Innovative examination of augmentation technologies in terms of technical, social, and ethical considerations Usable as a supplemental text for a variety of courses, and also of interest to researchers and professionals in fields including: technical communication, digital communication, UX design, information technology, informatics, human factors, artificial intelligence, ethics, philosophy of technology, and sociology of technology First major work to combine technological, ethical, social, and rhetorical perspectives on human augmentation Additional cases and research material available at the authors' Fabric of Digital Life research database at https://fabricofdigitallife.com/

Innovative examination of augmentation technologies in terms of technical, social, and ethical considerations Usable as a supplemental text for a variety of courses, and also of interest to researchers and professionals in fields including: technical communication, digital communication, UX design, information technology, informatics, human factors, artificial intelligence, ethics, philosophy of technology, and sociology of technology First major work to combine technological, ethical, social, and rhetorical perspectives on human augmentation Additional cases and research material available at the authors' Fabric of Digital Life research database at https://fabricofdigitallife.com/

This book is useful to understand and write alongside non-human agents, examine the impact of algorithms and AI on writing, and accommodate relationships with autonomous agents. This ground-breaking future-driven framework prepares scholars and practitioners to investigate and plan for the social, digital literacy, and civic implications arising from emerging technologies. This book prepares researchers, students, practitioners, and citizens to work with AI writers, virtual humans, and social robots. This book explores prompts to envision how fields and professions will change. The book's unique integration with Fabric of Digital Life, a database and structured content repository for conducting social and cultural analysis of emerging technologies, provides concrete examples throughout. Readers gain imperative direction for collaborative, algorithmic, and autonomous writing futures.

This book is useful to understand and write alongside non-human agents, examine the impact of algorithms and AI on writing, and accommodate relationships with autonomous agents. This ground-breaking future-driven framework prepares scholars and practitioners to investigate and plan for the social, digital literacy, and civic implications arising from emerging technologies. This book prepares researchers, students, practitioners, and citizens to work with AI writers, virtual humans, and social robots. This book explores prompts to envision how fields and professions will change. The book's unique integration with Fabric of Digital Life, a database and structured content repository for conducting social and cultural analysis of emerging technologies, provides concrete examples throughout. Readers gain imperative direction for collaborative, algorithmic, and autonomous writing futures.

Practitioners and scholars explore ethical, social, and conceptual issues arising in relation to such devices as fitness monitors, neural implants, and a toe-controlled computer mouse. Body-centered computing now goes beyond the "wearable" to encompass implants, bionic technology, and ingestible sensors-technologies that point to hybrid bodies and blurred boundaries between human, computer, and artificial intelligence platforms. Such technologies promise to reconfigure the relationship between bodies and their environment, enabling new kinds of physiological interfacing, embodiment, and productivity. Using the term embodied computing to describe these devices, this book offers essays by practitioners and scholars from a variety of disciplines that explore the accompanying ethical, social, and conceptual issues. The contributors examine technologies that range from fitness monitors to neural implants to a toe-controlled mouse. They discuss topics that include the policy implications of ingestibles; the invasive potential of body area networks, which transmit data from bodily devices to the internet; cyborg experiments, linking a human brain directly to a computer; the evolution of the ankle monitor and other intrusive electronic monitoring devices; fashiontech, which offers users an aura of "cool" in exchange for their data; and the "final frontier" of technosupremacism: technologies that seek to read our minds. Taken together, the essays show the importance of considering embodied technologies in their social and political contexts rather than in isolated subjectivity or in purely quantitative terms. Contributors Roba Abbas, Andrew Iliadis, Gary Genosko, Suneel Jethani, Deborah Lupton, Katina Michael, M. G. Michael, Marcel O'Gorman, Maggie Orth, Isabel Pedersen, Christine Perakslis, Kevin Warwick, Elizabeth Wissinger

NEW MEDIA THEORY, SERIES EDITOR: BYRON HAWK READY TO WEAR: A RHETORIC OF WEARABLE COMPUTERS AND REALITY-SHIFTING MEDIA is a book about the future but geared to the present. More and more, we are asked to adopt new or future technologies before we ever see, touch, or experience them. This rhetoric of innovation and adoption goes beyond commercial advertising. Emergent or disruptive technologies are circulated and explored in social media, inventors' blogs, news sources, popular culture, films, YouTube clips, TED talks, Kickstarter, and countless other media venues, often long before we get our hands on them. READY TO WEAR: A RHETORIC OF WEARABLE COMPUTERS AND REALITY-SHIFTING MEDIA explores how and to what ends wearable inventions and technologies augment or remix reality, as well as the claims used to promote them. As computer components shrink and our mobile culture normalizes, we wear computers on the body to create immersive experiences. Isabel Pedersen asks and answers questions that animate everyone: How is this augmented digital life construed and contextualized, and in what ways does it define our identity? What's at stake in the arguments for wearable computers? What posthuman world does this rhetoric envision? Her answers to these questions are provocative and timely. "READY TO WEAR: A RHETORIC OF WEARABLE COMPUTERS AND REALITY-SHIFTING MEDIA surveys an immense range of emerging technologies, most of which have not even been mentioned in existing scholarship on rhetoric and new media. Pedersen performs a much-needed expansion of the field's radar in an era of rapid innovation, planned obsolescence, and mind-blowing prototypes." -JOHN TINNELL ISABEL PEDERSEN is a Canada Research Chair in Digital Life, Media, and Culture and an Associate Professor at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology. She has been interested in human-computer interaction ever since she spent her youth playing Pac-Man in the Yonge Street arcades of downtown Toronto.