reached a tipping point in terms of making enough money you would see producers so you could see performances you know somebody's running them they're in the background they are actually operating the cameras and they're telling the performers what to do so abuse potentially can enter that way money enters and so and a lot of people can benefit from the proceeds so you can see this kind of interaction that was absent before that tipping point my time is up so thank you very much okay so today i'm going to talk to you about an auto ethnography survey study that i did on the crossfit open this is actually part of a much larger study which would be my actual doctorate study which is about influencer culture and particularly fitness influencers so what i am interested to look at in terms of crossfit crossfit is a brand at a corporation and it's also an exercise and program regime so crossfit is particularly interesting because how much of it relies on social media particularly aspects of social media that relate to surveillance and this idea of monetizing the surveillance of social media so to start what is crossfit so crossfit and this is where the title of my program comes in or the title of my presentation comes in their tagline is constantly varied functional fitness so crossfit is a mix of gymnastics weightlifting and cardiovascular exercises that are performed at very high intensity but can be scaled for every individual member of the crossfit community something that's really important to keep in mind when we talk about crossfit is that it is community based before i came into the presentation today i opened google maps and actually found out that the closest crossfit box is just two blocks down so it's a store of barbell and prospect athletic club i believe so i might call it in there afterwards to check crossfit values itself on being measurable so greg glassman was the founder of crossfit in the year two thousand it began with just a handful of fitness enthusiasts that would workout in his garage garage sorry and it's now become thirteen thousand boxes which is what crossfit calls gyms that are in one hundred and twenty countries so i'm from ireland if you haven't guessed because of my accent so my auto ethnography took place in my local crossfit box which is crossfit limerick so the open is a five week long international crossfit competition that's open access so anybody who's a member of a crossfit gym can join the open so you pay a small registration fee you enter your details online you decide which division you will be entered in really interesting part of selecting your division is it's not just broken down by gender and age group it's also broken down by ability or scalability so the most elite crossfit athletes who are often kind of the fittest people on earth perform every exercise or watch which is workout of the day at or x so like prescription so data measuring biometrics biomechanics all of these things are incredibly important to crossfit which is a communitybased program which also becomes really scientific when you start to get to the detail of it so my auto ethnography took place from the 22nd of february to the 26th of march the workouts for the open already started thursday and you have to submit your score by a monday this means that some people will actually do the workouts twice which is horrible because these workouts are designed to test the fittest people on earth you often see people rolling around on the ground sweating really really really uncomfortable afterwards but people do it twice because they want to win they want to be crowned the fittest on earth i for the record did not do a workout twice for the duration of my auto ethnography i am very much a researcher but i also value being able to go up and down the stairs crossfit inc which is the corporation crossfit maximize their community engagement using social media the image on the side of the screen is from dave castro's instagram david castro is the director of the crossfit games he uses social media a lot instagram in particular is where throughout the open he will post clues and it starts whole conspiracy theories about what the workouts are going to be announced on thursday this year there was a slight shift in the power dynamic of crossfit and the open and that the very last workout was left up to a public vote where any member of the crossfit community whether they were in the competition or not could go on facebook and select workout one two or three for people to perform on thursday and until monday what's really interesting about crossfit is here with this power dynamic and we're kind of entering foucalt because i can't talk about surveillance and not talk about foucalt this idea of the power of the institutions shifting to the public and it's not necessarily the health and medical experts but we're seeing this big shift within the crossfit community of anybody can be an expert if you've got your crossfit level one certificate training done you can train the others you monitor their progress you monitor the standards of their movements and ultimately you can judge them on their way to becoming the fittest on earth so what's really important to crossfit is that their program is driven by data so in the gym your scores for every workout that you do on the day are gonna be recorded on a whiteboard sometimes even on chalkboards what has happened with crossfit a lot in the last couple of years bear in mind you started in two thousand and now we're in two thousand and eighteen is that technology has become synonymous with the crossfit lifestyle there is an app for everything whether it's the wad or wodify app that you see here on the screen where you see your workout of the day the reps and the movements that you have to do and you can record them and share them with your community or indeed with the larger global community if they're using the app but you can also bring it down to a local level and within your local community gym you can see a leaderboard of who in your gym did the best that day and different rankings so again there's precise rules and standards for your performance so what's interesting about this technology is that it interacts with the community aspect of crossfit and you start to see that people will comment on one another's scores that they've inputted in the day and said one of your two of your reps were just a little bit shy of a full depth squat a competitiveness a hyper competitive starts to take place so these are two particular crossfit influencers that i kept kind of in touch with or kind of in line with when i was doing the open this year so on the left side of the screen is jordan her youtube channel is jackedlikejordan and on the right one of these to the far right is an actual crossfit games athlete bk goodmanson and on the left of that picture is craig richie who's based in the uk what i think is particularly interesting is that these influencers use youtube and instagram in particular to keep everybody up to date what i think is really really interesting about crossfit is that when i'm in the gym in limerick in ireland i have my phone out all of the time we're recording one another we're sharing each other's images and videos just like the influencers that we watch on youtube and on instagram there's a blurring of a boundary between what's online and what's offline so when bojack was talking about a hyperreality or a parallel reality this lens that we see that kind of distorts what is the physical here and now when you step into a crossfit gym the physical here and now is also being projected on a facebook live video for about five thousand viewers if you wanted to so we see this kind of disruption in terms of online and offline to what is online is fish and what's offline is something that could be considered an illness crossfit inc has taken up major issue with sugar and soft drinks pepsi and cocacola they have a very very regulated lifestyle which they track and monitor and share online all of the time but they don't see themselves as being abnormal that lifestyle is normal that constant monitoring and tracking using my fitness pal using all of their different apps is part of the normal lifestyle when the boundary between offline and online is blurred you start to wonder if when i leave the gym on a thursday evening if i'm not tracking what i have to eat afterwards am i suddenly abnormal am i not going to be the fittest on earth anymore as long as i have my phone in my hand and i'm connected to the crossfit community i'm online all of the time i'm in a hyperreality i'm in a parallel reality space so we see that there's this convergence between online and offline and it becomes quite matrix like and i don't know if i should always be doing squats if i should just be waiting for the elevator do i get off or do i get down my phone is in my pocket should i be tracking all of my movements all of the time so on the right hand side of the screen you can see that this is actually the app that my local crossfit gym in limerick use and you can see also that crossfit inc have got a global map where you can find your local community there's no off button crossfit is everywhere all of the time as soon as you create your social media account and you let your gym owners know that you have one the process for the open which begins this type of convergence and the parallel reality you sign up and you pay a fee you wait for the open announcement to be done on facebook live on a thursday you're following the hashtags you're looking at it on social media you're assigned to judge you perform a workout and you submit your scores you check your global leaderboard to see your position on it and you repeat it five times constantly getting feedback again these are just two the influencers that i looked at and what was most interesting about this auto ethnography what i found was that the open challenges competitors to perform a specific type of authenticity this type of disciplined authenticity is something that we're seeing on the rise more and more with influencers particularly the two influencers that i watched throughout the process of the crossfit open they're not elite athletes they're just like you and me that authenticity is incredibly clear in all of the content that they produced the third workout in the open this year was massively challenging you had to do handstand walks and handstand pushups both of the influencers that i showed you earlier struggled immensely with that workout as did i in the gym because i can't walk on my hands what's interesting about their content and their self branding as a normative strategy is that even their authenticity and their content is disciplined and it's regulated they have sponsors they have brands they need to get a certain amount of views or likes on instagram and youtube so while there is a stratification of the elite crossfit athletes and the everyday person what's more interesting is to look at this disciplined authenticity at a regulated authenticity that occurs within the larger global community so the space between the digital athletic self and the physical self is complicated and it collapses so this convergence between online and offline i like what girard said a chain of investments and reinvestments must never stop so this is where that disciplined authenticity is highlighted and i'm out of time okay thank you hi everyone hi can you hear us we just want to say thank you for having us here today we're also always very grateful to have the opportunity to share our work i'm elisa deplisinger i'm kristin miller i'm sorry i should come through but we also get i'm not sure what we need to do okay good morning everyone thanks whitney for helping me out my name is alana reyes and i'm really excited to be part of this panel that's kicking off to theorizing the web two thousand and eighteen before i start i want to mention two things i'm going to be referencing some superhero media in my presentation but there won't be any spoilers so infinity war fans you're safe here and second i'm going to be doing my best to describe the visuals on my slides both for accessibility purposes and so you know why i chose to put some pictures on my slides this first slide is easy because it's just a couple of words ability and technology which are my keywords for today's presentation today i want to take a closer look at the ways our differently abled bodies move through a world that's increasingly filled with technology i also want to think about the ways that these differently abled bodies are represented in the media that we consume every day in particular i want to ask this question what makes us think of specific technologies as only meant for certain bodies so as a starting point for asking this question i want to look at superheroes and disability in particular now putting these ideas together might seem really counterintuitive at first you might be thinking superheroes and disability aren't they like opposites well if you think about ability as this linear spectrum you can put ability disability on one end and super ability on the other but i don't like to think of ability as linear another way of thinking about superheroes and disability together are by thinking about