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Because My Garmin Told Me To: A New Materialist Study of Agency and Wearable Technology

Wearable technologies are being adopted in increasing numbers and the market space appears poised for continued growth in virtually all areas, from medicine, to self-quantification, to sports. While the overwhelming majority of work on wearables has been done on their medical applications and their role in shaping identity, this dissertation examines the roles that wearable technologies play on the decision-making processes in athletic contexts. Using new materialism and Actor Network Theory as lenses, I attempt to break from the Cartesian model that places human subjectivity and intentionality at the center of a rhetorical situation and, rather, allow that non-human actants are agentive. I examine the interactions that age-group triathletes have with their wearable technologies and the shifting agencies that accompany those interactions. These interactions call on disparate human and non-human actors in forming a series of temporary, shifting networks that utilize a distributed agency in the decision making process.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:USF/oai:scholarcommons.usf.edu:etd-9102
Date26 March 2019
CreatorsRepici, Michael
PublisherScholar Commons
Source SetsUniversity of South Flordia
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
SourceGraduate Theses and Dissertations

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