This article focuses on the power technology and globalization has on our behaviors, motivations and overall the way we take care of our bodies. Going back home in the middle of nowhere south of France last week has made the difference between the way we use our bodies depending on hnow immerged in a technology driven environment. My family lives in a farm in the middle of nowhere on a fluvial island, where we do not have internet, nor good cell service. My family’s relationship with technology and their bodily function is very different from the one I have been accustomed to by living in heavily « technologized » societies.

In Natasha Schull’s article, “Data for life: Wearable technology and the design of self-care.”, she pinpoints and explain the new developing technologies that are shaping us. The emergence of wearable technologies like the “Applewatch” or the “Fitbit” has created a new way for technologies to influence our behaviors constantly by monitoring our bodily functions as well as activity throughout the day. 

“I then turn to consider the behavioral-informatic mode of regulation that corresponds to such a self, which I call ‘governance by micronudge’, focusing on how this mode of regulation at once exemplifies and short-circuits cultural ideals for individual responsibility” (Schull, 2016; 8).

The micronudge referred to here is a new form of power given to technologies, that differs from more institutional power. A noticeable difference is that allowing the wearable technologies’ power to invade your life is a choice. Today’s culture is heavily reliant on technology, much more than in ages where electricity was not yet globalized. The dispositifs functioning today are more and more omnipresent in our lives. The power a simple fitbit vibration can have on your behaviors is enormous because of the blind trust we put in technology. It does not yet occur to us that those dispositifs might overthrow our own freedom and take over our entire lives. Take for the example the movie “The Matrix”, in which technology has taken over the world and now control humans, using our body energy to power their own machinery. In some way, we became their dispositive by influencing their way of being. By stripping us of our sense of kinship and existing altogether, they have reduced us to simple batteries. Transforming humanity into a simple mean to assure their survival. All the anthropological questions we considered in this class no longer matter if our very existence is reduced to creating energy. Our very sense of anthropology, culture and customs would not exist anymore.

“My problem, as I have already said, is in understanding how truth games are set up and how they are connected with power relations” (Foucault, 1997; 296). This could relate to a study done by David Rosenhan (1973) in which sane patients were being evaluated in mental institutions and checked in for an unlimited amount of time. They were to simulate hearing voices for the time of the interview but to behave normally immediately after and for the rest of their stay. From the point of the diagnosis, all their behaviors were interpreted according to their “mental illness”. This truth game induced a power relation in which those “patients” were now regarded as mentally ill, without any proof, other than an initial interview to back up that claim. This shows how a truth game can impact and create power relationships distorted by one false belief. The staff treating those fake patients with condescendence and smugness was only on the basis of a fake diagnosis. All their technologies of the self are seen in one light that differs completely from their habitus, because they indeed behaved normally for the rest of their stay. But for the staff, they are speaking their truth as well, so where does putting yourself into question come into play? Do you constantly have to think twice about your own beliefs to make sure they are not distorted by a dispositif? Or do we take the risk of abusing our power on someone else by being sure of ourselves ?

In Foucault’s text about Ethics of care of the self, he explains that risks of power overuse depends on taking care of one self.

“But if you take proper care of yourself, if you know ontologically what you are, if you know what you are capable of … if you know all this you cannot abuse your power over others” (Foucault, 1997; 288). However, taking proper care of yourself, in my opinion, does not repress the fundamentally human need to be superior to others. You could argue that the simple human nature and truth games is what makes people abuse their power over others, not whether they take good care of themselves.

WORKS CITED :

Schull, Natasha Dow. 2016. “Data for life: Wearable technology and the design of self-care.”  BioSocieties11 (2016): 317-333.

Wachowski, Andy, Larry Wachowski, Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, and Carrie-Anne Moss. 1999. The matrix. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video.

Foucault, Michel. 1997. “The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth (pp. 281-301)

Rosenhan, David (1973). “On Being Sane in Insane Places.” Science 179:250-58