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Hiding in plain sight:
The rhetoric
of bionic
contact
lenses in
mainstream discourses
Isabel
Pedersen
and Kirsten Ellison
Abstract
This
article explores
and
critiques mainstream
speculative
news surrounding personal technologies.
We focus on news concerning bionic contact lenses, a hardware invention prototype by Google
Inc promoted as a
‘future’
personal computing device. Technology is
increasingly
normalized and
configured as
inevitable
through representations across consumer media outlets. In our analysis
of a large corpus of online and print news coverage, we
identify
three rhetorical strategies that
justify
it as either a
medical/assistive device within
a discourse of health, or a
device
for transhuman
enhancement within a discourse of transhumanism.
Employing
Roland Barthes’s critical theory
of myth, we argue that the first medical justification obfuscates but ultimately promotes the
second
justification,
transhuman enhancement. This transhumanist
vision
endorses enhancement
and augmentation without an
identifiable
purpose or disclosure concerning how people as users
might be affected in the future. New media are subtly promoted during
invention;
yet, their social
function,
implied
ideologies, and commercialized agenda are rarely
challenged.
We problematize
these omissions, and
highlight
the need for critical dialogue.
Keywords
bionic contact lens,
digital
culture, discourse
analysis,
health, popular culture, rhetoric,
technoculture, transhumanism, wearable technology
Citation
Isabel Pedersen and Kirsten Ellison. (2017). Hiding in plain sight: The rhetoric of
bionic contact lenses in mainstream discourses. International Journal of Cultural
Studies Volume: 20 issue: 6, page(s): 669-683.
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Google invents smart contact lens with built-in camera: Superhuman Terminator-like vision here
we come. (Anthony, 2014)
Amid 50 celebrated innovations – such as invisibility cloaks, smog-eating cement and
sunscreen for plants – Time magazine named ‘bionic contacts’ one of the best inventions
of 2008. The following brief caption is the full text explanation given:
The University of Washington’s Babak Parviz has created a prototype ‘bionic’ contact lens that
creates a display over the wearer’s visual field, so images, maps, data, etc., appear to float in
midair. The lens works using tiny LEDs, which are powered by solar cells, and a radio-
frequency receiver. (Time, 2008)
A photograph of the prototype lens, scaled-up several inches, dominates the page, acting
as proof that it exists. Time tantalized its 2008 audience with an invention that was both
fantastical yet simultaneously real enough for the suspension of disbelief. However, Time
does not address the intended application for a bionic contact lens, only its features. It
neglects to explain why people will want them or need to use them. It does, however,
imply the fantasy that everyday smartphone-style online communication might be con-
ducted using a contact lens, with information appearing to ‘float in midair’ over the eye.
Couched in a best-of list, so often used in mainstream magazine pieces, bionic contact
lenses contribute to futurist posturing. Time presents a speculative scenario about this
technology that also reflects on the lives of individuals. In this article, we treat this kind
of transhumanist rhetoric in mainstream discourse as a form of fervor for scientific and
technological progress promoted as a means for perfecting humankind (Hyde, 2010) – an
ideology that is treated as a given and oftentimes used to justify technology. Time’s pro-
motion of the bionic contact lens, we claim, indexes transhumanist rhetoric of this ilk.
Fast-forward six years and on 22 April 2014, Vanity Fair published an article called
‘Move over, Google Glass; here come Google contact lenses’,1 also with a massive photo
of the lens prototype leading the article. The Vanity Fair author, Kia Makarechi, high-
lights that ‘Google … [is] working on contacts with embedded cameras, as well as lenses
aimed at diabetics who need to constantly monitor their blood sugar levels’. With its
mainstream audience in mind, Vanity Fair formulates the news in the same context of
technofantasy as Time. However, headlined along with Google and the famed Glass
invention, bionic contacts appear even more relevant, mainstream and imminent.
Furthermore, Vanity Fair also reports on a new proposed medical function, helping dia-
betics, and alludes to another potential assistive technology usage for blind and low-
visioned people.2 While the medical and assistive functions make bionic contacts seem
legitimate, urgent and serious, the original proposition, that bionic contact lenses will be
used by consumers for everyday communication (e.g. digital camera, Wi-Fi), is still very
much implied. Simply put, bionic contacts captivate public interest, yet the same dis-
course does not explain how consumers will use them or should use them. The news
remains elusive, celebratory, sensational and compelling.