how they're both distant from what we think of as normal bodies i also think superheroes are a great starting point to ask this question because they're everywhere today i mean infinity war comes out today there's other movies like black panther there's tv shows like gotham and like teen titans go my guilty pleasure you see them on lunchboxes tshirts so many places offline and online so given this ubiquity of superheroes and these images it's important to ask ourselves these two questions how did these images of superheroes ability and technology shape our understandings of both those images and ourselves and since this isn't just a oneway relationship we should also ask this reciprocal question how does our understanding and our embodied experience shape the creation and reification of these images about technology and superheroes is it possible that we are perhaps perpetuating ideas about our bodies and technology that we use by writing them into our real lives i mentioned earlier that there are some direct links between superheroes and disability and one really great example is a mascot team from morgan's wonderland an accessible theme park in austin texas i found out about this theme park through aimi hamraie's book building access and on this slide you can see a picture of the morgan's wonderland logo subtitled a special place for special friends aimi hamraie describes this theme park as meant for children with many levels of ability and mobility the mascots of morgan's wonderland are for children called the wonder squad which you'll see in the next two slides using screen grabs i got from their website the text is a little small but i encourage you to check out their website and learn more about the wonder squad the wonder squad is superheroes of morgan's wonderland brought together by circumstance and fate four young heroes turning their disabilities into super abilities we have morgan their leader who uses wings and has a cognitive delay but has emotional gifts that bestow her with wings like a butterfly we have rocket the mechanical genius who built the own built and designed the wheelchair that he uses xray with a visual disability who uses a seeing eye dog and jet who has cerebral palsy but uses jet powered crutches designed by rocket so these wheelchairs these jet powered crutches these are some immediately familiar images of what kind of assistive technologies can look like but i want to take a really quick look about how we can define assistive technology because it's it's a lot broader than just these two examples you see here the next slide is the us government definition of assistive technology according to the assistive technology act of one thousand nine hundred and ninety eight which says any assistive technology is any item piece of equipment or product system whether acquired commercially modified or customized that is used to increase maintain or improve functional capabilities of individuals with disabilities that is a very long definition but i want to call your attention to two things the first is that it's by definition it is broad it is supposed to include a wide array of technologies but second is actually written into the definition that it's for individuals with disabilities and i also want to remind everybody that assistive technology can take some simpler less mechanized forms that many people use every day for example on this slide you can see a picture of a curb cut or the ramps that are built into sidewalks all around the united states that i actually used to get up into the museum of moving image today and these assistive technologies are useful for bodies with many levels of mobility wheelchair users were their primary users in mind when this when curb cuts were designed and implemented but they also benefit people like you and me who would like to walk on surfaces without stomping and getting up and down gutters and people who use devices like strollers and other things with wheels roller blades for that matter but i promised you some superhero analysis today so let's get back to some superheroes here are two of my favorites who use some really iconic technology on the left we have ironman in his suit and hiding in the shadows on this dark slide is batman on the right these are two men two billionaires two heroes that are by all means amazing but these heroes are also upholding this idea that certain bodies certain wallets and certain ability levels have exclusive access to certain technologies so let's not focus on these guys because they're only going to lead to some sad analysis instead i want to tell you about this new anime that i found that i think does a great job of talking about technology and the broad reach that it can have it is called my hero academia and the posters on this slide are there any fans here yeah okay season yes yes please watch it season three is airing right now and i won't spoil anything beyond what you'll see in like episodes one and two okay i'll leave it on this slide for a bit so this show i love it because it's a really great it's a really richly structured show we're thinking about different ability levels and the way that societies can be built around them to accommodate them it takes place in a fictional city in japan where eighty of the world's population is born with a quirk or a super human ability now these quirks can range from things that are like really flashy like there's one character in the show whose right hand blasts out ice and his left hand blasts out fire and he's like learning how to use them at the same time but only eighty of the world has the quirks so what's interesting is the protagonist who you'll see on this slide izuku midoriya was born without a quirk and part of the storyline is how he navigates being in this society without a quirk although tiny spoiler he ends up inheriting a quirk but that's in like episode two so you'll see it right away but but again it's great for thinking about ability and disability management because most of the show is him learning how to learn use this quirk that he's inherited so i i adore this show also because on this slide you can see a group of teenagers in high school uniforms of course it wouldn't be an anime if part of it didn't take place with high school uniforms right my hero academia follows this group of teenagers as they go to high school to complete a hero course which allows them to be certified as professional heroes in a society that employs and licenses heroes it recognizes them beyond the way xmen recognizes mutants and even beyond the way that justice league and avengers everybody's like always battling each other