The smart body - from cyborgs to the quantified self
Mark Whitehead, William George Andrew Collier · Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2022
This chapter we engages in an exploration of the emergence of the smart body and its associated potential. Through a form of auto-technological ethnography, we draw attention to the lived experience of trying to create a smarter body. While we highlight the darker side of smart-body technology, we take seriously the benefits it can bring and draw attention to how these benefits can be more reliably achieved. This chapter begins by considering the history and nature of smart body technologies. We then move on to consider existing interpretations of these technologies and their consequences for human health and social systems more generally. The main section of this chapter introduces an auto-technology ethnographic. This ethnography recounts the experiences of one of the authors of this volume (Whitehead) as he utilised various smart body technologies over a three-week period. This auto-ethnography offers insights into the positive and negative aspects of smart body technologies from the perspective of the everyday experience of a user.