The bionic contact lens is still only an inventor’s prototype and is not available to the
public in any capacity. Nevertheless, the circulated news of the bionic contact lens is very
much commoditized within Google Inc.’s business model.3 Google’s approximate
Pedersen
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3
market capitalization reached $400 billion in 2014 and, arguably, it has the means to suc-
cessfully circulate any information it desires to across the complex media channels it owns
and controls. The bionic contact lens has been made legitimate through patent
applications and other genres as a medical device that will assist diabetics by using tears
in the process of a more constant glucose monitoring. Termed an ‘ophthalmic electro-
chemical sensor’, contact lenses used in this way give agency to ‘diabetics who need’ it
to solve a clearly defined problem (Makarechi, 2014). However, at the same time, the
much more subtle justification concentrates on the addition of a tiny embedded digital
camera in the lens, which implies a new form of mobile communication. In this scenario,
contact lens wearers will control the camera with eye blinks, rather than using a mouse,
keyboard or touch screen. Potentially, they could take surreptitious photos. They could
monitor others and be monitored in new and complex ways.
In this article, we argue first that the justification for the invention, glucose monitor-
ing, is framed in medical discourses in bold, denotative terms so that it seems obvious and
ultimately impervious to any challenge. Second, the overt medical justification obfuscates
the rationale offered by the more subtle or reticent discourse – that is, transhu- man
enhancement – making it covert and thus more difficult to call into question.
Following Roland Barthes’s (1984 [1957]) rhetorical theory and his term, myth, we
argue that the rhetorical strategies that run through these discourses surrounding the
invention make the transhumanist justification seem more palatable and seemingly depo-
liticized. Barthes writes that ‘however paradoxical it may seem, myth hides nothing: its
function is to distort, not to make disappear’ (1984 [1957]: 121). Finally, we make the
point that, as a consequence, little or no critical dialogue surrounds the emergence of
bionic contact lenses and that the social, political and cultural issues implicated in the
rhetorical use of perfection (discussed further on) to justify human enhancement ought to
be addressed at this stage, before real artifacts appear on consumer shelves. The potential
social practices associated with our globalized technoculture should be dealt with during
the earliest phases of design.
Related to an ongoing multi-year humanities research project on wearable technology
emergence and culture, our work involves an extensive discourse analysis of news con-
cerning the bionic contact lens. The research question that underpins the study is open-
ended in keeping with the state of this early stage technical innovation. We ask: How is
a bionic contact rhetorically framed in terms of human enhancement? The article fol-
lows in four parts. The first describes the methodological approach. The second explores
aspects of digital culture and network media to characterize discourses implicated in this
study. The third discusses the theoretical underpinning for characterizing transhumanism
as rhetorical. The fourth gives three close readings of selected texts using critical rhetori-
cal theories to reveal how the corpus tends towards a transhuman agenda.
Discursive study
Limiting the scope of our analysis to the contact lens technology developed by Dr Babak
Parviz and his team at the University of Washington, the Microsoft Research Group and,
later, Google[X], the study began with a comprehensive Factiva search of all English-
language international4 print and online coverage of Parviz’s lenses. We collected a total
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Table 1. Texts from the corpus counted according to thematic discourses.
1
Jan.–30
April
2014
1–15 Jan.
2014
16–29
Jan.
2014 30
Jan.
–12
April
2014
13–26 April
2014
27–30
April
2014
Corpus
total
Time
spanning
news
release of glucose
monitoring patent
Time spanning
news release
of miniature
camera patent
Time
frame (days)
120
15
14
73
14
4
Discourse of health
216
0
52
67
94
3
Discourse of
transhumanism
132
1
8
37
82
4
Discourse of health
and transhumanism
91
0
8
19
62
2
Corpus total
257
1
52
85
114
5
of 633 texts from January 2008 to May 2014, ranging from journal publications, news-
paper articles, conference presentations and marketing materials to tweets/re-tweets,
blogs and YouTube videos. A total of 257 of these results were posted between January
and May 2014, coinciding with the public release of Google[X]’s two patents: one for a
lens that could monitor glucose levels in diabetics on 16 January and one for miniature
cameras that could be embedded in the lens on 13 April. Responding to what we identi-
fied as two significant spikes in coverage of the Google lens following the two public
releases of the patents, we narrowed the scope of our analysis for the present article to the
coverage posted between January and May 2014, spanning a total of 120 days (see Table
1). In coding the corpus, we took a discourse analytic approach, identifying the dominant
discourses within which the idea of the lens was framed and reified in the context of the
speculative landscape of technology reporting. As outlined in Table 1, we identified two
dominant discourses: a discourse of health and a discourse of transhumanism. While the
first implicitly employs ideals of social responsibility, betterment and humanitarianism,
the second appeals to exciting, tantalizing, sensational narratives of the future, living
forever and transcending mortality. Of the 257 texts, 216 were coded according to a dis-
course of health and 132 according to a discourse of transhumanism. Of particular sig-
nificance was our finding that the majority of the transhumanist texts were also framed
within a discourse of health. Returning to our original research question, we conducted a
close rhetorical analysis in part four of this article for a selection of these texts in order to
examine how the bionic contact lens is rhetorically justified within the context of the two
discourses, and how, in light of the above finding, the mobilization of health func- tions
as an obfuscating shield against critiques of the transhumanist agenda of the latter.