and they're always getting in trouble this is a really different way of conceptualizing heroes and how they can operate within society i also really love this show because every single student gets their own hero costume so on this slide is a picture of the students like immediately after they try on their hero costumes i think this is later in season one as you can see they're really flashy they allow a lot of personality to come out for each student but what's great is that they're specifically designed for each student's own abilities and by putting this technology in the hands of children and students who are explicitly still learning how to use this technology and manage their own abilities i think the anime does a fantastic job of promoting this idea that all sorts of bodies can use all sorts of technology even better these costumes that you can see here are designed by other students at the high school so these students at the high school not only are they learning how to be heroes but some of the students are learning how to design technology and make it for other students in season two you get to see a character called mei hatsume or hatsume as they refer to her in the anime because last names are often used as first in animes she's one of the characters who's learning how to make support technology and you get to see a few episodes where she's designing this technology that both balances out people's weaknesses and amplifies other students strengths so but this also leads me to another pattern that i noticed mei's characterized as a genius a child prodigy and when i thought about a lot of other media that i think that i watched that have superheroes in them a lot of the technology designers are geniuses for example let's look at on the left we have tony stark in his lab working with jarvis to design something and on the right we have shuri from black panther who is now my favorite marvel character but she's also characterized as a genius a child prodigy and even returning to our friend rocket from the wonder squad in the second sentence of his description you see he's characterized as a mechanical genius so who cares that they're all geniuses why can't we just be happy that a wider array of technology designers are in the media compared to the billionaire genius playboy philanthropists that we're used to seeing yes we can be really happy about this and i'm thrilled to see shuri and rocket as really capable and able to design their own technology but going back to our original question of how do these ideas and representations coconstitute each other we might still be reinforcing this idea that tech and its creation only belongs to geniuses so i'm hopeful that as more media like academia my hero academia comes out and we can continue to show more learning tweaking and iterative processes that go into learning and making assistive technology maybe we can stop writing this idea into our own lives that assisted technologies only belong to certain people how do these images in our understanding shape each other that's something that you can take with you as you watch infinity war tonight or tomorrow or whenever you get to go see it and with that thank you very much for listening and please watch my hero academia and tweet me when you watch it so i can see your responses okay so while the last panelist are setting up i'm going to give you the first qa question ahead of time so you could all think about it and we don't have to waste time with it while they're setting up what i'm gonna ask our panelists is i've been thinking a lot about the looking glass self recently probably because i hang out with a sixteen month old but what that is is the idea that people come to know themselves through the way that other people react to them and i think what a lot of we're seeing here is the people that are members of these specific communities that have particular relationships to technology and so what i would like all of our panelists to talk about for our first question is how the people in the groups that they looked at come to know themselves through the members of the communities that they're in and what role technology plays in that coming to know themselves in that way all right thanks everyone i'm elizabeth this is kristen let's go so our paper's called possible futures of embodied biotech i think this one sorry okay so recently there's been a lot of interest in something called the fourth industrial revolution which has been there's been a lot of talk about ai and robotics taking over the world but there's also an other aspect of it where electronics and biology are becoming more fungible they're blending and so we're looking at this fourth industrial revolutionary moment which we are going to talk about that with regard to how this is translating into technologies that work with the human body so this excitement has translated into a lot of ra ra who ha out there in the world and media so there are people out there like at the consumer electronics show last january in las vegas saying things like just around the corner are wearables made from materials that aren't even in our vocabulary yet or you know at the fashion tech lab at biofabricated the revolution is coming and you were either in or you're out and you know how fashion people don't like to be out and then in talking about this lovely garment on the upper righthand corner it's filled with these microorganisms that never interact in nature they've been here engineered for the first time to have a relationship inside a piece of clothing think of it as an evolution not by natural selection but evolution by design and the garment in the upper right is from the mit media lab that's out of neri oxman's project and it's bioorganisms that have been engineered to support apparently support the body of the wearer during interstellar travel that's the idea anyway during which you'll want to wear your side boob so we're thinking about the where the body machine interface is headed and we're analyzing this through critical data studies fashion studies transhumanism versus posthumanism and this sociology of the body under neoliberalism and interestingly if you google when i googled transient transhumanism i got this lovely all hooked up and beautiful and when i googled posthumanism i got this sad little homunculus which might actually be a good visual representation of what it is to live as a body under the pressures of neoliberalism and so there are a number of animating questions for this project that we want to talk about the but you know most importantly how have the internet portables and the wearable