Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in
Book cover

Healthcare and Big Data pp 115–131Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

The Uncanny Lives of Data Commodities

  • Chapter
  • First Online:

Abstract

Market logics suffuse the anonymization, repackaging, and abstraction of health data. My data was transformed into a commodity through the innovations made upon it. This is the value of the commodity and through this transmutation, the data goes on to live a life of its own in the databases of the clinic, as well as all of the other enterprises where my data was transfered and innovated upon. Some of my medical data was also sourced from my credit card transactions and prescription data, which were sold to data brokers. Out of these sociotechnical confluences, these data things are born and take on lives of their own.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Chapter
USD   29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD   89.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Hardcover Book
USD   119.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

References

  • Althusser, Louis. 2001. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Translated by Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Arvatov, Boris, and Christina Kiaer. 1997. “Everyday Life and the Culture of the Thing (Toward the Formulation of the Question).” October 81 (2): 119–28.

    Google Scholar 

  • Barad, Karen. 2003. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” Signs 28 (3): 801–31.

    Google Scholar 

  • Blood, Cybele, and Joanne Cacciatore. 2014. “Parental Grief and Memento Mori Photography: Narrative, Meaning, Culture, and Context.” Death Studies 38 (4): 224–33.

    Google Scholar 

  • Brown, Bill. 2001. “Thing Theory.” Critical Inquiry 28 (1): 1–22.

    Google Scholar 

  • Chamberlain, Simon, Harley Giles, and Andrew Lientz. 2015. “Service for Associating Network Users with Profiles.” United States Patent and Trademark Office 9,058,340, filed September 9, 2013, and issued June 16, 2015.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cheney-Lippold, John. 2011. “A New Algorithmic Identity: Soft Biopolitics and the Modulation of Control.” Theory, Culture & Society 28 (6): 164–81.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dichek, Bernard. 2011. “Baby Boomer.” Israel21c: Uncovering Israel, February 8. Accessed January 9, 2016. http://www.israel21c.org/baby-boomer.

  • Eisele, Pam. 2013. “Merck Announces FDA Acceptance of New Drug Application for Investigational Fertility Treatment.” Press Release. Whitehouse Station, NJ: Merck. http://www.drugs.com/nda/corifollitropin_alfa_130909.html.

  • Engel, William E., and Max F. Kigler. 2013. “Process and System for Integrating Information from Disparate Databases for Purposes of Predicting Consumer Behavior.” United States Patent and Trademark Office 8,612,282, filed May 3, 2012, and issued December 17, 2013.

    Google Scholar 

  • Freud, Sigmund. 2003. The Uncanny. Translated by David Mclintock. London: Penguin Classics.

    Google Scholar 

  • Haraway, Donna. 1997. Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse TM : Feminism and Technoscience. New York: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kiaer, Christina. 1997. “Boris Arvatov’s Socialist Objects.” October 81 (2): 105–18.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kravets, Olga. 2013. “On Things and Comrades.” Ephemera 13 (2): 421–36.

    Google Scholar 

  • Layne, Linda L. 2000a. “Baby Things as Fetishes: Memorial Goods, Simulacra, and the ‘Realness’ Problem of Pregnancy Loss.” In Ideologies and Technologies of Motherhood: Race, Class, Sexuality, Nationalism, edited by Heléna Ragoné and France Winddance Twine, 111–38. New York: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2000b. “‘He Was a Real Baby with Baby Things’: A Material Culture Analysis of Personhood, Parenthood and Pregnancy Loss.” Journal of Material Culture 5 (3): 321–45.

    Google Scholar 

  • Markham, Annette N. 2013. “The Algorithmic Self: Layered Accounts of Life and Identity in the 21st Century.” Selected Papers of Internet Research 14: 1–4.

    Google Scholar 

  • Marx, Karl. 1976. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mitchell, W. J. T. 2005. What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Nakamura, Lisa. 2008. Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Preciado, Paul B. 2013. Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. Kindle. New York: Feminist Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rajan, Kaushik Sunder. 2006. Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Robertson, Jordan, and Shannon Pettypiece. 2014. “They Know You Buy Viagra and They Want to Sell You More.” Bloomberg Business, December 10. Accessed January 9, 2016. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-12-10/they-know-you-buy-viagra-and-they-want-to-sell-you-more.

  • Rose, Nikolas. 2007. The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Shelley, Mary. 2003. Frankenstein: Or the Modern Prometheus. London: Penguin Classics.

    Google Scholar 

  • Solove, Daniel J. 2006. The Digital Person: Technology and Privacy in the Information Age. New York: New York University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Steyerl, Hito. 2013. The Wretched of the Screen. New York: Sternberg Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Taussig, Michael. 2010. Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America. 2nd ed. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2011. I Swear I Saw This: Drawings in Fieldwork Notebooks, Namely Mine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Thompson, Charis. 1999. “Confessions of a Bioterrorist: Subject Position and Reproductive Technologies.” In Playing Dolly: Technocultural Formations, Fantasies and Fictions in Assisted Reproduction, edited by E. Ann Kaplan and Susan Squier, 189–240. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Timmermans, Stefan. 2010. “Reconciling Research with Medical Care in RCTs.” In Medical Proofs, Social Experiments: Clinical Trials in Shifting Contexts, edited by Catherine Will and Tiago Moreira, 17–32. Farnham, UK: Ashgate.

    Google Scholar 

  • Waldby, Catherine, and Melinda Cooper. 2010. “From Reproductive Work to Regenerative Labour: The Female Body and the Stem Cell Industries.” Feminist Theory 11 (1): 3–22.

    Google Scholar 

  • Waldby, Catherine, and Robert Mitchell. 2006. Tissue Economies: Blood, Organs, and Cell Lines in Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • White, Michele. 2010. “Babies Who Touch You: Reborn Dolls, Artists, and the Emotive Display of Bodies on eBay.” In Political Emotions, edited by Janet Staiger, Ann Cvetkovich, and Ann Reynolds, 66–89. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2015. Producing Women: The Internet, Traditional Femininity, Queerness, and Creativity. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Mary F. E. Ebeling

Authors
  1. Mary F. E. Ebeling
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Copyright information

© 2016 The Author(s)

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Ebeling, M.F.E. (2016). The Uncanny Lives of Data Commodities. In: Healthcare and Big Data. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50221-6_6

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50221-6_6

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-137-50220-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-137-50221-6

  • eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation