"Doing Privacy" in an Accelerating Society: A Sociological Perspective on How Wearable Technology Shapes People's Recognition and Practice

This paper mainly concerns the relationship between technology and privacy. It will focus on the idea that the development of science and technology to a great extent accompanies people’s changing recognition of the concept of and the practices of privacy. Starting from Heidegger’s viewpoint of the essence of (modern) technology, and from the observation of layperson’s daily practices from ethnomethodological perspective, this research proposal will examine further how technology “enframes” people’s understanding of privacy and accomplishing of the practices of it, based on the existing researches on privacy and with the example of wearable technologies. This proposal suggests the idea of “doing privacy” to describe a more dynamic and complex situation in which how people recognize and practice privacy. According to the vision offered to the users by technological developers, wearable technology relates not only to the users and developers, a broader areas should also cover the internet, new social media, big data analysis, data mining technologies, the internet of things, and so on. This vision attempts to present a world of interconnection, co-sharing, co-creation, and co-evolution. It is in this foreseeable future that emerges the question concerning technology and its relation to privacy. The goal of this research is to investigate how people’s “doing privacy” is accomplished through using new technologies, whether voluntarily or not, and its implications to the world.