technologies put the body's resources to work what forces will attempt to normalize and facilitate this transition and how fashion how is fashion involved in this process and what are the limits of the body when technologies elements and interfaces are increasingly organic and cellular is this me yes oh it's me okay so there's a lot of names up there but basically i want to give you kind of the the background intellectually and academically where we were coming from in terms of frameworks of thinking about labor and all of these influenced my definition that's cut off of glamor labor which is the work most of us carry out when we select images of optimal body and self for our instagram account or other social media accounts and it's a way it's thinking about how we put in work to be attractive through the aid of technology discipline and manipulation so glamor labor really is the work with technology to achieve a certain type of body and self that the technology actually pulls for so different technologies pull for different selves and thinking from the internet to social media and now wearable tech is kind of the background of where we're coming through from with this project one of the other frames that we're using for our analysis is to look at this the these varying forms of wearable technology through the sort of discourse of transhumanism and then also the critical approaches of the posthuman critique and i assume that there's fairly broad familiarity in this room with these concepts but just briefly transhumanism is a anthropocentric technocentric human enhancement ideology often called humanity plus and it often suggests that science and technology can innovate around physical limits and social inequities whereas post humanism although it's kind of cut off at the bottom here but often posthuman the word posthuman crops up in transhumanist discourse as a kind of like post technological singularity end stage of transhumanism in which humanity and technology have completely fused but post humanism as a school of critique is post anthropocentric posthuman it's a critical philosophy that applies intersectional lenses of gender race class sexual orientation ability and age to show that the human is not one but many and also makes room for the nonhuman in its analysis as well as the role of power so there are two phases of the study and the first phase was looking at wearable technology electronic technology and we did a bicoastal investigation in california and new york city or on the east coast anyway we talked to twenty five we did twenty five interviews of fashion fashion designers and tech designers and also did participant observation at professional gatherings of the same type of people and we really looked at portable and wearable tech fashion and gender especially with regard to the technologies designed for femme identified women yeah and you know that is women and for the purpose of this presentation as men as inclusively with regards to gender so there are a number of findings that were the results of this project or at least the first phase of this project which probably will be familiar to anybody who studies the tech industry broadly the first and most important is that our interviewees and our observation reveals that unsurprisingly there is a young white cis male monoculture of wearable tech research and design that leads to inattention to other demographics there are also problematic assumptions that are built into many of the projects such as women as the female body or women as potential victims many of these projects visualize quote unquote difficult to read emotional responses by translating biometric data and there is both extreme interest in extracting and monetizing data as well as insufficient privacy protection for that data and just quickly by that programmer over there this is a dress that was surprisingly designed by a woman but it is a dress that it's designed to gradually grow more transparent as the wearer becomes sexually aroused so in the course of this project one of the things that that emerged in our discussions was that we felt like we needed a workable definition beyond wearable technology to talk about many of the projects that we were looking at especially as wearable technologies increasingly starting to cross over into biodesign biotech and bio fabrication and so we really like andrew iliadis and isabel peterson's definition of embody technology as something that we can move forward with because it allows us to discuss not only technology that is prosthetic and contact with the skin but technologies that are implantable injectable or even ingestible and that are increasingly working with the body on a cellular level so when we're talking about biotech and biowear what exactly do we mean so biowear is equal parts biotechnology things that you interact with and shaped the human body through bacterial and other cellular channels it's wearable tech that meets tracks and translates blood sweat and tears converting bodily processes into data and it's also involved the biofabrication and synthetic biology biology which engages genetic modification of organisms and processes for the production of fibers and garments an inch of interest in particular is this patch is a patch that you can put on your loved ones and it reads the composition of the person's sweat it locates them tells you how they're feeling tells you about their health and my it's a lot of surveillance going on there so interesting we can explain this one in the qa when we come back oh and so then the next phase of the project then was moving into really trying to understand embodied biotech so we've expanded the study to look at embodied technology not just wearable tech and the interview subjects have been synthetic biologists biodesigners biofabricators and wearable wearables designers that are engaging with biological materials so and there's also been we've been doing participant observation at conferences like the one called biofabricate and we can talk more about exactly what biofabrication is but we have an example here which we'll get to in a second and fashion conferences that also have to do with like new materials so for instance in the upper righthand corner is oh that's gingko bioworks and fabric futures project that uses i think transgenic bacteria to dye fabric and the bottom one is an outfit that was grown from yeast we're running out of time so the main finding is most of the people we talked to said yeah this field is dominated by women so it's going to be different from what you found going on with wearable tech there are different metaphors for