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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
With the advent of digital devices and software, self-tracking practices have gained new adherents and have spread into a wide array of social domains. The Quantified Self movement has emerged to promote 'self-knowledge through numbers'.
In this groundbreaking book Deborah Lupton critically analyses the social, cultural and political dimensions of contemporary self-tracking and identifies the concepts of selfhood and human embodiment and the value of the data that underpin them.
The book incorporates discussion of the consolations and frustrations of self-tracking, as well as about the proliferating ways in which people's personal data are now used beyond their private rationales. Lupton outlines how the information that is generated through self-tracking is taken up and repurposed for commercial, governmental, managerial and research purposes. In the relationship between personal data practices and big data politics, the implications of self-tracking are becoming ever more crucial.
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Seitenzahl: 307
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
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Table of Contents
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1: ‘Know Thyself’
The emergence of contemporary self-tracking
Contemporary self-tracking technologies
Research on self-tracking practices
2: ‘New Hybrid Beings’
Sociomaterial perspectives
Knowing capitalism and lively data
Practices of selfhood and neoliberal politics
Cultures of embodiment
Datafication
Dataveillance and privacy
3: ‘An Optimal Human Being’
The reflexive monitoring self
Representations of embodiment
The affective dimensions of self-tracking
Taking and losing control
Selfhood and surveillance
4: ‘You Are Your Data’
The meaning and value of personal digital data
Metricisation and the lure of numbers
Data spectacles: Materialisations of personal data
Artistic and design interventions
The importance of context
5: ‘Data's Capacity for Betrayal’
Exploited self-tracking
Pushed and imposed self-tracking
Personal data security and privacy
Communal self-tracking and taking control of personal data
Responses and resistances to dataveillance
Final Reflections
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Start Reading
CHAPTER 1
Index
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Copyright page
The right of Deborah Lupton to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2016 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
350 Main Street
Malden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978–1–5095–0059–8
ISBN-13: 978–1–5095–0060–4(pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lupton, Deborah.
Title: The quantified self / Deborah Lupton.
Description: Malden, MA : Polity, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015034998| ISBN 9781509500598 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 1509500596 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781509500604 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 150950060X (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Self-actualization (Psychology) | Reflection (Philosophy) | Digital media–Social aspects.
Classification: LCC BF637.S4 L85 2016 | DDC 158.1–dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015034998
Typeset in 10.5 on 12 pt Sabon
by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited
Printed and bound in the UK by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Dedication
For Gamini Colless, my favourite self-tracker
Acknowledgements
This book draws and expands on the material I have presented in several posts on my blog, ‘This Sociological Life’ (http://simplysociology.wordpress.com), as well as on four previously published academic articles:
Lupton, D. (2012) M-health and health promotion: The digital cyborg and surveillance society. Social Theory and Health, 10 (3): 229–44.
Lupton, D. (2013) Quantifying the body: Monitoring and measuring health in the age of mHealth technologies. Critical Public Health, 23 (4): 393–403.
Lupton, D. (2013) Understanding the human machine. IEEE Technology & Society Magazine, 32 (4): 25–30.
Lupton, D. (2014) Self-tracking cultures: Towards a sociology of personal informatics. In Proceedings of the Twenty-sixth Australian Computer–Human Interaction Conference on Designing Futures ‘The Future of Design’, 77–86. Sydney, Australia: ACM (Association for Computing Machinery).
I thank the two anonymous reviewers of the draft manuscript of this book for their helpful and constructive comments and suggestions.
Introduction
The concept of self-tracking using digital technologies has recently begun to emerge in discussions of the ways in which people can conduct their lives. Monitoring, measuring and recording elements of one's body and life as a form of self-improvement or self-reflection are practices that have been discussed since ancient times. The introduction of digital technologies that facilitate these practices has led to renewed interest in what self-tracking can offer and to an expansion of the domains and purposes to which these practices are applied.
This book is about contemporary self-tracking cultures, analysed from a critical sociological perspective. I use the term ‘cultures’ to encapsulate the view, adopted throughout the book, that the practices, meanings, discourses and technologies associated with self-tracking are inherently and inevitably the product of broader social, cultural and political processes. The book examines the influences, discourses, technologies, power relations and systems of thought that contribute to the phenomenon of self-tracking, the ways in which this phenomenon is spreading from the private realm into diverse social domains, and the implications of the self-tracking phenomenon for the politics of personal data, data practices and data materialisations.
