Disruption and the political economy of biosensor data

Abstract

Science and Technology Studies has long held that the frames and definitions designers give to new tools matter enormously for how those tools are initially received, and ultimately modified, by users (Fischer, 1994; Kline and Pinch 1996). Discourses are powerful forces in technology design, shaping, for instance, how gender and racial inequalities get designed into technologies (Suchman 2002). The startups working in biosensing and self-tracking present a case to examine the role that power plays in the discursive process of framing new technologies. One frame often used for defining new data tools and services include their abilities for “disruption,” or the perceived ability of technologies to upend the status quo of power within established industries or social institutions. In this chapter we present findings on our research in the start-up environment in the consumer wellness field which is relatively less regulated and the more closely regulated field of mobile medical applications. We use two cases of health data innovation to present possibilities for scholars and practitioners to think about both the processes and discourses of disruption, and how these discourses might affect how people design and use new technologies. Our goal here is not to make normative or evaluative judgements about the roles that disruption discourses play in society. We hope to show that disruption discourses limit, in part, the possibilities for people to imagine technologies bridging existing social contexts and categories. Disruption limits such vision by overlooking the distinct roles for and relationships around data across contexts. Data can have different expectations to different people within and across different social institutions (Fiore-Gartland and Neff, forthcoming). Social institutions produce the tools and methods for making data even sensible or intelligible. However, as a concept for thinking about technology disruption helps to reproduce existing discourses of institutional power, even as people using disruption to describe what they are doing purport to change, replace, or disrupt those same power arrangements