A Panopticon on My Wrist: The Biopower of Big Data Visualization for Wearables

TL;DR

This paper critically examines how big data visualizations in wearable health devices like FitBit serve as tools of neoliberal governance, seducing users into data commodification and raising ethical concerns.

Contribution

It offers a novel critical perspective on wearable data visualizations, highlighting their role in individual governance and potential harms, which is underexplored in existing literature.

Findings

Wearable visualizations act as tools of neoliberal governance.

They seduce users into data participation and monetization.

Potential harm to individuals from data ecosystems is significant.

Abstract

Big data visualization - the visual-spatial display of quantitative information culled from huge data sets - is now firmly embedded within the everyday experiences of people across the globe, yet scholarship on it remains surprisingly small. Within this literature, critical theorizations of big data visualizations are rare, as digital positivist perspectives dominate. This paper offers a critical, design-informed perspective on big data visualization in wearable health tracking ecosystems like FitBit. I argue that such visualizations are tools of individualized, neoliberal governance that operate largely through experiences of seduction and addiction to facilitate participation in the corporate capture and monetization of personal information. Exploration of my personal experience of the FitBit ecosystem illuminates this argument and emphasizes the capacity for harm to individuals using these ecosystems, leading to an exploration of the complex professional challenges for user experience designers working on visualizations within the ecosystems of wearables.