the body that are being used and also there's this idea that maybe this biofabrication technology might solve some of the problems of the fashion industry in terms of waste and over consumption so share our questions yeah some questions that we had based on our again our interview subjects responses was well this woman dominated biofabrication field or movement actually deliver on its promises and are the industrial footprint footprint of biotech fabrication and its ideological frame is really so different from the prevailing attitudes of the tech community broadly and so wanted to close by talking about yeah something that you may have noticed throughout the course of this presentation which is that in the marketing and display of wearables there is repetitive use of a young white enabled thin feminine generally blonde even and partially clothed bodies to display and market these technologies and even in the most speculative corners of embodied design which most of these projects represent where there are more likely to be women in lead positions and you might expect they're far more social critique the representation of normative gender and bd standards is basically unaltered and so while designers often feel free to push the boundaries of living matter woman appears as a pretty narrow and inflexible category for all of the sort of messiness and viscerality and goop and cellulose and so you know given that that woman seems to be written as almost biologically female one might sense low investment in using these technologies to enable the lives and bodies of anyone beyond the already privileged so the prominent women biodesigners are also generally providing a kind of glamor labor for the less quote unquote sexy aspects of the the tech industries that underwrite their projects you know and it's in the the captions on most of these images but many of these projects like mariato's project is underwritten by stratasis this 3d like gaze is actually wearable up here is underwritten by autodesk anyway so just be one second so basically what we want to ask is if it's really so revolutionary to make space and a stem for the feminine if what that feminine is doing is simply reinforcing old binaries that render you know femininity as inherently biological squelchy messy visceral and you know that renders the body and the biological is something that should be ever ready for exploitation yeah and so you know clearly there are important potentials in many of these technologies for just citizen science and dra medicine so the problem is possibly not the technology but the uses to which it's being put and for what purposes and so we wanted to ask to close like what might some alternatives look like to prevent this discussion from seeming potentially luddite and one of the projects that we looked at was this embody suit which is a project that that pulls ambient data in close to the body of the wearer and makes uses haptic sensors to make the body of the wearer you know aware of whatever kind of tech data that's in their ambient environment that they choose to be aware of so i guess we're done but we can talk about that more yeah we can talk about this more in the qa and you know some of our thoughts around this slide thank you thank you if all our panelists could come up to the front and we've got our first discussion topic is going to be tech and self knowledge go oh then for everybody else if you want to ask questions i'll be running up and down with this mic just raise your hand and i will try to get to everybody before we run out of time who wants to go first okay so i guess the thing that got me interested in this idea in this topic that i just presented on you know how when you were little or like you see kids doing this they look at posters and things like on twitter a few weeks ago there was this video of two two black children who were looking at this poster of black panther and they were like i'm that one and you're that one i used to do that with my brother all the time when we were kids and he has a visual disability and so if anyone's seen the original comics for teen titans i really like that show and one of the characters his name is cyborg and so my brother used to say oh i have to be cyborg because i have visual impairment and that was something that really stuck with me because he was choosing the cyborg because he felt like he had to and not because he felt like he matched with cyborg and so i guess to answer the earlier question like how how would we see how our study subjects see each other and how it informs our research that that was my starting point and i think that's more common than anything i think a lot of people don't realize or talk about so one of the things that we found when we were looking at the shift from the electronic to the biological in terms of wearables was that a lot of the people that we talked to many of them identified women i guess that we talked to they were saying that as scientists and researchers and designers they had they were putting different metaphors for the body so they were going into these giant conventions of tech people and one of them pointed out that most of the people around her were talking about cogs and circuits and machines that put up there and that she and her colleagues were talking about bodies and the biome and shit and private sorry did i swear private parts the things that are traditionally coated as female embodied they are bringing into the technology via their perspective that they're bringing to it so does that is that because they're women i don't know but it's interesting that there's a different metaphor for the body different a way of thinking of the self through technology then electronic clean dry space of like the virtual i don't have a body i'm in i'm in cyberspace kind of point of view there's that distinction between what i think that's the terminology it's like sparkies and squishies we all could figure out what that means right yeah electronic engineer versus biofabrication designer growing mushroom based leather in her lab in her kitchen yeah i think like a part of the reason why i find to be so interesting and looking at it through social media and through surveillance and through the technology is because that's how i found it and that was how i found the community was online if i hadn't had an instagram account i don't know if i would be a member of a crossfit gym what became more interesting to me was that the longer i stayed in the community the more i saw that it was diverse but beneath the surface so within the crossfit competitions there are different categories for adaptive