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The Data Multiple: Seeing Double in Digital Entrepreneurialism

ABSTRACT:Media and critical data scholars often critique digital entrepreneurs for endorsing narrow and positivist models of data and corporeality. But what happens when device makers plan for digital uncertainty and are invested in fostering interpretive fluidity of both data and bodies? Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork with makers of wearable computing in New York City's Silicon Alley, this article argues that creators of wearable technology work with more pluralized concepts of data than digital scholars often recognize. In marketing materials and public-facing documents, devices makers often do promote the idea that wearable technology can help people to patiently synchronize their digital records so as to compile Borgesian archives of their experiences. In practice, commercial imperatives effectively require that product makers also cultivate a multifaceted regard of personal data and somatic experience. In examining how device makers capitalize on the ambiguities inherent to digital knowing and thus enact a digital economy shaped by pliable rather than atomized notions of corporeality and data, this article opens onto wider debates about the politics of digital representation.