TY - JOUR
T1 - Listening Like a Computer
T2 - Attentional Tensions and Mechanized Care in Psychiatric Digital Phenotyping
AU - Semel, Beth M.
N1 - Funding Information:
I thank my ethnographic interlocutors for their generosity, patience, and insight as well as the special issue editors for the invitation to contribute and their attentive guidance. This article and the talks from which it is based benefited enormously from the feedback of several careful readers and listeners, including two anonymous reviewers, participants of the Harvard STS Circle, my colleagues in the Department of Anthropology at MIT, Marc Aidinoff, Chelsea Barabas, Richard Fadok, Steven Gonzalez, Jia-Hui Lee, Thomas Mann, Ryo Morimoto, Lu´ısa Reis Castro, Elena Sobrino, and Hannah Zeavin. All errors are strictly my own. The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: School for Advanced Research; Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (1627861); Wenner-Gren Foundation (9251); Society for Psychological Anthropology/Robert Lemelson Foundation; and Weatherhead Foundation.
Funding Information:
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: School for Advanced Research; Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (1627861); Wenner-Gren Foundation (9251); Society for Psychological Anthropology/Robert Lemelson Foundation; and Weatherhead Foundation.
Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2021.
PY - 2022/3
Y1 - 2022/3
N2 - This article explores negotiations over the humanistic versus mechanized components of care through an ethnographic account of digital phenotyping research. I focus on a US-based team of psychiatric and engineering professionals assembling a smartphone application that they hope will analyze minute changes in the sounds of speech during phone calls to predict when a user with bipolar disorder will have a manic or depressive episode. Contrary to conventional depictions of psychiatry as essentially humanistic, the discourse surrounding digital phenotyping positions the machine as a necessary addition to mental health care precisely because of its more-than-human sensory, attentional capacities. The bipolar research team likewise portrays their app as capable of pinpointing sonic signs of mental illness that humans, too distracted by semantic meaning, otherwise ignore. Nevertheless, the team members tasked with processing the team’s data (audio recordings of human research subject speech) must craft and perform a selectively attentive machinic subject position, which they call “listening like a computer”: a paradoxical mode of attention (to speech sound) and inattention (to speech meaning). By tracing the team’s discursive and on-the-ground enactments of care and attention as both humanistic and machinic, I tune a critical ear to the posthuman promises of digital phenotyping.
AB - This article explores negotiations over the humanistic versus mechanized components of care through an ethnographic account of digital phenotyping research. I focus on a US-based team of psychiatric and engineering professionals assembling a smartphone application that they hope will analyze minute changes in the sounds of speech during phone calls to predict when a user with bipolar disorder will have a manic or depressive episode. Contrary to conventional depictions of psychiatry as essentially humanistic, the discourse surrounding digital phenotyping positions the machine as a necessary addition to mental health care precisely because of its more-than-human sensory, attentional capacities. The bipolar research team likewise portrays their app as capable of pinpointing sonic signs of mental illness that humans, too distracted by semantic meaning, otherwise ignore. Nevertheless, the team members tasked with processing the team’s data (audio recordings of human research subject speech) must craft and perform a selectively attentive machinic subject position, which they call “listening like a computer”: a paradoxical mode of attention (to speech sound) and inattention (to speech meaning). By tracing the team’s discursive and on-the-ground enactments of care and attention as both humanistic and machinic, I tune a critical ear to the posthuman promises of digital phenotyping.
KW - artificial intelligence
KW - attention
KW - care
KW - digital psychiatry
KW - feminist science and technology studies
KW - listening
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U2 - 10.1177/01622439211026371
DO - 10.1177/01622439211026371
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85108409379
SN - 0162-2439
VL - 47
SP - 266
EP - 290
JO - Science Technology and Human Values
JF - Science Technology and Human Values
IS - 2
ER -