Wearable technology
news and
network culture
Wearable technology can be defined as digital technology that one either attaches to the
body or holds close to it, which is meant to augment acts such as communicating with
other people and machines (e.g. social media, ePayment), recording user biofeedback
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(e.g. heart rate tracking), and monitoring the environment for the user (e.g. weather, GPS
traffic monitoring). Bionic contact lenses will be one of the few technologies that people
wear passively without some artificial affixation. We carry smartphones, clip fitness
trackers, don devices like Google Glass, wear Apple Watch, but we will stick contacts to
the eyes like a membrane. Consequently, bionic contact lenses will be much more inti-
mate because of their placement on the body. To open one’s eyes is to engage other
people, other surroundings, etc., but to close them is to direct one’s consciousness to inner
thoughts, inner feelings and the aspect of the self that cannot ever be wholly shared. If they
actually come to fruition, they will sit on the cusp between the inside (self) and outside
(cultural, social, ecological, political, etc.) of the body. While the inside/outside binary is
artificially imposed, our insides and outsides co-constitute each other through myriad
experiences, the perception of closing one’s eye is significant in the formation of what it
feels like to be a solitary self. Through this intimate aspect of the self, bionic contact
lenses will be far more personal than most other proposed wearable mobile media.
New personal technologies are marketed extensively before consumers are able to see
them, touch them, or know them in any material sense. To an extent, knowledge of them
is entertainment. We characterize this phenomenon as one very much part of the ‘demotic
turn’ identified by Graeme Turner to explain recent internet or networked culture. The
demotic turn signals a shift in how ‘ordinary people’ participate through media, but also
how media function in ‘the distribution of entertainment and the production of cultural
identities [more] than ever before’ (Turner, 2010: 4). For the past decade, networked
media outlets have played host to the technocultural tendency to circulate tantalizing
fetishized images across multiple channels. Visual depictions of the bionic contact lens
are very much a prized commodity item in this vein. Many articles in our corpus include
a close-up photograph of a contact lens resting on top of a human finger. Computer cir-
cuitry snakes across the transparent surface of the lens, pointing to a future context. Yet,
these photos are all the more desirable as social media commodities because they present
the bionic contact lens as a sort of realized fact. They defy the circumstance that they do
not exist for the public; the lens has not been released as a product, nor is it even close to
being on the market. Yet, the visual representations make it seem as natural as any other
new digital device that we are already using.
Networked media become sites for active spectatorship and participation. Coupled
with the graphic depictions of the lens, are the concise, short headlines that animate the
imagination of the public that does not yet have access to the invention. Social media
patterns of communication influence online discourse and dictate the way that messages
have to be short, direct, and exciting enough to make an impact. By re-envisioning Guy
Debord (1970 [1967]), McKenzie Wark (2013) posits the notion of the ‘disintegrating
spectacle’:
The spectacle has always been an uninterrupted monologue of self-praise. But things have
changed a bit. The integrated spectacle still relied on centralized means of organizing and
distributing the spectacle, run by a culture industry in command of the means of producing its
images. The disintegrating spectacle chips away at centralized means of producing images and
distributes this responsibility among the spectators themselves. While the production of goods
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is out-sourced to various cheap labor countries, the production of images is in-sourced to unpaid
labor, offered up in what was once leisure time. The culture industries are now the vulture
industries, which act less as producers of images for consumption than as algorithms that manage
databases of images that consumers swap between each other – while still paying for the
privilege. Where once the spectacle entertained us, now we must entertain each other, while the
vulture industries collect the rent. (2013: 15–16)
The culture/vulture industry places ‘responsibility among the spectators themselves’ to
distribute content they fetishize. Facilitated by the ‘algorithms that manage databases of
images that consumers swap between each other’, participants actively circulate items
across online environments. Consequently, striking, tantalizing images of the bionic con-
tact lens are circulated and shared in dizzying numbers.
In addition to circulation via the share economy that Wark identifies, other discursive
processes drive this kind of popular science news across media channels. Drawing on
Charles Bazerman’s and Bruno Latour’s theories on the discourse of science, Jeanne
Fahnestock (1986) proposes that the work of science accommodators is key to circulation
within popular science discourses. She writes, ‘instead of simply reporting facts for a dif-
ferent audience, scientific accommodations are overwhelmingly epideictic’, meaning that
the news must be celebratory (rather than political) to be consumed (1986: 278–9). To be
successful, science journalism reproduces points of significance for a decontextualized
audience. Most importantly, certain scientific discoveries should be ‘adjust[ed]’ to ‘an
audience’s already held values and assumptions’ (1986: 279). Thus, mainstream audi-
ences require scientific discovery to be meaningfully normalized. We add to our analysis
of this discursive mix the role of the science accommodator, who provides the rhetorical
ethos (i.e. credible persona) necessary to drive circulation.
