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.
AmruteSareeta. 2019. “Of Techno-ethics and Techno-affects.”Feminist Review123 (1): 56–73.
2.
ArataStephen. 2004. “On Not Paying Attention.”Victorian Studies46 (2): 193–205.
3.
AtanasoskiNedaVoraKalindi. 2019. Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures. Durham: Duke University Press.
4.
BarthesRoland. 1977. Image, Music, Text. Translated by Stephen Heath. New York: Macmillan.
5.
BenjaminRuha. 2016. “Informed Refusal: Toward a Justice-based Bioethics.”Science, Technology, & Human Values41 (6): 967–90.
6.
BenjaminRuha. 2019. Race after Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Cambridge, UK: Polity Books.
7.
BrandtMarisaStarkLuke. 2018. “Exploring Digital Interventions in Mental Health: A Roadmap.” In Interventions: Communication Research and Practice, International Communication Association 2017 Theme Book, edited by ShawAdrienneTravers ScottD., 167–82. Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang.
8.
CardosoJefferson RosaPereiraLigia MaxwellIversenMaura DalyRamosAdilson Luiz. 2014. “What Is Gold Standard and What Is Ground Truth?” Dental Press Journal of Orthodontics19 (5): 27–30.
9.
CarrE. Summerson. 2010. Scripting Addiction: The Politics of Therapeutic Talk and American Sobriety. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
10.
ChandlerChelseaFoltzPeter W.ElvevågBrita. 2020. “Using Machine Learning in Psychiatry: The Need to Establish a Framework that Nurtures Trustworthiness.”Schizophrenia Bulletin46 (1): 11–14.
11.
Combahee River Collective. 2015. “A Black Feminist Statement.” In The Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, edited by MoragaCherríeAnzaldúaGloria, 210–18. Albany: State University of New York Press.
12.
CorriganOonagh. 2003. “Empty Ethics: The Problem with Informed Consent.”Sociology of Health & Illness25 (7): 768–92.
13.
CsordasThomas. 1993. “Somatic Modes of Attention.”Cultural Anthropology8 (2): 135–56.
14.
CumminsNicholasSchererStefanKrajewsiJarekSchniederSebastianEppsJulienQuatieriThomas F.. 2015. “A Review of Depression and Suicide Risk Assessment Using Speech Analysis.”Speech Communication71 (C): 10–49.
15.
DastonLorraineGalisonPeter. 2007. Objectivity. Cambridge, MA: Zone Books.
EkbiaHamid R.NardiBonnie. 2017. Heteromation and Other Stories of Computing and Capitalism. Cambridge: MIT Press.
18.
FeltUlrikeBisterMilena D.StrassnigMichaelWagnerUrsula. 2009. “Refusing the Information Paradigm: Informed Consent, Medical Research, and Patient Participation.”Health13 (1): 87–106.
19.
HatchAnthony Ryan. 2019. Silent Cells: The Secret Drugging of Captive America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
HoeyerKlaus. 2009. “Informed Consent: The Making of a Ubiquitous Rule in Medical Practice.”Organization16 (2): 267–88.
22.
HowardDorothyIraniLilly. 2019. “Ways of Knowing Research Subjects Care.” Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-16), May 4–9, Glasgow, UK.
23.
HuysQuentin J. M.MaiaTiago V.FrankMichael J.. 2016. “Computational Psychiatry as a Bridge from Neuroscience to Clinical Applications.”Nature Neuroscience19 (3): 404–13.
24.
InselThomas. 2017. “Digital Phenotyping: Technology for a New Science of Behavior.”Journal of the American Medical Association318 (13): 1215–16.
25.
IraniLilly. 2015. “The Cultural Work of Microwork.”New Media & Society17 (5): 720–39.
26.
IraniLilly. 2018. “‘Design Thinking’: Defending Silicon Valley at the Apex of Global Labor Hierarchies.”Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience4 (1): 1–19.
27.
JacksonZakiyyah Iman. 2020. Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World. New York: New York University.
28.
LavauStephanieBinghamNick. 2017. “Practices of Attention, Possibilities for Care: Making Situations Matter in Food Safety Inspection.”The Sociological Review Monographs65 (2): 20–35.
29.
LempertMichael. 2019. “Fine-grained Analysis: Talk Therapy, Media, and the Miscroscopic Science of the Face-to-face.”Isis110 (1): 24–47.
30.
LiangYunjiZhengXiaolongZengDaniel D.. 2019. “A Survey on Big Data-driven Digital Phenotyping of Mental Health.”Information Fusion52 (2019): 290–307.
31.
MartinArynMyersNatashaViseuAna. 2015. “The Politics of Care in Technoscience.”Social Studies of Science45 (5): 625–41.
32.
MiceliMilagrosSchuesslerMartinYangTianling. 2020. “Between Subjectivity and Imposition: Power Dynamics in Data Annotation for Computer Vision.”Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction4 (CSCW2): 1–25.
