has transformed it from a literary genre into a form of communication interactive and online always on and webcamming is one of the a sexual component so and then the question arises what is webcaming is a form 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 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 that isn't isn't well defined on what's going on when people perform sexually webcaming so the starting point in my discussion is the the debate between cyber skeptics in cyber utopians as you probably know this is a this new invention for humanity and as we go on a growing list of cyber sceptics that have brought us to today and the way we internet and its ills and problems affecting society affecting politics are affecting our social lives affecting the way in which we interact or do not interact and the watershed point  remarkably transformed it into a business driven a business driven space 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 hungarian he's the wealthiest hungarian on the planet owning this one single platform and what this does is really is it is it is a particular example of how commercial interests transform what we do or what we did online even before there were commercial commercial interests or money involved so people could webcams for various purposes but on such platforms i mean the owners of like philippines romania where a large number of performers through webcaming work for their livelihoods on these websites they receive a very so performer on these platforms have to comply with the viewers pleasure because they know that they are going to be ranked many of them so this is based on investigations into this  into this sphere they are coerced in situations of one on one viewer and performer they are actually coerced into doing things that they don't want to do and oftentimes they do it at home 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 incriminating and incriminating in any way so this is a very it's the it's a dark side but a typical side of glow of a globalized economy where high tech learning high tech companies who are actually working as virtual pimps do this kind of operation but they are they have they have legal means to distance themselves from any cushions 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 chatterbait showed up and chatterbait i mean it looks similar visually when you look at the homepage of chatterbait and those websites and it was launched in two thousand and eleven interestingly it's a colombian owned company it's not an american hi tech 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 chatterbait two and a half years ago it ranked three hundred and eighty 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 percent of the proceeds but there are vital differences between chatterbait 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 the perform and and it raises a question i mean of the autonomy and the the will to actually engage in such performance also is completely free free to watch and free to participate you can tip so the whole quad 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 think i think this is an important question chatter bay operates on tipping so some of the view have can buy tokens which they can use for tipping while other performers don't need to tip number three there's a sharing economy aspect to chatterbait 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 you get into the room but you can't see what's happening and the sharing works in sharing the information 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 involves micro communities so some of the performance and i followed those over time some of the performers develop micro communities i mean fans who follow them and there's a and it's interactive its interactive in the 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 performance can can block viewers who are abusive this way or another so i'm asking myself okay i want to say one more thing there is a growing there are two aspects of chatterbait that highlight the problem of money when money enters interactions such as this or sexual interactions or eroticized attack interactions number one there is a marked difference between countries that have economic opportunities for people in countries that don't and people that perform and come from such countries you could see that the need for this 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 that's one difference another difference is once chatterbait 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 there in the background they are actually operating the cameras and they're telling the performers what to do so abuse potential you 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 measuring biometrics biomechanics all of these things are incredibly important to crossfit which is a community based program which also becomes really scientific when you start to get  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 community of anybody can be in experts 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 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 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  might be thinking superheroes and disability are 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 another way of thinking about superheroes and disability together are by thinking about how they're both distanced 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 ward comes out today superheroes and these images it's important to ask ourselves these two questions how do these images of superheroes ability and technology shape our understandings of both those images and ourselves and since this isn't  one way relationship we should also ask his reciprocal question how does our understanding and our embodied experience shape the creation and reification of the images about technology and superheroes is it possible that we are perhaps perpetuating ideas about our bodies and technologies 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 aimee henry's book building access and on this slide you can see a picture of the morgan's wonderland logo mechanical genius who built the own built in design of the wheelchair that he uses x ray with a visual disability who uses a seeing eye dog and jet who has cerebral palsy but uses jet powered crutches designed by rocket 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 acquired commercially modified or customized that is used to increase maintain or improve functional capabilities of in vigils with disabilities there's a very long definition but i want to call your attention to two things the first is that it's 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 use to get up into the museum of the moving image  today and these assistive technologies are useful for bodies with many levels of mobility wheelchair users or the primary users in mind and this when curb cuts were designed and implemented but they also benefit people like you and me would like to walk on surfaces are two of my favorites who use some really iconic technology on the left we have iron man 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 years 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 to accommodate them it takes place in a fictional city in japan where eighty percent of the world's population is born with a quirk or a superhuman ability now these perks can range from things that are like really flashy like there's one 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 court that he's inherited so 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 employees and licenses heroes it recognizes them beyond the way x men recognizes mutants and even beyond the way like just everybody's like always battling each other and are 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 as you can see they're really flashy they allow a lot of personality to come out for each student but w 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 but 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 and technology and make it for other students in season two you get to see a character called mei hut zooming or hudson mei mei if they refer to her in the anime because last names are often used first in animes she's one of the characters who's learning how to make it 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 geniuses for example let's look at on the left we have tony stark in his labs working with jarvis to design something and on the right we have sherry from black panther who is now favorite marvel character but she's also characterized as a genius a child prodigy and even returning to her 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 philanthropist that were used to seeing yes we can be really happy about this and i'm thrilled to see sherry 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 co constitute each other we might still be reinforcing this idea that tech and its creation technology maybe we can stop writing this idea into our own lives that assistive technologies only belong to certain people how do these images and our understanding shape each other that's something that you can take with you as you probably because i hang out with a sixteen month old but what that is it's 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 you people that are members of these specific communities that have particular relationships technology and so what i would like all of our panelists to talk about 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 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 a fourth industrial revolution moment which we're 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 who out there in the world in 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 tec okay and so there's a lot of names up there but basically i want to give you kind of the background intellectually and academically where we were coming from in terms of frameworks of thinking about labor and all of these influence my definition  off of glamour 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 of thinking about how we put in work to be attracted through the aid of technology discipline and manipulation so glamour labor really is the work with technology would to receive a certain type of body itself that the technology actually pulls for so different technologies pull for different cells and thinking from the internet to social media and  enhancement ideology it's almond called humanity plus and it often suggests that science fiction 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 post human t 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 there are interviewees and our observation reveals that  fabrication and so we really like and really otteson isabelle peterson's definition of embodied technology as something that we can move forward with because it allows us to discuss not only technology that is you know 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 kenzan patch is the 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 they're so interesting and we can explain this one in the q and a when we do that oh and so then materials and so and there's also been we've been doing participant observation at conferences like the one called bio fabricate and we could talk more about exactly what biofabrication is we have an example here which we'll get to in a second and fashion conferences that also have to time so the main finding and most the people we talked to said yeah this field is dominated by women so it's gonna 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 bio fabrication technology might solve some of the problems of the fashion industry in terms of waste and overconsumption so there are questions yeah some questions that we had based on our again our interview subjects responses was well this are more likely to be women and lead positions and you might expect their form or social critique the representation of a normative gender and b standards is basically unaltered and so while designers often feel free to push the boundaries of living m 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 do in medicine so the problem is researchers and designers they had they were playing different metaphors for the body so they were going to these giant conventions of tech people and one of them pointed out that most of the people around her were talking about po people conflict with the data and if that happened in other words where someone might seem go ahead and say are but the data is saying you did a great work out but i'm looking at the video and i've known you a long time and i've got six other people who agree with me that it wasn't that so how does the how does the representation will advance the assistive technology as the domain of the super rich or the super privileged affect our perceptions of assistive technology i think  idea and pull it down into like a more accessible for life horrible technology especially for people who are young and either want to get into developing it or maybe you're just starting out to use it and they feel where they were saying that we need to educate hollywood better because there are early dove genetic modification technologies and literally another name of it so there's an interesting like cultural movement happening right now where people are afraid of gmos and the people we were in the room with last night were like