athletes so you will actually see people who may not be able bodied but they still going to be climbing ropes and lifting bar bells and i thought that was incredibly interesting the way that it skewed again this reality of what it is to be the fittest on earth it doesn't always mean that you're an able bodied person it doesn't always mean that you look like the influencers that i would have showed you in the slides not everybody is straight white and cisgender but you have to really get into the community i find you have to kind of go through the layers of surveillance and be on the apps and join the communities and follow the hashtags until you had to really scratched that surface and i think that's where i find it really interesting to apply a concept like higher reality or hyper reality the convergence of online and offline and this distortion of normalization around the able body and higher technology and surveillance and social media in particular provided a really interesting gateway for that so this idea of the self and self knowledge and embodiment and kind of the convergence of that technology and social media is something that i have many many more questions about it myself maybe if i had twenty five minutes per presentation but i don't and i'll work on that for next time yeah i just wanted to say that we did a new liberal age with that has introduced a permanent and increasing moral panic about sexual issues and that's very suffocating so a website like chatter bait not that we need to become cyber utopians we can suspend our cyber skepticism and say there are platforms and there are venues online that can allow fully autonomous potentially empowering sexual expression despite this rising moral panic so that's that's how it speaks to me all right we're gonna open it up for qa who's got a question right in the center and speak right into the mic or the live stream will not hear you and everyone will be sad hi my question is for the gentleman do you have a sense of how sestafosta might impact the the ways in which like people who are using the internet for sex work are able to do so autonomously you have to explain that concept to me okay so there's there trump just signed a law that is about basically trying to regulate or to tamp down on trafficking but many sex workers are saying that it will also impact like how they can use the internet to communicate because it's it's like seeping into all of these online spaces that they're using and i think there's a sense that it might force these sort of more open online expressions to go underground sorry i interrupted too early i'm sorry i don't want to do it again i'm sorry legislation in the us bad did you mention that the unmentionable the unmentionable person i thought i heard the word should i answer now or are we picking up more questions no no answer yeah sure this kind of legislation can really i mean well can impede on venues that are autonomous and spontaneous and fun and do not include abuse or the level of abuses is possible but it's very limited so yeah this kind of of inter many interventions can yeah it can be it can be very damaging but that's what what makes me suspend my skepticism about the internet early internet promise is still here with us there's a conflict between that and commercial interests but also the moral panic which is wider why do you think that's happening science business and commercial interests i think that the internet and with work of independent hackers the spirit of that can still and the fact that it's global it's not restricted to us law for example that means that such activities can can stay and thrive so i'm suspending my skepticism i don't want to say i'm optimistic but yeah hi my question is for louise picking up on a threat on how you compare the entity between the online and offline concerning representation you've got this function of surveillance but i was really interested in the two phrases you've mentioned of regulated authenticity and discipline authenticity so is the implication here that real authenticity is natural unstaged unsurveillanced not managing audience like what is the juxtaposition of the actual authenticity if there is one i think it's particularly interesting if we're looking at influencers who are using social media accounts and this this idea of finstagrams i don't know if anybody's heard of it the fake instagram accounts or the more real instagram accounts that influencers will have which kind of show it's this idea of the backstage here you're the behind the scenes of the perfect life which is interesting and i think kind of oxymoronic in a way because almost all performance and almost all kind of performance of the self is regulated in a particular we think about things like when we walk into the room here today we're in a particular space where we know we're going to be around particular people we're at a panel about body politics so what will we wear what will we do we perform an awful lot in a way that is natural and a way that's not commodified so the idea of looking at this parallel reality and hyperreality of disciplined authenticity is really looking at a kind of contemporary time with neoliberalism and possibly even postfeminism how that can be commodified and using looking at social media in particular the data the surveillance and the algorithm and this kind of algorithmic personalization how that disciplined authenticity can be monetized and how it can be curtailed to cast an interest whether it's the cis male influencer like craig richie that i was talking about or whether it's jordan and other cisgender influencer their authenticity can be commodified and it can be monetized in a particular way but the more authentic that they are the more views that they get like i said when somebody sees them struggling at work often the views on that video are going to go up so i think that's interesting when you kind of add on that lens that kind of hyper real lens and look at the kind of monetization that happens behind it that answer your question thanks hi i guess my question is for you too is that maybe more generally for the panel i'm just curious were there any instances in which the kind of the social setting the pressures that you have described on people conflict with the data and if that happened in other words where someone might see data and say well the data is saying you did a great workout but i'm looking at the video and you know i've known you a long time and i've got six other people who agree with me that it's it wasn't that great i mean that's maybe ridiculous cause i'm just off the top of my head but i'm just