This section has characterized the corpus within a general discussion of how popular
technology news is circulated across multiple and far-reaching channels in light of new
processes of distribution. The next section moves to identify how this news is trans-
formative as a rhetoric that ultimately justifies the bionic contact lens.
Transhumanist
rhetoric
Bionic contact lenses excite the public imagination because they imply evolved humans,
or posthumans. Posthumanism is a broad academic field with writers motivated by mul-
tiple viewpoints. Those who have long taken a critical approach include N. Katherine
Hayles, Brian Massumi, Francis Fukuyama and Eugene Thacker, attending to the cate-
gorical treatment of humans as materially, biologically, politically, digitally, culturally and
environmentally mediated and integrated beings. The overarching view is that post-
humanism, right from the start, ‘removed the human homo sapiens from any particularly
privileged position in relation to matters of meaning, information, and cognition’ (Wolfe,
2009: xii). More relevant to our research, however, is writing related to transhumanism,
which is a value-system or an ideology that influences current activities, innovations and
beliefs towards (so-called) posthuman ends. Transhumanist perspectives, specifically,
identify ‘science and technology as the main assets of reformulation of the human’
(Ferrando, 2013: 28). Consequently, discussion of transhumanism inevitably points to
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‘the risk of technoreductionism’ (2013: 28). We are concerned with how transhumanist
beliefs circulate in current media and ultimately motivate cultural participation. As Rosi
Braidotti (2013: 2) remarks, ‘[d]iscourses and representations of the non-human, the
inhuman, the anti-human, the inhumane, and the posthuman proliferate and overlap in our
globalized, technologically mediated societies’. And at the core of the debates sur-
rounding these advances, she contends, is the concept of human enhancement. Advances,
technological innovations and novel paradigms for human enhancements are constantly
trumpeted; however, the foundation itself – that human enhancement writ large is desir-
able – functions as a quiet and unquestioned given.
Transhumanist rhetoric is largely constituted through cultural norms based on every-
day underlying assumptions. This kind of rhetoric becomes implicated in the recent
demotic turn, the overwhelmingly commercialized circulation of cultural products at the
hands of ordinary people that Turner identifies, discussed in the previous section.
However, it is also embedded in long-standing values and assumptions concerning human
progress. In coming to terms with the notion of human enhancement and justifi- cations
for it, we draw on Michael Hyde’s notion of ‘perfection’ to define transhumanist ideology
in rhetorical terms as the zeal ‘for scientific and technological progress as the ultimate
means for perfecting humankind’ (2010: 212). Hyde writes: ‘the achievement of certain
forms of perfection presupposes predetermined and agreed upon rules and stand- ards of
excellence concerning activities that enable us to gauge when a given endeavor is
complete, without fault or defect’ (2010: 8). Hyde’s notion of a perfection principle is
founded upon a phrase in Kenneth Burke’s 1966 poem ‘Definition of human’ which
claims we are ‘rotten with perfection’ (Burke, 1989). Using irony to underscore this
proposition, Burke points to how people constantly goad themselves in the aspiration to
be ‘perfect’, a concept that can be abstract, destructive and often arbitrary. Likewise,
Glenn Stillar’s Analyzing Everyday Texts (1998) argues that everyday language contex-
tualized through logonomic or discursive systems construes perfection in ways that are
often ambiguous; these ways of construing perfection can form destructive as well as
constructive attitudes.
Finally, we use Roland Barthes’s ‘myth’ to explain the way transhumanism is made
harmonious with everyday life. Others have recently used Barthesian myth to reveal
how hegemonic orders leverage power through common new media representations
(Power et al., 2013; Russell, 2005; Yar, 2008). We use it to explain the power in beliefs
that are seemingly obvious, that is, that the next wave of computer technology will
necessarily make us better people. Barthes’ (1984 [1957]) cultural semiotic theory of
‘myth’ is an apt functional model to reveal how discourses instantiate and orient sev-
eral kinds of rhetorical strategies towards a latent, assumed, everyday, transhumanist
ideology. Barthes writes:
What the world supplies to myth is a historical reality, defined, even if this goes back quite a
while, by the way in which men have produced or used it; and what myth gives in return is a
natural image of this reality.… The world enters language as a dialectical relation between
activities, between human actions; it comes out of myth as a harmonious display of essences. A
conjuring trick has taken place; it has turned reality inside out, it has emptied it of history and
has filled it with nature, it has removed from things their human meaning so as to make them
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signify a human insignificance. The function of myth is to empty reality: it is, literally, a
ceaseless flowing out, a hemorrhage, or perhaps an evaporation, in short a perceptible absence.
