Key Takeaways
1. The Digital Transformation of Self-Tracking
What is indisputably new is the term ‘the quantified self’ and its associated movement, as well as the novel ways of self-tracking with the help of digital technologies that have developed in recent years.
Ancient practice, new tools. While self-monitoring for self-improvement has existed for millennia, digital technologies have profoundly reshaped its scope and impact. Early pioneers like Gordon Bell and Steve Mann experimented with "lifelogging" in the 1990s, using clunky wearable computers to capture daily life, laying the groundwork for today's pervasive digital self-tracking. The "Quantified Self" movement, coined in 2007 by Wired editors Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly, formalized this ethos, promoting "self-knowledge through numbers" and fostering a global community.
Pervasive digital tools. Today, the array of self-tracking technologies is vast, extending far beyond simple fitness bands. Sensors are pivotal, embedded in everything from smartphones and wearables (Fitbit, Apple Watch) to smart homes and cars, collecting data on:
- Bodily functions: heart rate, sleep, glucose, brain waves
- Behaviors: physical activity, diet, work productivity, driving habits
- Social interactions: emails, social media engagement, geolocation
- Environmental conditions: pollution, radiation, temperature
Beyond personal use. The digitization of self-tracking has moved it from a purely private endeavor into diverse social domains. Personal data, once confined to paper journals, is now transmitted to cloud databases, making it potentially accessible to developers, third-party buyers, data-mining companies, and government agencies. This shift endows personal data with significant commercial and managerial value, transforming self-tracking into a phenomenon with broad social, cultural, and political implications.
2. The Quest for Self-Optimization and Neoliberal Selfhood
Personally, like, my goal is to basically be – an optimal human being in every aspect of my life.
The optimal human. Self-tracking is deeply intertwined with contemporary ideals of selfhood, particularly the neoliberal emphasis on self-responsibility and continuous improvement. Individuals are encouraged to become "optimal human beings" by actively monitoring and managing aspects of their lives—health, productivity, emotional well-being—as an ethical project. This aligns with the "reflexive monitoring self" of late modernity, where individuals navigate uncertainties by seeking self-knowledge and making informed choices.
Self-help ethos. The self-help industry, with its psychological models and promises of personal growth, strongly influences self-tracking cultures. Digital tools are positioned as expert systems that provide detailed, objective data, enabling individuals to "work upon themselves" to achieve health, happiness, and success. This narrative often discounts broader social determinants, framing personal difficulties as failures of individual effort rather than systemic issues.
Productivity and performance. Self-tracking also feeds into the ideal of the productive, efficient citizen. Apps designed to track work habits, time use, and goal achievement reinforce the notion that the "best self" is one that maximizes output and minimizes wasted time. This blurs the lines between personal well-being and workplace demands, suggesting that a healthy, fit individual is inherently a more successful and valuable worker.
3. Embodiment Reimagined: The Body as a Data Machine
Your body isn't a temple, it's a data factory emitting digital exhaust.
The body as data. Self-tracking fundamentally reconfigures our understanding of the human body, often portraying it as a machine or a "data factory" that generates quantifiable information. This metaphor, evolving from industrial-era engines to computerized information systems, suggests that the body's complex workings can be understood and optimized through data analysis. Self-trackers are often described as "body hackers" or "bio hackers," treating their bodies as scientific experiments.
Prosthetics of selfhood. Digital self-tracking devices act as "prosthetics of selfhood," extending the body's capabilities and spatial dimensions. Wearables, smartphones, and sensor-embedded environments blur the boundaries between the body and technology, creating a "digitized assemblage" where the physical and digital are intensely integrated. This constant monitoring brings the body to the forefront of awareness, challenging notions of a non-reflexive or absent body.
Spectacular and knowable. These technologies produce a "spectacular body," where internal workings are displayed and made visible through data. Like medical imaging, self-tracking aims to penetrate the body's "dark interior," rendering it knowable and, by extension, manageable. This techno-utopian vision suggests that by augmenting our senses with "exosenses" and transforming bodily sensations into data, we can achieve unprecedented control and insights into our physical selves.
4. "Lively Data" Fuels the Digital Knowledge Economy
Not only are personal digital data continually generated, as Savage emphasises, but they are fundamentally about the lives of humans: about their bodily functions, behaviours, social relationships, moods and emotions.
Data's inherent vitality. The concept of "lively data" captures the dynamic, mutable, and impactful nature of personal digital information. Self-tracking data, whether deliberately generated or passively collected, is constantly produced, circulates across diverse sites, and is repurposed for various ends. This vitality extends beyond mere generation; these data are fundamentally about human lives and have the power to influence them, shaping behaviors, self-perception, and even life opportunities.
