Jessa Lingel

Our metrics, ourselves: A hundred years of self- tracking from the weight scale to the wrist wearable device

The recent proliferation of wearable self-tracking devices intended to regulate and measure the body has brought contingent questions of controlling, accessing and interpreting personal data. Given a socio-technical context in which individuals are no longer the most authoritative source on data about themselves, wearable self-tracking technologies reflect the simultaneous commodification and knowledge-making that occurs between data and bodies. In this article, we look specifically at wearable, self-tracking devices in order to set up an analytical comparison with a key historical predecessor, the weight scale. By taking two distinct cases of self-tracking – wearables and the weight scale – we can situate current discourses of big data within a historical framing of self-measurement and human subjectivity. While the advertising promises of both the weight scale and the wearable device emphasize self-knowledge and control through external measurement, the use of wearable data by multiple agents and institutions results in a lack of control over data by the user. In the production of self-knowledge, the wearable device is also making the user known to others, in a range of ways that can be both skewed and inaccurate. We look at the tensions surrounding these devices for questions of agency, practices of the body, and the use of wearable data by courtrooms and data science to enforce particular kinds of social and individual discipline.

Adjusting the Borders: Bisexual Passing and Queer Theory

Fluidity is a term sometimes used in reference to bisexual identity, thus positioning sexuality as an adaptive, evolving set of behaviors performed to constitute alternately straightness or queerness. Part of the speciousness of using fluidity to describe bisexuality centers on the implication that heterosexuality and homosexuality occupy opposite ends of a psychological spectrum, leaving bisexuality vaguely straddling poles of identity, without specificity or intent. This article is predominantly concerned with the notion of intentionality in bisexual behavior and whether or not deliberate choices are made to participate in communities that identify as either straight or queer. Rather than framing this investigation in terms of whether or not sexuality itself is a choice, this article compares bisexuals who alternately engage in straight or queer practices in the context of passing, as when a person presents herself as an alternate race. Using personal narratives, theoretical works from Judith Butler, bell hooks and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and drawing on descriptions of racial passing, I am interested in crafting psychological profiles of women who routinely perform their sexualities differently as part of belonging to and identifying with distinct communities of queerness and straightness.

In Face on Facebook: Brooklyn's Drag Community and Sociotechnical Practices of Online Communication

Recently, Brooklyn has seen an explosion of drag culture, with dozens of performers taking the stage in any given week. Social media plays a vital role for members of this community, simultaneously allowing self-promotion and community solidarity. Drawing on focus group interviews, we analyze the communication practices of Brooklyns drag performers, examining both the advantages and drawbacks of social media platforms. Using conceptual frameworks of faceted identity and relational labor, our discussion focuses on affordances and constraints of multifaceted identity in online contexts and theories of seamful design. We contend that by analyzing online communication practices of drag performers, it becomes possible to identify gaps between embedded ideologies of mainstream social media technologies and the localized values of outsider communities.

Working through paradoxes: Transnational migrants’ urban learning tactics using locative technology:

This study examines the ways in which transnational city newcomers interact with locative technology to build knowledge about their urban surroundings. We conducted semistructured interviews with 25 transnational migrants recently relocated to the greater New York City area, investigating their day-to-day smartphone use, navigation tactics, and uses of location-based services. Our analysis reflects on three themes: tensions surrounding different navigation strategies (searching vs. browsing); social monitoring practices (awareness vs. surveillance); and perceptions of online information sources (credibility/trust vs. distrust). Together, these themes highlight the contradictory outcomes of technology use both facilitating and hindering the processes of urban learning. We conclude with a discussion of paradoxical outcomes of technological use as a means of unpacking the sociotechnical tensions that emerge from locative technology use among transnational migrants in new urban environments.

Online Dating as Pandora's Box: Methodological Issues for the CSCW Community

As a socio-technical phenomenon, online dating has significant appeal to researchers interested in various aspects of human-computer interaction -- presentation of self in online environments; norms of disclosure and deception; and the extent to which technological design informs dynamics of human relationships. With these many facets of socio-technical practice come important and complex methodological questions, where both the sensitivity of the topic and the specific technologies being studied can introduce practical and ethical obstacles. This panel brings together scholars across human computer interaction, communication, information studies, and Internet studies to examine methodological issues that have arisen in their own work on online dating, with the objective of broadening these issues of ethics and methods to the wider CSCW community.

Facebooking in "Face": Complex Identities Meet Simple Databases

Online systems often struggle to account for the complicated self-presentation and disclosure needs of those with complex identities or specialized anonymity. Using the lenses of gender, recovery, and performance, our proposed panel explores the tensions that emerge when the richness and complexity of individual personalities and subjectivities run up against design norms that imagine identity as simplistic or one-dimensional. These models of identity not only limit the ways individuals can express their own identities, but also establish norms for other users about what to expect, causing further issues when the inevitable dislocations do occur. We discuss the challenges in translating identity into these systems, and how this is further marred by technical requirements and normative logics that structure cultures and practices of databases, algorithms and computer programming.

Lit up and left dark: Failures of imagination in urban broadband networks

The design and deployment of urban broadband infrastructures inscribe particular imaginations of Internet access onto city streets. The different manifestations and locations of these networks, their uses, and access points often expose material excesses of urban broadband networks, as well as failures of Internet service providers, urban planners, and public officials to imagine the diverse ways that people incorporate Internet connection into their everyday lives. We approach the study of urban broadband networks through the juxtaposition of invisible networks that are buried under the streets and have always been “turned off” (dark fiber) versus hypervisible that are “turned on” and prominently displayed on city streets (LinkNYC). In our analysis of these two case studies, we critique themes of visibility and invisibility as indexes of power and access. Our findings are meant to provide a critical analysis of urban technology policy as well as theories of infrastructure, visibility, and access.

Transformative Spaces: The Library as Panopticon

This paper seeks to describe and understand the nature of library experiences that both conjure immersion in different worlds, and yet relate to the physical spaces in which they occur. What does the library space make possible and what does it prohibit? Using Foucault’s account of panopticism to unpack layers of surveillance, docility and agency within library sites, this paper seeks to gain a richer understanding of panopticism and the library as a social institution. A discussion of Foucault’s panopticism is followed by the identification of areas where application of his concept might be useful to scholars and practitioners seeking to understand the experience of library users in their interaction and encounters with information interfaces, both interpersonal and technological.