(1984 [1957]: 143)
Myth is a ‘conjuring trick’. It functions to legitimize beliefs as if they are natural, indis-
putable, or factual realities. More specifically, myth naturalizes opinions, ideas and
debates, smoothing them over until they appear ‘harmonious’ and agreeable. It causes
language to ‘hemorrhage’ the significance, dialectical positioning and conversation that
made a claim noteworthy in the first place, making it an indisputable ‘essence’. Myth, in
this sense, is not assimilated into our cultural landscape based on its own terms, but is
grounded in our familiarity and acceptance of other cultural and commoditized practices,
values, beliefs and mediated experiences. Barthes’ famous proposition made about this
type of ideology is that ‘[m]yth is depoliticized speech’ (1984 [1957]: 143). From here,
we argue that the transhumanist rationalizations for the bionic lens hide in plain sight in
the discourses that announce it, depoliticized and empty.
Rhetorical
strategies
Three rhetorical strategies are identified to explain how bionic contact lenses are justi-
fied amid circulating news that announces them. First, bionic contact technology is
framed as assistive technology for glucose monitoring, but this also acts as an alibi for a
much broader vision that justifies it as a mainstream consumer device. Second, we recon-
noitre the transhuman justification through ‘remediation’, a strategy that treats the lens as
an expansion of a prior medium known to society. Third, we attend to the mythic jus-
tification through science fiction, a strategy that goads society to a notion of the future
created by the cinematic mode.
Medical justification
as
rhetorical
strategy
Bionic contacts are predicted to be a significant medical advance and the discourse that
hosts this message is bold. Two hundred and sixteen of the texts from the corpus fore-
ground this justification, 52 of which appeared within the 14 days following Google’s
release of the glucose monitoring patent. Those 52 proclaim an advance in the manage-
ment of the debilitating disease of diabetes. Relevant to our study is how this news is
packaged in mainstream, popular, daily articles, and circulated in an annunciatory fash-
ion. On 17 January 2014, the New York Daily News began circulating its article ‘Google
making smart contact lens for diabetics’ opening with disclosure of the invention:
The Google lab known for working on unusual projects like self-driving cars is crafting a contact
lens that could help diabetics manage blood sugar levels.
‘We’re now testing a smart contact lens that’s built to measure glucose levels in tears,’ project
co-founders Brian Otis and Babak Parviz said Thursday in a blog post.
The lens works ‘using a tiny wireless chip and miniaturized glucose sensor that are embedded
between two layers of soft contact lens material,’ Otis and Parviz said. (New York Daily News, 2014)
Pedersen
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The article celebrates bionic contact lenses as ‘unusual’ and as futuristic as ‘self-driving
cars’, but it uses simplified statements of fact to describe the invention, for example, ‘a
smart contact lens that’s built to measure glucose levels in tears’. Furthermore, it also
bears witness to innovation by including no less than three close-up photographs of pro-
totypes held by human fingers. Even though it is usually the role of the ‘linguistic mes-
sage’ or written text to counter what Barthes calls ‘the terror of uncertain signs’ (1977:
274), in this case, these photographs serve that purpose. The portrait of a seemingly
simple contact lens corrals a future that seems infinite. Further, the article contextualizes
this innovation through a prominent moral stance; it will ease the lives of ‘diabetics’ and
afford human agency over the disease in practical terms.
More so, the identity of the human diabetic is implied through the medical rationale.
When spoken of as an assistive technology, the bionic contact lens is not about enhancing
or furthering human abilities, but rather helping those who are considered at a disadvan-
tage. Health, in this case, is not about what is next or new or unknown, but what is nor-
mal, accepted, expected in a fully functioning human. Finally, because glucose monitoring
contact lenses are proffered as a legitimate goal, the New York Daily News as well as the
public who circulate the news, are framed as saviours – We are all helping diabetics live
normal lives.
Read alternatively (a path that we take to forge our argument), glucose monitoring also
serves as an alibi for a broader vision of the innovation. We do not argue that the New
York Daily News or any other authority deliberately uses glucose monitoring as a cloak to
promote the ideological claim for transhuman enhancement. Nor do we deny the valuable
contribution the advance will make to the lives of diabetics and the medical fields that
produce it. Rather, we assert that the motivated theme of glucose monitoring operates
across the corpus as an overt, rational and obvious reason to accept the bionic contact
lenses. In this regard, it functions as myth and the discourse that instantiates this argument
seems untouchable. Consequently, the health discourse simultaneously facili- tates public
adoption of the idea across the board, and obscures questions regarding mainstream (non-
medical) justifications for adoption. From here, this article assembles and seeks to
disclose the transhumanist subtext in the secondary discourse that addresses the general
public.
