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By discursively analyzing blogs and popular press articles written by people who discontinued using Fitbit, this article reveals the incongruities between the tracking of our bodily information, the communication of that bodily information via wearables, and the promises of changing of users' attitudes and behaviors with how wearables are actually used in practice. The discourses of discontinuance in this analysis also reveal how former Fitbit engenders feelings of disconnection and may affect users in detrimental ways. As a result, and despite the predominant framing and conceptualization of wearables as "motivating," "empowering," and "useful" (self)surveillance tools, I argue that Fitbit is an example of a failure both of self-surveillance and of wearable communication for helping users achieve their health and fitness goals. Finally, I argue that we need to start thinking about wearable communication like other forms of communication that are inherently inconsistent and contradictory, and that can be accepted, negotiated, or rejected by users. Instead of focusing on the disciplinary or controlling potentials of wearables as a form of self-surveillance, this paper considers the resistance and negotiations inherent in the (dis)use of wearables, and demonstrates the necessity of exploring both wearables and surveillance itself in relation to fundamental understandings of communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

More than 30 years have passed since the first HIV-specific criminal laws were enacted, generally making it a crime for people living with HIV to have sex with another person without disclosing their HIV-status. This study examines the tensions between medicine and criminal justice discourses in the application of laws governing a once terminal disease that medicine has transformed, over the past three decades, into a manageable condition. Has medical progress affected courtroom discussion? To answer this question, the authors analyze court transcripts from nine criminal HIV nondisclosure jury trials between 1994 and 2015 in Michigan, Tennessee, and Missouri. The analysis focuses on how shifting medical discourses of risk influence the way prosecutors and counsels construct notions of individual responsibility and, thus, culpability for HIV exposure. The authors argue that antiretroviral therapy and sophisticated clinical testing technologies have led to increasingly medicalized notions of criminal responsibility that they term 'molecular responsibility.' Over time, arguments over the defendant's responsibility shift from the realm of morality to incorporate the defendant's capacity and willingness to medically control the microbiological dimension of their condition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adolescents and young adults with Marfan syndrome (MFS) use information from self-surveillance to manage their disorder. Thirty-seven male and female adolescents with MFS aged 14 to 21 years were interviewed. They identified 58 distinct self-surveillance behaviors that fell into four categories and multiple subcategories (SCs): tracking phenotype (SCs: physical appearance, physical fitness, medical problems, and other observations); tracking medical care (SCs: medical evaluations and treatments, and pharmacotherapy); tracking behavior (SCs: personal choices and social relations); and tracking emotions (SCs: positive emotional impact and negative emotional impact). The frequency and range of self-monitoring increased with the age of the child. On average, a child of 14 self-monitored from 1 to 3 times per day, whereas a person aged 21 might self-monitor many more times per day. The patient-parent-physician relationship is the context for teaching adolescents and young adults self-surveillance skills. Self-surveillance by patients is first-line symptom assessment and an adjunct to medical monitoring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital technologies have given rise to increased occurrences of self-surveillance and forms of ‘virtual vigilantism’. This has progressed from key moments such as the video recording of the Rodney King incident, to recording human rights abuses, to citizen grassroots surveillance. From this has emerged the phenomenon known as citizen journalism where recent urban crises have been recorded on mobile phones by the individuals involved. Also on the increase are forms of mob vigilantism, or ‘participatory panopticon’; examples here include phone images spread over the Internet as severe forms of ‘community punishment’. I argue that these unmediated forms of bottom-up surveillance – sousveillance– show the early signs of a new type of civil responsibility that stands unregulated and without restraint. This paper addresses the issues of increased individualised self-surveillance and asks whether this is the consequence of a personalised resistance to an ever increasing surveillance society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]