wondering if there was pressure to sort of use social media and then also pressure to accept data and deny such activity what if those are in conflict in any of your work and how people deal with that if there is yeah in the this open that happened just recently a few weeks ago there is actually a particular instance where one of the elite athletes when they were they have to video record their open workouts when they are submitting their scores the standard of the hand stand pushups changed this year so it was a little bit difficult it was or more difficult it was measured in a particular way so while this particularly athletes score was incredible it pushed them really high up on leaderboard when their video submission was under review a lot of the members of the crossfit community and there was a whole reddit thread about it and it blew up that were pointing out that half of your reps aren't meeting the standard and crossfit had to come out with a statement and say it wasn't necessarily but this workout in particular we know that when this athlete gets to the next stage they're perfectly capable of doing the work that is asked of them so it really did provide this instance of the data isn't matching up with visually what we're seeing what became the topic of conversation for that was that it was the community that pointed that out it wasn't crossfit inc itself as a brand that said hang on a minute your heels aren't getting over the tape on the wall it was the community that said those reps aren't to standard what are you going to do about it but they are as of then going through to the next stage of the competition so we'll see what happens and i think it will be in june when the next stage of the competition is there and i imagine that the judging standards are going to be very much under the microscope of all of the people watching it on facebook live and all of the people looking at it on twitter and it kind of comes back to this idea of crossfit being a community driven sport but what happens when the community starts to revolt against you know the fittest people on earth then what happens the lazy people get control again and it's great so we can just sit down on the couch speaking for my friends this is super we have time for probably one or two more questions so alana this is specifically for you one of the juxtapositions between my hero academia and the kind of marvel representation of assistive technology is that assistive technology is confined to either people with social connections like the avengers xmen so on and so forth or people with huge amounts of money eg tony building assistive technology for roadie at the end of civil war whereas in my hero academia this is an egalitarian kind of representation the assistive technology does any of that enter into your analysis or your future work or how do you think that affects the way in which we view particular kinds of advanced assistive technologies hmm okay so for the first part of that question does it enter into my work i would love to turn this into a bigger project in terms of my actual dissertation i'm only a second year so i'm still finishing up coursework but my eyes are kind of on this and i think there's something that i need to unravel a little bit more and as far as your second question sorry can you can you repeat it so how does the how does the representation of advanced assistive technology as the domain of the super rich or the super privileged affect our perceptions of assistive technology i think so this is my opinion and this is something i can't quite support with theory yet but my opinion is that it kind of pigeonholes it into this like the the advanced stuff anyways it makes it seem like it's completely inaccessible just on the whole and my goal today was by saying like pulling out the example of curb cuts was to say yes like we look at this really advanced technology that really elaborate like you said technology is kind of accessible to only a few but we can start to pull down from that idea and pull it down into like a more accessible for lack of a better word form of technology especially for people who are young and either want to get into developing it themselves or maybe you're just starting out to use it and they feel like they're kind of tapping into this really niche separate thing i think by pigeonholing it in terms of like i said billionaire genius playboy philanthropists it kind of separates it from what is normal and what we think about as normal and that's something that we can't just count especially as we're seeing it more and more frequently i hope that answers your question we have one minute who's got a short question this is a question for you two about your presentation was really interesting but perhaps this is a surface level question but with all of the sensationalized media attention on neri oxman do you think this is a really positive for her creative endeavors and her colleagues and her peers work or i mean it's kind of early to tell but yeah so neri oxman is a biofabricating mit scientist who happens to be gorgeous and dating brad pitt perhaps we don't know they're just friends we actually we had a picture on the slide that was like from people or something about the two of them and then we were like oh maybe we should take that out cause we don't actually have time to talk about it but so now we can talk about it i don't know i think is it a good thing yeah it's a positive for this whole okay so the people we talk to would be like hell yeah but that's an uncritical point of view and we're trying to bring a more critical voice to it but they are very much excited about the idea that biofabrication synthetic biology and these new practices that aren't so new in the seventies but whatever are becoming more wellknown and they're we were just at a research site last night biotech without borders in brooklyn and they there was an interesting conversation at this lesson on how to bring biology to your business where they were saying that we need to educate hollywood better because they were afraid of genetic modification technologies and there's really nothing new with it so there's an interesting like cultural moment happening right now where people are afraid of gmos and the people we were in the room with last night were like they should not be afraid it's the way of the future and i think it's a mixed bag it really is these are people who are like sort of evangelist for crispr and things like that so has everybody or how many people in the room i've seen thank you so much for being here thanks for being in the conference and enjoy the rest of your day