Remediation
as
rhetorical
strategy
On 15 April 2014, Wired Magazine, UK (wired.co.uk,) posted an article announcing
Google’s most recent patent application for a bionic contact lens with a tiny micro cam-
era embedded into the fabric of the lens (Solon, 2014). After the simple, straightforward
headline, ‘Google embeds camera in smart contact lens’, the first paragraphs follow:
Earlier this year, Wired.co.uk wrote about Google’s invention of a smart contact lens that could
monitor glucose levels through tear fluid. Now, the tech giant has invented another pair of lenses
with an in-built camera.
The lenses were developed in the Google X lab and were featured in a patent filing dating from
2012, which was recently published by the US Patent and Trademark Office. The patent filing
features a contact lens that includes an embedded circuit, camera and sensor. The control circuit
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could be linked wirelessly or via a wire to the camera and sensor. The sensor could be a light
sensor, pressure sensor, temperature sensor or electrical field sensor, which may allow for people
to gain a ‘sixth sense’ of sorts.
Solon catalogues the mechanical features of the device, providing a tangible and recog-
nizable record of what constitutes this invention instigated by a patent application. In
order to shift into what this means to the user, to society, to technological progress, the
author invokes familiar technologies (e.g. camera, light sensors) to describe the contact
lenses. However, the article segues subtly into a transhuman purpose for them, an allur-
ing ‘sixth sense’ or augmented vision in the future. Many of the writers describing the
merits of bionic contact lenses refer to previous, more familiar media and then make a
leap to fantastical future goals. Drawing on Marshall McLuhan’s (1964) claim that ‘the
‘content’ of any medium is always another medium’, Bolter and Grusin (1999) define
remediation as the processes through which this transference, one medium refashioning
an older one, occurs. News outlets order technocultural progress along remediative tra-
jectories to make it easier to consume novel news. It serves as another means to accom-
modate science and make it palatable.
Likewise, the concept of Google Glass is remediated to ease the assimilation of the
idea:
While the project might seem a bit ‘out there’, the technology isn’t all that far off – smart contact
lenses with displays have already been tested in labs, although they’ve been a little clunky up
until now. One of the key benefits of having a camera embedded in a contact lens rather than
attached to the side of the head like Google Glass is that the camera frame would follow a
person’s precise gaze without obstructing their view (by being placed along the edge of the lens,
away from the pupil). (Solon, 2014)
Mention of Google Glass provides remediative grounds to promote the idea.
Acknowledging the futuristic nature of the bionic contact lens, Solon quickly assures the
reader that while this technology may seem ‘a bit ‘out there’’, it is not out of reach – the
technology exists, has been tested, and, ‘up until now’, was only in need of some minor
adjustments.
The justification for the camera in the bionic contact lens appropriates other reme-
diative language, namely, the drive for immediacy. For Bolter and Grusin, one of the
goals for new media is to create an ‘interfaceless’ interface, where ‘the user [moves]
through the space interacting with the objects “naturally”, as she does in the physical
world’ (1999: 23). In this sense, they state, ‘a transparent interface would be one that
erases itself, so that the user is no longer aware of confronting a medium, but instead
stands in an immediate relationship with the contents of that medium’ (1999: 23–4). In
the Wired UK article, the paragraph shifts from describing the mechanical, technical
aspects of the device to the impact it will have on our day-to-day mediated experiences
with the world. Not only is it understood as being ‘less clunky’, the camera lens is
described as being able to see what the viewer sees, while the device itself goes unno-
ticed, placed just ‘out of sight’ of the viewer’s line of vision. Wired UK celebrates the
lens in terms of its ability to bring us closer to the experience of recording our vision
without the mediating experience of the camera, where the viewer literally ‘sees
Pedersen
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11
through the medium’. Bringing us closer to the natural experience of sight, recording as
seamlessly as one would when scanning a room with one’s very own eyes, bionic contact
lenses seem tantalizingly naturalized. The reticent justification always sits below the
surface as an assumption, that this kind of augmentation is a desired value, and one that
does not need discussion or attention.
At other points, Solon makes more direct statements: ‘There may also be the option of
go-go gadget eyes that have a zoom capability’. Here, the transhuman potential of the
technology is taken one step further. Moving beyond seamless photography and bionic
eyesight, the contact lens is now framed as having the potential to extend our vision
instead of just duplicating it. In this sense, the zoom capability of the camera becomes the
zoom capability of our eyesight. The distinction between the two is lost.
What is missing is any discussion of why we need or want such a camera at all. We
celebrate the technology purely for its similarity to another popularized device (e.g.