Self-tracking practices are directed at regularly monitoring and recording, and often measuring, elements of an individual's behaviours or bodily functions. Some self-trackers simply collect information about themselves as a way of remembering and recording aspects of their lives, or to satisfy their curiosity about the patterns in their behaviours or body metrics that they may uncover. Others take an approach that is more specifically goal-oriented, seeking as they do to reflect on and make meaning out of the information they choose to collect and to discern patterns that will work to improve features such as their health, physical fitness, emotional wellbeing, social relationships or work productivity. Some self-trackers collect data on only one or two dimensions of their lives, and only for a short time. Others may do so for hundreds of phenomena and for long periods.
My interpretation of self-tracking in this book rests on the assumption that it involves practices in which people knowingly and purposively collect information about themselves, which they then review and consider applying to the conduct of their lives. Self-tracking differs, therefore, from covert surveillance or means of collecting information on people that result in data sets to which the subjects of monitoring do not have access. As I go on to demonstrate in later chapters, many forms of personal information are generated by people's routine engagements and transactions online or by their movements in spaces that are embedded with sensors or fitted with cameras that monitor them. Only a small proportion of this information is accessible to the subjects of this monitoring. Indeed in many cases people have no knowledge of what data are collected on them, where these data are stored and to what purposes they are used by other actors and agencies. These are examples not of self-tracking, but of tracking of the self by others.
Several terms in addition to self-tracking are used to describe the practices by which people may seek to monitor their everyday lives, bodies and behaviours; such terms are lifelogging, personal informatics, personal analytics and the quantified self. Lifelogging tends to be used to refer to the specific practice of using wearable computing devices such as cameras, sensors, and other computerised and automated ways of collecting personal information over a period of time. The practice is not necessarily about self-improvement but may also be undertaken as a form of computerised memory or as a kind of recording information about a person's life for future generations. Personal informatics and personal analytics are terms that are used most often in academic literature on human–computer interaction. The title of this book denotes ‘the ‘quantified self’ – a new term for describing self-monitoring practices that was invented in 2007 and has since gathered cultural resonance. While the quantified self overtly refers to using numbers as a means of monitoring and measuring elements of everyday life and embodiment, it can be interpreted more broadly as an ethos and apparatus of practices that has gathered momentum in this era of mobile and wearable digital devices and of increasingly sensor-saturated physical environments.
I first became interested in contemporary self-tracking cultures when I came across a reference to the Quantified Self movement in a news story a few years ago. I had a look at the Quantified Self website (Quantified Self, 2015c) and was fascinated to see the types of practices that ‘quantifying the self’ and attempting ‘self-knowledge through numbers’ (the site's motto) involved. As an academic in the fields of sociology and media and cultural studies who has written on a range of related topics (such as embodiment, selfhood, health and medicine, risk and digital cultures), I am interested in analysing self-tracking as a sociocultural phenomenon. My initial response to self-tracking was that it was an intriguing way of using forms of information to conduct practices of selfhood and embodiment. This, in itself, is an interesting topic to explore. However, over the period in which I have observed and sought to analyse self-tracking, it has become clear that the practice has expanded well beyond the domain of the individual, into a variety of social contexts and uses. In many cases self-tracking is a purely voluntary personal enterprise initiated by the person who is engaging in it. However, there are various ways in which self-tracking is being encouraged, or even enforced on people, predominantly so that the objectives of others are met; and such ways raise the question of exactly how voluntary self-tracking may be in these contexts. People are now frequently encouraged, ‘nudged’, obliged or coerced into monitoring aspects of their lives so as to produce personal data that can then also be used for the purposes of others.
The digitisation of self-tracking has been a major impetus in these changes. Writing down thoughts in diaries or journals and recording everyday habits or body measurements through the time-honoured technologies of pen and paper are avenues of self-monitoring that have long-established histories. They remain practices in which some self-trackers continue to engage. Since the advent of computing, however, self-tracking has been transformed into major interconnected practices that have significant social, cultural and political implications.
First, the technologies and practices of self-tracking have become progressively digitised and automated, facilitating the ever more detailed measurement and monitoring of the body and everyday life in real time. Accessing information generated through digital technologies and sharing it with others are greatly facilitated via the processes of searching, retrieval and tagging with the help of software. Second, these personal details are now typically transmitted to and stored on cloud computing databases. As a consequence, accessibility to these details is no longer limited to the self-trackers themselves, as was the case in the days of paper journals and records, but personal details are potentially available to other actors and agencies. These include the developers of the devices and software that self-trackers use; third parties that may purchase these data from such developers; data-mining companies and their clients; and government agencies. Cybercriminals or hackers may illegally access the data and steal them for profit or malicious purposes. This has major repercussions on the privacy and security of the details that self-trackers collect about their bodies and lives, which are often of a very sensitive and intimate nature. And, finally, this personal information has become endowed with significant commercial and managerial value, as part of the digital data knowledge economy.