33.
MillsMara. 2011a. “On Disability and Cybernetics: Helen Keller, Norbert Weiner, and the Hearing Glove.”Differences22 (2-3): 74–111.
34.
MillsMara. 2011b. “Do Signals Have Politics? Inscribing Abilities in Cochlear Implants.” In The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, edited by PinchTrevorBijsterveldKarin, 320–46. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
35.
MolAnnemarie. 2008. The Logic of Care: Health and the Problem of Patient Choice. London, UK: Routledge.
36.
MullaSameena. 2014. The Violence of Care: Rape Victims, Forensic Nurses, and Sexual Assault Intervention. New York: New York University Press.
37.
MurphyMichelle. 2015. “Unsettling Care: Troubling Transnational Notions of Care in Feminist Health Practices.”Social Studies of Science45 (5): 717–37.
38.
NadelsonTheodore. 1987. “The Inhuman Computer/the Too-human Psychotherapist.”American Journal of PsychotherapyXLI (4): 489–98.
39.
Nakano GlennEvelyn. 1992. “From Servitude to Service Work: Historical Continuities in the Racial Division of Paid Reproductive Labor.”Signs18 (1): 1–43.
OnnelaJukka-PekkaRauchScott L.. 2016. “Harnessing Smartphone-based Digital Phenotyping to Enhance Behavioral and Mental Health.”Neuropsychopharmacology41 (7): 1691–96.
42.
OrrJackie. 2010. “Biopsychiatry and the Informatics of Diagnosis.” In Biomedicalization: Technoscience, Health, and Illness in the U.S., edited by ClarkeAdele E.MamoLauraFosketJennifer RuthFishmanJennifer R.ShimJanet K., 353–79. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
43.
PetrynaAdriana. 2005. “Ethical Variability: Drug Development and Globalizing Clinical Trials.”American Ethnologist32 (2): 183–97.
44.
PickersgillMartyn. 2019. “Digitising Psychiatry? Sociotechnical Expectations, Performative Nominalism and Biomedical Virtue in (Digital) Psychiatric Praxis.”Sociology of Health and Illness41 (S1): 16–30.
45.
Puig de la BellacasaMaria. 2011. “Matters of Care in Technoscience: Assembling Neglected Things.”Social Studies of Science41 (1): 85–106.
46.
Puig de la BellacasaMaria. 2017. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
47.
RheeJennifer. 2018. The Robotic Imaginary: The Human Price of Dehumanized Labor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
48.
RiceTom. 2015. “Listening.” In Keywords in Sound, edited by NovakDavidSakakeenyMatt, 99–111. Durham: Duke University Press.
49.
RosaJonathan. 2019. Looking Like a Language, Sounding Like a Race: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinadad. New York: Oxford University Press.
50.
RussellJames A.1980. “A Circumplex Model of Affect.”Journal of Personality and Social Psychology39 (6): 1161–78.
51.
SchüllNatasha. 2019. “Self in the Loop: Bits, Patterns, and Pathways into the Quantified Self.” In A Networked Self and Human Augments, Artificial Intelligence, Sentience, edited by PapacharissiZizi, 25–38. New York: Routledge.
52.
SchützAlfred. 1970. “On Phenomenology and Social Relations.” Edited by Helmut R. Wagner. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
53.
SeaverNick. 2011. “‘This Is Not a Copy’: Mechanical Fidelity and the Re-enacting Piano.”Differences22 (2-3): 55–73.
54.
SemelBeth. 2019. “Speech, Signal, Symptom: Machine Listening and the Remaking of Psychiatric Assessment.” PhD diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge.
55.
StarkLaura. 2012. Behind Closed Doors: IRBs and the Making of Ethical Research. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
56.
StarkLuke. 2016. “That Signal Feeling: Emotion and Interaction Design from Social Media to ‘The Anxious Seat.’” PhD diss., New York University, New York.
57.
SterneJonathan. 2003. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
58.
SterneJonathanRogersTara. 2011. “The Poetics of Signal Processing.”Differences22 (2-3): 31–53.
59.
StevensonLisa. 2014. Life Besides Itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Artic. Oakland: University of California Press.
60.
SuchmanLucy. 2007. Human-machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions, 2nd ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
VaillantGeorge E.1984. “The Disadvantages of DSM-III Outweigh Its Advantages.”American Journal of Psychiatry141 (4): 542–45.
63.
WeheliyeAlexander G.2014. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
64.
WilkieAlex. 2010. “User Assemblages in Design: An Ethnographic Study.” PhD diss., Goldsmiths University, London, UK.
65.
WilsonElizabeth. 2010. Affect and Artificial Intelligence. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
66.
WynterSylvia. 2003. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation: An Argument.”New Centennial Review3 (3): 257–37.
67.
ZeavinHannah. 2021. The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy. Cambridge: MIT Press.