Google Glass) that has entered our everyday toolbox of communication. By invoking a
logic of transparent immediacy, any critical discussion of the medium itself is lost. What
does it mean, for instance, to be able to take pictures with our eyes? How will this be
useful to us? What will we be taking pictures of? How will this ability impact our relation
to ourselves, to others, and to the world around us? This is not just about a smoother,
sleeker, sexier way of doing something we are already familiar with, but it indicates all
that we ‘see’ in our field of vision. The logic of transparent immediacy invokes
Barthesian-style myth; by ‘seeing through’ the medium, the contact lens can only be
culturally signified in terms of its remediated content. In this sense, the device, as a cul-
tural object, remains impenetrable to social critique.
Superheroism
as
rhetorical
strategy
By calling the invention ‘bionic’, a common term in a transhumanist lexicon, writers
index both a discourse of health and a discourse of science fiction. The word bionic
means to enhance biological capability with electronic or electromechanical devices.
Many of the articles in the corpus rely on brief references to superhero characters or
fantastical imagery relating to bionic sight. Steve Austin (The Six Million Dollar Man,
1974–8), Geordi La Forge (Star Trek: The Next Generation, 1987–94) and Terminator
(The Terminator, 1984) are invoked throughout the corpus, helping to instantiate the
globalized political economy of technofantasies that augmented vision inspires in popu-
lar culture. Early in the initial stage of data collection, we identified a 2009 article penned
by the inventor himself, Babak Parviz, which uses the Terminator character to make
bionic contact lenses seem exotic, futuristic and transhuman.
Often, however, references are cursory and meant to set the popular science tone, but
they contribute to the rhetorical work of normalizing the invention. In an April 2014
article, Parade Magazine, for example, opens with ‘It sounds like something out of Star
Trek, but contact lenses with built-in cameras could become a reality’ (Lowe, 2014). The
writer’s vagueness over the actual usage of the contact lenses (‘could become a reality’)
and the vague but exciting pointer to Star Trek, operate mythically to accommodate the
idea. Fiction and reality mingle without the writer making direct claims about the inven-
tion. In closing, the article uses the health justification adeptly: ‘While the contact lens
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Studies
project began with a primarily medical purpose, the announced addition of tiny cameras
could transform the lenses into a sophisticated wearable computing device’. Lingering
behind are allusions to a sci-fi world, with the bionic contact lenses made ‘sophisticated’
and legitimate, and no discussion of how a consumer application for the embedded cam-
era might actually be used.
Eyes hold a certain cachet in western cultural lore. Inventions celebrated to enhance
the hands or handiwork, for example, remain mundane while inventions made to enhance
the eyes are often rhetorically framed as ethereal or transhuman, that is, improving the
essentialized concept of the human condition. However, a cultural fasci- nation with eyes
predates the comic book era. Odin, ruler of Asgard, and considered king of the gods in
the pantheon of Norse mythology, is famous for many acts, but one speaks to both his
vulnerability and his power. He places his own eye in the well of Mimir as a sacrifice in
return for supernatural vision and the ability to be all knowing (Lindow, 2002: 301). In
ancient Greek stories, another character, Tiresias pays for his wrongdoing with blindness
but is often rewarded with foresight or clairvoyance. This kind of cultural reverence (for
both eyes and their correlation to knowledge) becomes naturalized in current discourses.
On 17 April 2014, Adriana Lee posted ‘Google eyes a creepier glass – a camera-
bearing contact lens’ on the popular ReadWrite blog. Into the article, Lee begins to ques-
tion the social function of the invention:
In the past, variations on eye control typically depended on hi-definition cameras pointed at the
user. But this approach takes the opposite tack, by building the sensors and cameras into the
lenses themselves.
This could allow for an unprecedented level of accuracy. If it works well, and if it ties in with
existing and emerging technologies, then it could genuinely change quite a few games – fields
from medical to law enforcement and military. The stakes could be high for individuals as well.
The first adopters would probably be tech enthusiasts pining for cutting-edge human-to-
computer gesture control – or harboring deep-seated Six Million Dollar Man bionic-eye
fantasies. But think of what it could do for people suffering with limited mobility or sight
impairments. (Lee, 2014)
Lee uses a glamorous reference to a transhuman pop hero; ‘first adopters’ would be ‘har-
boring deep-seated Six Million Dollar Man bionic-eye fantasies’. ‘Steve Austin’ of The
Six Million Dollar Man franchise popularized the term ‘bionic’ in the 1970s with the
film, television, literary and comic book character. Austin’s bionic eye featured such
enhancements as a camera eye, zoom lens, night vision, heat detector and, in print comic
variations, a laser beam. Austin is also appealing because he is a handsome mortal as
well as a transhuman superhero, a man similar to Tony Stark of the Iron Man franchise,
who is made super through technological embellishment.
The article also makes critical comments on the goals for the invention for society:
A primary issue with this appliance, however, could have to do with those miniature camera
components. This is, after all, a world in which Google Glass wearers get targeted for attacks.