I employ the concept of ‘lively data’ in this book and frequently return to this concept in my efforts to theorise self-tracking cultures. I first came across this description of digital data in an article by Mike Savage (2013) in which the author used the phrase ‘lively data’ to denote the constant generation of large masses of digital data as part of the digital data economy, and the implications of this practice for sociological research methods. Dave Beer's (2013) and Dave Beer and Roger Burrows' (2013) work on the circulations and politics of digital data has also contributed to my thinking about the vitality of these knowledge forms.
In my own work I have developed the notion of lively data still further, so as to denote the manifold ways in which personal digital data (whether deliberately generated for individuals' own purposes or collected by others about them) are vital. 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. Digital data generate new forms of knowledge and new insights into people's bodies and selves. They are also contributing to livelihoods by generating profit for those who use them commercially or by facilitating the management and governance of people and populations. Furthermore, as outlined by Beer and Burrows (2013), these data have a vitality of their own in the digital data economy by virtue of the fact that they circulate, enact new forms of knowledge and are purposed and repurposed in many different ways. In other words they have their own social lives, which are quite independent of the humans who originally generated them. Digital data about people's lives are also vital in their effects. As I explain in greater detail later in this book, they have begun to play a significant role in influencing people's behaviours, sense of self, social relationships and, increasingly, their life chances and opportunities. Digital data have implications for people's employment, research material and profit. All of these properties of digital data are important to consider in a sociological analysis of self-tracking.
From a sociological perspective, a number of interesting questions arise about the quest for monitoring and measuring elements of one's body, behaviour and habits. What are the tacit assumptions that underpin contemporary modes of self-tracking? Why are people attracted to self-tracking? How do they interpret and use the data they produce? How are concepts of the body, self, social relationships and social behaviours configured and negotiated via these data? How have the ethos and practices of self-tracking been appropriated by other actors and agencies? What implications are there for data politics, data practices and the digital data knowledge economy? What are the power relations and power inequalities inherent in self-tracking cultures?
The book discusses all of these issues. In making my arguments I draw on material from a range of sources such as app and software descriptions and product reviews, news reports, white papers, social media and blog discussions – in addition to the existing literature on self-tracking published by researchers in the social sciences and human–computer interaction studies. To keep up to date with discussions on self-tracking, I used tools such as Twitter hashtags (#quantifiedself, #lifelogging and #selftracking), the Quantified Self website and various other websites devoted to self-tracking for regularly checking the content that people posted. A weekly update of articles and blog posts about self-tracking, collated by the Quantified Self website organisers, has been an invaluable resource. I searched for the work of artists and designers who are engaging in self-tracking practices (I viewed some exhibitions in person); and I checked for news reports on self-tracking by searching the web and by using the news database Factiva.
In Chapter 1, after a discussion of the early lifeloggers and experimental attempts to use wearable computing devices for self-tracking, I provide an overview of the varieties of self-tracking devices, apps and other software that are currently available. The chapter ends with a review of market research and academic studies that have sought to identify what types of people engage in self-tracking and how and why they do so. Chapter 2 reviews ways of analysing self-tracking rationales and practices from various sociocultural theoretical perspectives. These approaches offer opportunities to delve below the surface meanings and rationales of self-tracking cultures and to illuminate how these cultures operate and what the wider implications of their practices are. The discussion begins by outlining the value of sociomaterial perspectives and continues with more specific reviews of knowing capitalism and lively data, practices of selfhood and neoliberal politics, the cultural dimensions of embodiment, datafication, dataveillance and privacy.
The following three chapters then go on to build on these two initial overview chapters by concentrating closely on elements of self-tracking cultures. Chapter 3 focuses on portrayals and representations of the body and the self in self-tracking cultures, incorporating analysis of the reflexive monitoring self, affective dimensions of self-tracking, concepts of embodiment and control, and selfhood and surveillance. In Chapter 4 I move on to analysing the ways in which data are discussed and conceptualised as part of self-tracking. I examine the meaning and value of personal digital data; metricisation and the lure of numbers; materialisations of the data; artistic and design responses; and qualified selves and the importance of context. In the final substantive chapter, Chapter 5, I address the important issue of data politics. The chapter outlines in detail the ways in which the personal information generated through self-tracking is used by second and third parties. The discussion covers the modes of exploited, pushed, imposed and communal self-tracking, personal data security and privacy, and strategies of resistance to dataveillance. In the brief ‘Final Reflections’ chapter that concludes the book, I summarise its major themes and make some suggestions concerning the ways in which self-tracking cultures and practices, as well as academic research on these phenomena, might further develop.
