What does it mean to wear a routine? This article explores a number of implications for the engagement of wearable fitness technology in everyday life. It straddles both a critical hermeneutic that explores the institutional prescription of wearable technology to combat the so-called "obesity epidemic" in American society, as well as a more phenomenological and experiential analysis that argues these data-driven technologies actually produce a qualitative re-engagement with social relationships. Expanding and enriching Adam Greenfield's concept of "everyware" to describe ubiquitous technologies, this article develops the sub-variant "everywear" as a way to understand the increasing prevalence of technologies that are worn or in some way tethered to the body. Ultimately, it argues that studies of technology in everyday life must attend to a multiplicity of complex individual and institutional values and engagements. Furthermore, it suggests quantitative and qualitative modes of being operate dialectically in the production of everyday practice and experience.[Footsteps] cannot be counted because each unit has a qualitative character: a style of tactile apprehension and kinesthetic appropriation. Certeau (1984), The Practice of Everyday Life (p. 97) Michel De

This article draws from a critical discourse analysis of Google’s three-year process to gain permission to extract greater amounts of water from an aquifer in South Carolina located near one of its data centers. Through an account of this local conflict by analyzing local news coverage, we participate in ongoing academic research regarding how the conditions of media infrastructures – the otherwise banal and largely taken-for-granted facilities that help technologies like cloud storage and streaming to operate – need to be explored in terms of the particular, local conflicts that arise from major corporations like Google building infrastructure in places like Berkeley County, South Carolina. To advance this research, we offer what we call an agri-cultural approach, which emphasizes how digital culture is formed from conflicts over the relationships between natural resources like water and digital infrastructures like data centers.

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This article provides a critical analysis of the child wearable Jiobit, a locational tracking device that is designed to allow parents to monitor how children move through space. Emphasizing the device’s incorporation of geofencing features, which allow users to program ‘fences’ on a paired smartphone application and receive notifications when a Jiobit wearer enters and leaves the ‘fenced’ areas, I demonstrate how the operations of this device are part of a cultural politics that values the tracking of children through a variety of technological and infrastructural processes. Through an artifactual analysis of the device itself and its smartphone application, as well as an examination of the company’s promotional language, I demonstrate how the logic of ‘securitization’ is used to encourage parents to delegate some of the work of monitoring children to this device. This artifactual analysis is paired with a discursive analysis of the company’s policy documents, which readily acknowledge Jiobit’s inability to serve as a fully reliable security system, while also detailing the ways in which the extraction of data is stored indefinitely and, in some cases, disclosed to third parties. Through this case study of Jiobit, I argue for critical studies of wearable technologies to attend to the ways in which their producers promise ‘security’ and the ways in which ‘security’ acts as an alibi for continuous data collection.

This article analyzes how users' engagements with digital platforms through the act of clicking are coded as meaningful for the production of affinity, a way of assessing identity amongst users. Drawing on an understanding of identity as related to the Latin idem—or same—this article explores how streaming media company Netflix uses click-based A/B testing to create “taste doppelgängers” that live in “taste communities” and help structure the recommendations, home pages, and image thumbnails that users experience. Clicks are figured as communicative gestures that platform engineers decode and analyze as part of ongoing experiments for refining algorithms and interface design. Drawing additionally on an analysis of Netflix's recent move into interactive television—in particular, Black Mirror: Bandersnatch—this article ultimately argues for attention to how platforms like Netflix treat users as test subjects for the purposes of constructing idem-based affinities.