The new commodity. In the "knowing capitalism" era, digital data has become a highly valuable commodity. User interactions with online technologies—"prosumption"—simultaneously consume and create digital content, generating fine-grained details about habits and preferences. This explains why many digital services are "free"; the user is "the product," and their data is harvested, aggregated into "big data" sets, and sold to marketers, financial institutions, and other commercial entities.
Data assemblages. Self-tracking generates constantly shifting "personal data assemblages"—snapshots of the body and self configured by specific data points and rationales. These assemblages are never stable, open to reconfiguration and reinterpretation, and recursive, as user behavior changes in response to data outputs. The challenge for self-trackers, and the goal of movements like the Quantified Self, is to "get meaning out of their personal data" by engaging in sense-making around these vital, mutating forms.
5. The Power and Politics of Quantification
We tolerate the pathologies of quantification – a dry, abstract, mechanical type of knowledge – because the results are so powerful.
The lure of numbers. Quantification is central to self-tracking, driven by the belief that "unless something can be measured, it cannot be improved." Numbers are often presented as neutral, objective, and more reliable than subjective human perception, offering certainty in a world of vagaries. This "data-driven lifestyle" promises greater efficiency, productivity, and intellectual tractability, reducing emotional resonance while increasing intellectual control over complex problems.
Politics of measurement. Despite their perceived neutrality, numbers are deeply political and socially constructed. The process of "datafication"—rendering complex human experiences into digital data, often through "metricisation"—is a form of biopower. It allows for:
- Commensuration: Transforming diverse qualities into common metrics (e.g., NikeFuel points, Klout Score) for comparison and evaluation.
- Algorithmic authority: Algorithms, often "black-boxed," make social distinctions and judgments, shaping beliefs about what data is important and how it should be interpreted.
Algorithmic subjectivity. The algorithmic manipulation of bodily functions and behaviors into metrics and scores configures new types of knowledge about humans, leading to "algorithmic identities." These identities can have material effects, influencing access to information, services, and opportunities. The body/self, produced through self-tracking, becomes both subject and product of scientific measurement, with the "numbers" often taking precedence over embodied knowledge.
6. Data Spectacles: Materializing the Self Through Visualizations
When a specific part of the body is being closely monitored and its data are visualised and displayed to the owner, this bodily part may become invested with new significance.
Making data visible. A core aspect of self-tracking is the visualization and materialization of personal data, transforming abstract numbers into comprehensible forms. From standard graphs and charts to more creative "data spectacles," these representations aim to make patterns in one's life tangible and aesthetically pleasing. The Quantified Self movement, for instance, encourages members to share compelling visual demonstrations of their data, fostering a "sharing" mentality.
Emotional connections. Data visualizations can evoke powerful emotional responses, creating new "affective ties" between users and their personal data. Seeing one's heart rate graphed or steps counted can be motivating, pleasurable, and instill a sense of accomplishment. Activities like housework gain new value when they contribute positively to fitness data, and data can "prove" subjective impressions, engendering satisfaction and a sense of control.
Artistic and design interventions. Beyond conventional displays, artists and designers are exploring innovative ways to materialize personal data, challenging the notion of "truthful" data. Examples include:
- Data art: Laurie Frick's "Floating Data" using laser-cut aluminum panels for walking data.
- Data drawing: Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec's "Dear Data" project, hand-drawing weekly data on postcards.
- Critical making: Projects like "self-made human cheese" from skin microbiota or 3D-printed facial sculptures from DNA, provoking reflection on identity and surveillance.
- Sensory data: "TastyBeats" creating personalized drinks from heart-beat data, or "Edi-Pulse" transforming heart rate into 3D chocolate, aiming to reincorporate sensory knowledge into data practices.
These interventions highlight the complexities and emotional resonances of data, moving beyond sterile numbers to explore deeper insights into selves and bodies.
7. The Emotional Landscape of Self-Tracking
People may respond emotionally to the data that are generated about themselves through self-tracking technologies.
Beyond rationality. While self-tracking is often framed as a rational pursuit of self-knowledge, it is deeply imbued with emotional responses. The data generated can elicit a wide range of feelings, from pleasure and satisfaction when goals are met, to disappointment, frustration, or even anger when progress falters. Social media metrics, like "likes" or follower counts, can become powerful, albeit sometimes confrontational, indicators of personal worth or social standing.
Moral imperatives and self-punishment. Underlying self-tracking is often a moral discourse that champions self-improvement, implicitly judging those who don't engage or "fail." This can lead to feelings of guilt, self-recrimination, or even "addiction" to tracking, where individuals "beat themselves up" if data suggests laziness or lack of control. The constant feedback loop can transform self-monitoring into a form of self-punishment, eroding trust in one's own intuition.
