Conference paper presented as part of the two-day symposium "Tap, swipe, scan, submit! Interrogating Media Devices", 7-8 July 2016, School of Communication and Arts, University of Queensland.

Title: Reconstructing the ‘story of you’: listening and personal biometrics

Abstract: In recent years, listening has undergone a dramatic transformation. In this presentation I consider two emerging modes of listening – biometric and algorithmic listening – that epitomise how listening works in our post-convergent, post-Snowden, post-privacy moment. Increasingly deployed through highly technical and often obscure systems of regulation and control, these modes of listening are used to reconstruct the very stories and narrative accounts of ordinary citizens through the narrative order of their metadata. The ubiquity of personal digital devices like smartphones and wearable technologies extends these modes of listening into intimate realms. I consider how the rise and uptake of self-quantification and lifestyle monitoring devices expose users to biometric and algorithmic listening practices that mine and extract personal biometrics and aggregated metadata to reconstruct the ‘story of you’.