Pedersen
and
Ellison
13
And the system, as proposed, would be capable of facial recognition. If people are uncomfortable
with face-worn cameras pointing at them, how will they feel if teensy, undetectable cameras
show up in contact lenses? (Lee, 2014)
Lee deals with fear over facial recognition software, and those who might be ‘uncomfort-
able with face-worn cameras pointing at them’. The passage posits the privacy argument
that appears over and over in any discussion of camera-based technologies. However, fear
is framed in abstract terms with no direct consequence established. It is simply a fear that
privacy might be lost, but the loss is rarely characterized, categorized or directly
discussed.
Barthes uses the term ‘inoculation’ to frame how myth functions to deceive:
The inoculation … consists in admitting the accidental evil of a class-bound institution the better
to conceal its principal evil. One immunizes the contents of the collective imagination by means
of a small inoculation of acknowledged evil; one thus protects it against the risk of a generalized
subversion. (1984 [1957]: 150)
By acknowledging the issue of privacy (will other people fear having their photos taken
involuntarily?), the passage also evades a graver issue. Bionic contact lenses are rarely
questioned on the basis of the identity of the person who will wear them, a self who is a
material, biological, social, mediated and, at times, a solitary being with a consciousness
that cannot be shared. How will notions such as memory, creativity or nostalgia evolve?
Will the private information of the wearer herself be tracked or even sold? In the corpus
we analysed, most texts follow the same trend, to question the issues of society at large,
without attention to the persona at the centre of it all, the wearer. It inoculates against
weightier questions which might undermine the belief that the technological discourse is
inherently benign. It is not a red herring, maliciously misleading our attention, it simply
obscures the most glaring issues with bionic contacts that sit ensconced in silence.
Transhumanist rhetoric pacifies the ‘collective imagination’ characterized by its dedica-
tion to the technocapital ideal, and moves towards a perfectionist inclination with tech-
nology as the saviour. The hierarchical principles so key to a transhumanist ideology
override, obscure and distort the greater and more subversive questions concerning the
actual wearer.
Conclusion
We have argued that transhumanist rhetoric circulates with complexity across main-
stream discourses, which host various forms of demotic participation, rampant spectator-
ship, and alternative consumption. The medical justification for bionic contact lenses,
glucose monitoring and assisted vision, operates denotatively as a beacon that directs all
attention towards itself, deflecting critical attention away from the second discourse,
transhuman enhancement. The transhuman value becomes covert, impotent and assumed
as inevitable. Aspirations toward perfection drive and direct technological progress as a
naturalized value, pre-empting our ability to question how this medium of communica-
tion will alter identity, creativity, emotion and social life, in addition to political and civic
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Studies
participation. The medical justification misleads and deforms the potential for a critical
dialogue about a new medium of communication that could be significantly transforma-
tive. Social practices surrounding identity construction have evolved dramatically in this
device-driven era; as wearable platforms are designed, the time to interrogate the social
conditioning they potentially bring about is while the inventor discloses the technologi-
cal innovation. The bionic contact lens sits at this strategic moment of its emergence.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/
or publication of this article: We thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of
Canada (SSHRC) for supporting this research. This research was undertaken, in part, thanks to the
Canada Research Chairs program.
Notes
1. Google’s Glass is a computer device one wears like glasses. Glass is a wearable ‘head-mounted
display’, a category of computer hardware that places virtual information over the wearer’s eyes
and field of vision (Pedersen, 2013: 3–4). Glass was popularized extensively after 4 April 2012,
when it was announced as a prototype developed by Google X lab (Encheva and Pedersen 2014).
2. Kia Makarechi, pointing to assistive technology, reports that ‘the patent filing for that product
notes that the lenses could be used to alert blind wearers to approaching cars’. No description
of an application being developed for blind and low-visioned persons is announced, however,
only the possibility.
3. Google Inc. became part of the multinational conglomerate Alphabet Inc. in 2015.
4. The corpus is limited to international publications in English, including those published or circu-
lated in United Kingdom, Australia, North America, India, the Middle East, Europe, etc. Many of
the texts represent global online publications drawn from news agencies (e.g., CNN) that reach
broad international audiences, for example, PC Magazine, published by Ziff Davis on pcmag.com.
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Author
biographies
Isabel Pedersen, Canada Research Chair in Digital Life, Media and Culture, is an Associate
Professor at the Ontario Tech University. She is also an Associate of the Graduate Program in
Communication and Culture, Ryerson University and York University. She lives in Toronto and
concentrates on discourses of reality-shifting media.
Kirsten
Ellison
is a PhD candidate in Communication and Cultural Studies at the University of
Calgary. She is a Research Assistant and Graduate Associate at Trent University’s Centre for Aging
and Society and a Graduate Affiliate of Concordia University’s ACT Project. She is researching
anti-aging technology and the discursive construction of ageless futures.
