Turning Babies Into Data--And How to Stop It

A/Prof Tama Leaver, Internet Studies

Turning Babies Into Data—And How to Stop It! (Guest Lecture)

7.8.2017@tamaleaver

Overview.

1. Shifting Contexts of Identity and Surveillance Online

2. Pregnancy & Instagram Ultrasounds

3. Parental Monitoring: Infant Wearables

4. Parental Mediation: Influencers & (Micro-)Microcelebrities

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I. Shifting Contexts of Identity and Surveillance Online

Shifting Identity Online

Push toward real-name and persistent identities (van Dijck, 2013b; van Zoonen, 2013)

Identity as persistent, replicable and searchable (boyd, 2010)

Challenges of context collapse & context collision (Nissenbaum, 2009; Marwick & boyd, 2011; Davis & Jurgenson, 2014)

The Shift to Real Names (nymwars) …

Single database point. All activity connected …

Changing Surveillance Landscape

Datafication: all social activity is being tracked and digitized

"dataveillance—the monitoring of citizens on the basis of their online data—[which] differs from surveillance on at least one important account: whereas surveillance presumes monitoring for specific purposes, dataveillance entails the continuous tracking of (meta)data for unstated preset purposes" (van Dijck, 2014, p. 205).

Lateral / Peer Surveillance

“we are becoming habituated to a culture in which we are all expected to monitor one another—to deploy surveillance tactics facilitated at least in part by interactive media technologies—in order to protect ourselves and our loved ones and to maximise our chances for social and economic success”

(Andrejevic, 2007, p. 239).

The Centrality of Affect (or Affective Turn)

Affective publics (Papacharissi, 2014)

“communication in a post-referential era” (Andrejevic, 2013, p. 139)

“communicative capitalism” (Dean, 2010, pp. 3–4)

Intimate Surveillance

“the purposeful and routinely well-intentioned surveillance of young people by parents, guardians, friends, and so forth. The surveyed have little or no agency to resist. On one level, intimate surveillance points to the limits of most surveillance models, in that they are incomplete in trying to address subjects who have no agency or awareness of the means of resistance (for obvious reasons).”

(Leaver 2015a, p. 153)

Parents: Framing Online Identities?

II. Pregnancy & Instagram Ultrasounds

NB: Pregnancy Apps & Surveillance

“dominant feature of pregnancy-related apps is the representation of the foetus as already a communicative person in its own right” (Lupton and Thomas, 2015)

Ultrasound image-sharing on Instagram and elsewhere widespread, disclosing personal info (Leaver, 2015a)

“‘device-ification’ of mothering” (Johnson, 2014)

the “co-construction of prenatal life” (Seko & Tiidenberg, 2016, p. 57)

“ultrasound” on Instagram, March-May 2014.

Table 1. #ultrasound tagged media on Instagram, 2014

Images Videos Overall Media

March 3468 151 3619

April 3847 128 3975

May 3575 151 3726

3-Month Totals:

10890 430 11320

Leaver, T., & Highfield, T. (2016). Visualising the ends of identity: pre-birth and post-death on Instagram. Information, Communication & Society, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2016.1259343

Table 2. #ultrasound tagged images on Instagram, 10-11 March 2014

Total number of Instagram media items 295Items deleted or made private within a fortnight 19Sonograms 221Sonogram without personally identifiable metadata

145 (66% of sonograms)

Sonograms with personally identifiable metadata 76 (34% of sonograms)Collages / Professional Photos 45Social experience of sonogram 22Selfie 14Historical sonogram 4Sonogram humour 4Other medical ultrasound (not foetal sonogram) 22

Advertising 4Irrelevant 7

Ultrasounds with personally identifiable text in the photo

76 photos (34% of the set) included personally identifiable information in the photo (usually generated by the ultrasound equipment)

Typically includes mother’s full name, mother’s DOB, medical facility, estimated gestation period to date, date of the scan, etc.

III. Parental Monitoring: Infant Wearables

Google Smart Crib Patent (Awarded 2016)

“Internet of Toys” (Holloway and Green, 2016)

Owlet (Early version)

http://owletcare.com/

Owlet

Owlet Product Vision

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fT9Vc68BfTI

Owlet = Big Data

“The thing that’s most interesting is we’re collecting the largest data set about infant health and sleep and wellness and safety that’s

ever been collected.”

