Kate O'Riordan

Ethics of Internet research: Contesting thehuman subjects research model

The human subjects researchmodel is increasingly invoked in discussions ofethics for Internet research. Here we seek toquestion the widespread application of thismodel, critiquing it through the two themes ofspace and textual form. Drawing on ourexperience of a previous piece ofresearch, we highlightthe implications of re-considering thetextuality of the Internet in addition to thespatial metaphors that are more commonlydeployed to describe Internet activity. Weargue that the use of spatial metaphors indescriptions of the Internet has shaped theadoption of the human subjects research model.Whilst this model is appropriate in some areasof Internet research such as emailcommunication, we feel that researchers, whennavigating the complex terrain of Internetresearch ethics, need also to consider theInternet as cultural production of texts.

Virtually Belonging: Risk, Connectivity, and Coming Out On-Line

This essay examines a self-defined, lesbian on-line community focusing on the construction and performance of identity in relation to coming out on-line. Coming out is a central narrative form in the construction of lesbian identity. In considering the implications of coming out in an on-line community, issues of privacy and public space are central. Coming out on-line can be seen as both an alternative to, and augmentation of, coming out off-line. Questioning whether this on-line community sustains performative utterances, the authors explore the relationships between on-line and off-line locales. The construction of boundaries is considered in an analysis of how sexualized bodies emerge in virtual spaces.

Training to self-care: fitness tracking, biopedagogy and the healthy consumer

ABSTRACT In this article, we provide an account of Fitbit, a wearable sensor device, using two complementary analytical approaches: auto-ethnography and media analysis. Drawing on the concept of biopedagogy, which describes the processes of learning and training bodies how to live, we focus on how users learn to self-care with wearable technologies through a series of micropractices that involve processes of mediation and the sharing of their own data via social networking. Our discussion is oriented towards four areas of analysis: data subjectivity and sociality; making meaning; time and productivity and brand identity. We articulate how these micropractices of knowing one’s body regulate the contemporary ‘fit’ and healthy subject, and mediate expertise about health, behaviour and data subjectivity.

From reproduction to research Sourcing eggs, IVF and cloning in the UK

This article provides an analysis of the relationships between IVF and therapeutic cloning, as they played out in the UK Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority consultation of 2006: Donating Eggs for Research: Safeguarding Donors. We develop an account of current developments in IVF and cloning which foregrounds the role of mediation in structuring the discursive context in which they are constituted. We foreground the imperative of choice and the promise of cures as key features of this context. We also argue that the intercorporeal exchanges of IVF are materially restructured in relation to cloning research, despite their represented similitude in the consultation document. The discourse of choice in relation to reproductive technologies has become entrenched over the last twenty years. In relation to therapeutic cloning, it has been coupled with, and strengthened by, the discourse of cures. In examining relations between IVF and cloning with specific attention to both mediating imaginaries, and intercorporeal exchanges, we develop an analysis that displaces the rhetoric of choice and cures. This makes visible the limited subject positions available, and the limited possibilities for responding critically to the consultation. Identifying women as the gendered subjects of this consultation and placing intercorporeality at the centre of our analysis illuminates the interdependency of women undergoing IVF, cloning science and the governance of embryo research in the UK.

The first bite: Imaginaries, promotional publics and the laboratory grown burger

In this article, we analyse a 2013 press conference hosting the world’s first tasting of a laboratory grown hamburger. We explore this as a media event: an exceptional performative moment in which common meanings are mobilised and a connection to a shared centre of reality is offered. We develop our own theoretical contribution – the promotional public – to characterise the affirmative and partial patchwork of carefully selected actors invoked during the burger tasting. Our account draws on three areas of analysis: interview data with the scientists who developed the burger, media analysis of the streamed press conference itself and media analysis of social media during and following the event. We argue that the call to witness an experiment is a form of promotion and that such promotional material also offers an address that invokes a public with its attendant tensions.

