Embodied Computing

Book excerpt: Practitioners and scholars explore ethical, social, and conceptual issues arising in relation to such devices as fitness monitors, neural implants, and a toe-controlled computer mouse. Body-centered computing now goes beyond the “wearable” to encompass implants, bionic technology, and ingestible sensors—technologies that point to hybrid bodies and blurred boundaries between human, computer, and artificial intelligence platforms. Such technologies promise to reconfigure the relationship between bodies and their environment, enabling new kinds of physiological interfacing, embodiment, and productivity. Using the term embodied computing to describe these devices, this book offers essays by practitioners and scholars from a variety of disciplines that explore the accompanying ethical, social, and conceptual issues. The contributors examine technologies that range from fitness monitors to neural implants to a toe-controlled mouse. They discuss topics that include the policy implications of ingestibles; the invasive potential of body area networks, which transmit data from bodily devices to the internet; cyborg experiments, linking a human brain directly to a computer; the evolution of the ankle monitor and other intrusive electronic monitoring devices; fashiontech, which offers users an aura of “cool” in exchange for their data; and the “final frontier” of technosupremacism: technologies that seek to read our minds. Taken together, the essays show the importance of considering embodied technologies in their social and political contexts rather than in isolated subjectivity or in purely quantitative terms. Contributors Roba Abbas, Andrew Iliadis, Gary Genosko, Suneel Jethani, Deborah Lupton, Katina Michael, M. G. Michael, Marcel O'Gorman, Maggie Orth, Isabel Pedersen, Christine Perakslis, Kevin Warwick, Elizabeth Wissinger