Owlet = Tech Startup Company

$US9 million dollars in startup funding (TechCrunch, 2015)

Best Startup Award at CES 2016

Two products:• The Owlet Wearable device itself.

• The collated big data collected from all infants wearing Owlet

The big profit expectations come from the BIG DATA sets and whatever insight these can offer.

Review of Infant Wearables

“medical professionals and consumers need to be aware that such devices have no proved

use in safeguarding infants or detecting health problems, and they certainly have no

role in preventing SIDS.”

(King 2014, p. 2)

Owlet Terms of Use

This Application, the Services and our Monitor are not medical devices and are not intended to replace, modify or

supplement any prescribed medical device. Further, this Application, the Services and Monitor are not for high risk

infants and are not intended to be a substitute for obtaining medical advice and/or treatment from a

physician or other health care practitioner.

(Owlet Baby Care, 2016b).

Owlet Features

“sensor society” (Andrejevic and Burdon, 2015)

“self-tracked data are used as a medium to generate stories for and about the body/self. But equally, the digital devices and dataflows themselves provide their own unique forms of authorship. In this way, the data-subject [or their parents] translates the data just as the data apps and outputs translate the actions of the self-tracker.” (Smith and Vonthethoff 2016)

Design displaces other narratives (Rettberg, 2014)

Mimo Smart Baby Breathing and Activity Monitor

Integrated “Smart Nursery”

infant wearables, of which the Owlet is for now the most well-known, are normalising parental practices of monitoring and surveillance.

Owlet encourages an intimate surveillance in which well-intentioned parents are recording their infant’s biometric data

Owlet aggregates and monetizes this as a valuable big data resource.

Owlet and related devices directly associate with good parenting with surveillance which is an association which is likely to persist as a child grows.

IV. Parental Mediation: Influencers

Parental Influencers & (Micro-)micro-celebrities

influencers (Abidin, 2015a, 2016).

Micro-celebrity is the result of purposeful self-presentation strategies online which often utilise the same techniques as marketing and branding campaigns, but at a smaller and more seemingly more intimate or personal level as a means to increase their online popularity and ongoing audience (Marwick, 2013; Senft, 2013).

HappilyEvaAfter.com

Positively Oakes

Influencers / micro-celebrities act as “more authentic” online role models for parents

Are affective amplifiers, heightening the emotional desirability of certain products/practices (eg Owlet)

Micro-microcelebrities normalize infants (being shared) online but often are managed/assisted by agents, social media managers (something audiences do not have)

Overall Conclusions Pregnancy and infancy are becoming monitored and datafied at

an unprecedented scale, exemplified in the surveillance and aggregation of big data via infant wearables

Parental micro-celebrity/influencer parents as affective amplifiers, leading the normalisation of practices, devices and norms about online sharing on infancy

Intimate surveillance from pregnancy onward is being normalised as a form of parental care and pathologising unplugged parenting as irresponsible

(Urgent) Future Work: (1) map the extent and drivers of intimate surveillance; (2) surface, document and share resistant practices; and (3) better inform parents about the ramifications of the choices they are making for their infants today.

References Abidin, C. (2015a). Communicative Intimacies: Influencers and Perceived Interconnectedness. ❤ Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, (8). https://doi.org/10.7264/N3MW2FFG

Abidin, C. (2015b). Micro-microcelebrity: Branding Babies on the Internet. M/C Journal, 18(5). Retrieved from http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/viewArticle/1022

Abidin, C. (2016). Visibility labour: Engaging with Influencers’ fashion brands and #OOTD advertorial campaigns on Instagram. Media International Australia, 1329878X16665177. https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878X16665177

Andrejevic, M. (2007). iSpy: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era. Lawrence, Kan.: Univ Press of Kansas.

Andrejevic, M. (2013). Infoglut: How Too Much Information Is Changing the Way We Think and Know (1 edition). New York: Routledge.

Andrejevic, M., & Burdon, M. (2015). Defining the Sensor Society. Television & New Media, 16(1), 19–36. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476414541552

boyd, danah. (2014). It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Davis, J. L., & Jurgenson, N. (2014). Context collapse: theorizing context collusions and collisions. Information, Communication & Society, 17(4), 476–485. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2014.888458

Dean, J. (2010). Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive. Cambridge: Polity.