Biodigital publics: personal genomes as digital media artifacts

The recent proliferation of personal genomics and direct-to-consumer (DTC) genomics has attracted much attention and publicity. Concern around these developments has mainly focused on issues of biomedical regulation and hinged on questions of how people understand genomic information as biomedical and what meaning they make of it. However, this publicity amplifies genome sequences which are also made as internet texts and, as such, they generate new reading publics. The practices around the generation, circulation and reading of genome scans do not just raise questions about biomedical regulation, they also provide the focus for an exploration of how contemporary public participation in genomics works. These issues around the public features of DTC genomic testing can be pursued through a close examination of the modes of one of the best known providers—23andMe. In fact, genome sequences circulate as digital artefacts and, hence, people are addressed by them. They are read as texts, annotated and written about in browsers, blogs and wikis. This activity also yields content for media coverage which addresses an indefinite public in line with Michael Warners conceptualisation of publics. Digital genomic texts promise empowerment, personalisation and community, but this promise may obscure the compliance and proscription associated with these forms. The kinds of interaction here can be compared to those analysed by Andrew Barry. Direct-to-consumer genetics companies are part of a network providing an infrastructure for genomic reading publics and this network can be mapped and examined to demonstrate the ways in which this formation both exacerbates inequalities and offers possibilities for participation in biodigital culture.

From usenet to Gaydar: a comment on queer online community

This paper provides a brief overview and introduction to the intersections between queer theory and online community in the UK and USA in the 1990s. Different communities and theoretical paradigms that relate to this are examined.

The Life of the Gay Gene: From Hypothetical Genetic Marker to Social Reality

The gay gene was first identified in 1993 as a correlation between the genetic marker Xq28 and gay male sexuality. The results of this original study were never replicated, and the biological reality of such an entity remains hypothetical. However, despite such tenuous provenance, the gay gene has persisted as a reference in science news, popular science writings, and in press releases and editorials about biomedical research. An examination of the life of the gay gene in U.K. news media demonstrates that the gay gene has become an assumed back-story to genetic sexuality research over time, and that the critique of its very existence has been diminished. Latterly, the gay gene has entered into the online biomedical databases of the 21st century with the same pattern of persistence and diminishing critique. This article draws on an analysis of the U.K. press and online databases to represent the process through which the address of the gay gene has shifted and become an index of biomedicalization. The consequent unmooring of the gay gene from accountability and accuracy demonstrates that the organization of biomedical databases could benefit from greater cross-disciplinary attention.

Human Cloning in Film: Horror, Ambivalence, Hope

Abstract Fictional filmic representations of human cloning have shifted in relation to the 1997 announcement of the birth of Dolly the cloned sheep, and since therapeutic human cloning became a scientific practice in the early twentieth century. The operation and detail of these shifts can be seen through an analysis of the films The Island (2005) and Aeon Flux (2005). These films provide a site for the examination of how these changes in human cloning from fiction to practice, and from horror to hope, have been represented and imagined, and how these distinctions have operated visually in fiction, and in relation to genre.

Revisiting digital technologies: envisioning biodigital bodies

Abstract In this paper the contemporary practices of human genomics in the 21st century are placed alongside the digital bodies of the 1990s. The primary aim is to provide a trajectory of the biodigital as follows: First, digital bodies and biodigital bodies were both part of the spectacular imaginaries of early cybercultures. Second, these spectacular digital bodies were supplemented in the mid-1990s by digital bodywork practices that have become an important dimension of everyday communication. Third, the spectacle of biodigital bodies is in the process of being supplemented by biodigital bodywork practices, through personal or direct-to-consumer genomics. This shift moves a form of biodigital communication into the everyday. Finally, what can be learned from putting the trajectories of digital and biodigital bodies together is that the degree of this communicative shift may be obscured through the doubled attachment of personal genomics to everyday digital culture and high-tech spectacle.