Wearable technology, including smartwatches, biometric trackers, and body cameras, are often touted as helpful tools that record, produce, and analyze data about daily life to improve our individual habits and health or to solve serious public issues. In this book, James N. Gilmore argues that these lofty promises mask forms of surveillance and power.
Charting the implementation of wearables in areas of accessibility, health, sports, labor, law enforcement, and infrastructure, Gilmore demonstrates how these devices have been positioned as authoritative means for producing knowledge about human activity. Drawing on news reporting, advertising, film and television, company reports, and legal policies, he shows how this knowledge production reproduces three distinct modes of power: normalcy, surveillance, and solutionism. Bringers of Order empowers readers to examine the complicated ways our devices reshape how we think about our lives and our ethics and why we should resist companies analyzing our personal data.
James N. Gilmore is Associate Professor of Media and Technology Studies in the Department of Communication at Clemson University.
"Nuanced and engaging, James Gilmore’s exploration of wearable technologies reveals how personalized datafication enrolls users in a system that consolidates institutional power and increases social marginalization."—Torin Monahan, author of Crisis Vision: Race and the Cultural Production of Surveillance
"Bringers of Order traces an important and clarifying map of wearable assemblages. Looking beyond aspects of surveillance or technical fixes, Gilmore provides timely insight into how discourses about and affordances of these devices shape understandings of ourselves and the world around us, and the power and politics involved."—J. Macgregor Wise, Professor of Communication Studies, Arizona State University
256 pp.6 x 9
9780520410145$29.95|£25.00Paper
Jan 2025