Holloway, D., & Green, L. (2016). The Internet of Toys. Presented at the ANZCA: Creating space in the Fifth Estate, Newcastle, Australia.

Johnson, S. A. (2014). “Maternal Devices”, Social Media and the Self-Management of Pregnancy, Mothering and Child Health. Societies, 4(2), 330–350. https://doi.org/10.3390/soc4020330

King, D. (2014). Marketing wearable home baby monitors: real peace of mind? BMJ, 349, g6639. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.g6639

Leaver, T. (2015a). Born Digital? Presence, Privacy, and Intimate Surveillance. In Hartley, John & W. Qu (Eds.), Re-Orientation: Translingual Transcultural Transmedia. Studies in narrative, language, identity, and knowledge (pp. 149–160). Shanghai: Fudan University Press.

Leaver, T., & Highfield, T. (2016). Visualising the ends of identity: pre-birth and post-death on Instagram. Information, Communication & Society, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2016.1259343

Lupton, D., & Thomas, G. M. (2015). Playing Pregnancy: The Ludification and Gamification of Expectant Motherhood in Smartphone Apps. M/C Journal, 18(5). Retrieved from http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/1012

Martino, E. A. (2016, June 29). Peace Of Mind With Owlet Baby Care. Retrieved September 8, 2016, from http://happilyevaafter.com/peace-of-mind-with-owlet-baby-care/

Marwick, A. E. (2013). Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity, and Branding in the Social Media Age. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Marwick, A. E., & boyd, danah. (2011). I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. New Media & Society, 13(1), 114–133. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444810365313

Nissenbaum, H. (2009). Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life. Stanford Law Books.

Oakes, J. (2015, October 22). The Secret to Better Sleep Moms: Owlet Baby Monitor. Retrieved from http://www.positivelyoakes.com/blog/2015/10/22/the-secret-to-better-sleep-moms-owlet-baby-monitor/

Owlet Baby Care. (2015). More Than Just A Gadget- The Owlet Vision. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fT9Vc68BfTI

Owlet Baby Care. (2016). Terms and Conditions. Retrieved from http://www.owletcare.com/terms/

Papacharissi, Z. (2014). Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology, and Politics. New York: Oxford University Press.

Rettberg, J. W. (2014). Seeing Ourselves Through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs and Wearable Devices to See and Shape Ourselves. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

Seko, Y., & Tiidenberg, K. (2016). Birth through the Digital Womb: Visualizing Prenatal Life Online. In Paul G. Nixon, Rajash Rawal, & Andreas Funk (Eds.), Digital Media Usage Across the Lifecourse (pp. 50–66). London & New York: Routledge.

Senft, T. M. (2013). Microcelebrity and the Branded Self. In J. Hartley, J. Burgess, & A. Bruns (Eds.), A companion to new media dynamics (pp. 346–354). Chicester: Wiley. Retrieved from http://public.eblib.com/EBLPublic/PublicView.do?ptiID=1120692

Smith, G. J. D., & Vonthethoff, B. (2016). Health by numbers? Exploring the practice and experience of datafied health. Health Sociology Review, 0(0), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/14461242.2016.1196600

TechCrunch. (2015, August 18). Owlet Baby Care. Retrieved September 27, 2016, from https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/owlet#/entity

van Dijck, J. (2013b). “You have one identity”: performing the self on Facebook and LinkedIn. Media, Culture & Society, 35(2), 199–215. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443712468605

van Dijck, J. (2014). Datafication, dataism and dataveillance: Big Data between scientific paradigm and ideology. Surveillance & Society, 12(2), 197–208.

van Zoonen, L. (2013). From identity to identification: fixating the fragmented self. Media, Culture & Society, 35(1), 44–51. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443712464557

Veron, M. (2016, June 30). Crib with Embedded Smart Sensors. Retrieved from http://pdfaiw.uspto.gov/.aiw?docid=20160183695

Questions or Comments?

Or find me later …

www.tamaleaver.net

@tamaleaver

t.leaver@curtin.edu.au