Loss of control and context. Paradoxically, the pursuit of control through data can lead to a different kind of loss of control. Users may become obsessive, prioritizing data over physical sensations or real-world experiences, as seen in the example of choosing walking routes based on step counts rather than enjoyment. The "inadvertent algorithmic cruelty" of platforms like Facebook, which resurface painful memories, further highlights how data, devoid of human context, can inflict emotional distress and undermine well-being.
8. Dataveillance: When Self-Tracking Becomes External Control
The exploitation of people's personal information by second and third parties is a significant political issue, not simply because of the data privacy and security issues involved but also because of the ways in which people's personal information has become valuable for these parties.
Beyond self-monitoring. While self-tracking can be a voluntary act of self-surveillance, the data generated often extends beyond personal use, becoming subject to "dataveillance" by external actors. This blurs the lines between public and private, as intimate personal information is harvested, aggregated, and repurposed by commercial, managerial, and governmental agencies, often without the individual's explicit knowledge or consent.
Digital biocapital. Self-tracking data, particularly that related to bodily attributes and dispositions, generates "digital biocapital." This combines the value derived from biological entities with the commercial value of digital data, creating a new form of commodified human information. This "free digital labor" of prosumers benefits for-profit companies that sell detailed "profiles" to marketers, financial institutions, and employers, leading to potential exploitation.
Predictive harms and coercion. The advent of big data and predictive algorithms creates new possibilities for social and economic discrimination. "Predictive privacy harms" occur when individuals are adversely affected by assumptions made about them based on their data, impacting access to:
- Healthcare and insurance
- Credit and employment
- Social security and education
- Targeting by policing and security agencies
This can lead to "pushed" or "imposed" self-tracking, where individuals are subtly "nudged" or overtly coerced into sharing data, often under the guise of "wellness programs" or financial incentives, blurring the line between choice and obligation.
9. The Imperative of Context: Towards a "Qualified Self"
Where the quantified self gives us raw numbers, the qualified self completes our understanding of those numbers. The second half completes the first half.
Numbers are not enough. The limitations of raw, decontextualized data are increasingly recognized. While self-tracking provides numbers, these alone often fail to convey meaning or inspire effective action. A high heart rate, for example, could indicate stress or simply a recent sprint up the stairs. Without context, data can be misleading, obvious, or even detrimental to self-understanding.
The "qualified self." This concept emphasizes the need for reflection, interpretation, and contextualization of personal information, whether numerical or qualitative. It involves:
- Sense-making: Actively making connections between diverse data sets (e.g., diet, meditation, sleep, mood, location).
- Interrogation of validity: Questioning the quality and accuracy of data.
- Narrative construction: Using data to build "stories that they tell themselves about themselves," transforming raw facts into meaningful insights.
Beyond metrics. The "qualified self" moves beyond mere quantification to embrace the richness of human experience. It acknowledges that personal data, especially images or journal entries, can serve as powerful "aide-mémoires," evoking memories, emotions, and a deeper sense of connection to one's life and community. This approach challenges the solipsism of purely quantitative self-tracking, recognizing that self-knowledge is not just about numbers, but about understanding the intricate tapestry of one's life.
10. Resisting Data Exploitation and Reclaiming Agency
It is important, however, to emphasise that dataveillance (or any other mode of watching) is not an inevitable, fail-safe operation. It is always responded to with resistant strategies.
Challenging the status quo. While pervasive dataveillance seems inevitable, it is not an unchallengeable force. Individuals and organizations are developing strategies to resist the exploitation of personal data and reclaim agency. This includes advocating for "privacy by design" in digital technologies, promoting transparency in data collection and algorithmic interpretation, and empowering users with greater control over their information.
Strategies of resistance:
- Partial records: Deliberately creating incomplete or imperfect data records to "dupe the log" and evade "merciless memory."
- Ethics of forgetting: Designing systems that allow for the natural degradation or selective deletion of data, mirroring human memory.
- Obfuscation: Intentionally producing false, misleading, or ambiguous data (e.g., AdNauseam, TrackMeNot) to disrupt profiling.
- Counterveillance: Using tools like Eyebrowse to visualize how others are tracking one's activities, fostering awareness of dataveillance.
Self-tracking as a political act. The future of self-tracking lies not just in individual optimization, but in its potential as a strategic and political intervention. This could involve:
- Communal self-tracking: Sharing data for collective benefit, citizen science, or community development (e.g., Open Humans Network).
- Challenging norms: Using self-generated data to contest stereotypes, expose social inequalities, and advocate for social change.
- Cyborg politics: Embracing the complex human-technology intertwining to disrupt power structures and configure new, more inclusive norms of selfhood and embodiment.
These efforts aim to transform self-tracking from a tool of individualistic pursuit or external control into a means of collective empowerment and social justice.
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