1‘Know Thyself’Self-Tracking Technologies and Practices
The tracking and analysis of aspects of one's self and one's body are not new practices. People have been recording their habits and health-related metrics for millennia, as part of attempts at self-reflection and self-improvement. 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. In this chapter I discuss contemporary self-tracking practices and technologies, from the days of early lifelogging techniques and wearable computing devices with which people experimented in the 1990s to the vast array of technologies that are available today. This is followed by a review of existing empirical research, which has focused on those who take up self-tracking and their experiences.
The emergence of contemporary self-tracking
As I noted in the Introduction, various terms have been used over the years to describe self-tracking practices: lifelogging, personal informatics, personal analytics and the quantified self. Lifelogging is the most established term. The practice of lifelogging, under this name, emerged in the early days of personal computing, as computing engineers in research labs were experimenting with techniques and technologies (Sellen and Whittaker, 2010). Gordon Bell, an American computer scientist at Microsoft Research, is well known for his long-term lifelogging project. Bell took inspiration from an idea expounded by the American presidential science advisor, Vannevar Bush, who wrote an essay published in 1945 in which he asserted his belief that humans' ability to remember could be enhanced by technology. In this essay Bush introduced his idea of the Memex, a mechanised device in which people could store all their documents, records, books, letters and memos, as well as newspapers and an encyclopaedia. He suggested that people could also wear small cameras on their forehands to capture details of their daily lives and add them to the Memex archive (MyLifeBits, 2015; Thompson, 2006). Beginning in 1998, Gordon Bell attempted to record as many aspects of his life as possible using digital technologies, including all his correspondence and documents (scanning paper documents as well as storing emails and so on), books he had read, photos, home movies and videos, computer files, mementos, meetings, conversations and phone calls. Bell started wearing a camera in 2000 and an early health-tracking armband, BodyMedia, in 2002. He instigated the MyLifeBits project for Microsoft, expanding on this endeavour (MyLifeBits, 2015).
The developers of wearable computing devices were also among the earliest to experiment with monitoring aspects of their lives through these technologies. The first international symposium on wearable computers was held in 1997 and included papers that focused mainly on the uses of such devices (for example head-mounted devices and clothing embedded with sensors) for performing work-related tasks (IEEE, 1997). The symposium also discussed using wearable technologies for the performing arts, identifying emotions in the wearer, assisting people with disabilities, and telemedicine.
The Canadian computing engineer Steve Mann, a contributor to this first symposium, was one of the most prominent advocates of and experimenters with wearable computers in those early days. Mann began experimenting with using wearable computers in the 1970s. By the early 1980s he was using these devices, which to contemporary eyes appear very chunky and clunky, for recording personal information about his daily activities. Mann founded the MIT Wearable Computing Project at the MIT Media Lab in 1992. From 1993 on he wore a webcam and recorded and broadcast details of his everyday life in a continuous live feed, as part of his Wearable Wireless Webcam project. By 1998 Mann had reduced the size of his wearable recording device considerably and was wearing a pendant containing a camera as part of his attempts to create what he called a ‘lifeglog’ (a shortened version of the term ‘cyborglog’ or computerised automated lifelog) (Mann, 1997, 2013).
Artists and designers have experimented with lifelogging and wearable technologies for several decades. In 1974 Andy Warhol began a ‘time capsule’ project that continued until his death in 1987. It involved placing items that crossed his desk into cardboard boxes: books, catalogues, letters, photographs, newspapers and magazines, invitations and so on. By the time he died, he had accumulated over six hundred filled boxes, the contents of which have become archived and preserved at the Andy Warhol Museum (Allen, 2008). On Kawara, a Japanese conceptual artist who lived most of his adult life in the United States, spent decades noting down details of the people he met each day, the places he visited and the books he read. He developed a massive archive of these details that he enshrined in bound volumes. During an 11-year period, Kawara sent a postcard each day to friends and colleagues, recording the time he had awoken that morning and his geographical location. Each day for almost half a century – from 1966 to 2013 – Kawara also produced a ‘date painting’ recording each day's date; the ‘date painting’ was often accompanied by a storage box that usually contained a cutting from a newspaper published on that date. Another conceptual artist, the Italian Alberto Frigo, has embarked on a long-term lifelogging project that began when he was 24 and has spanned more than a decade thus far (Frigo, 2015). He plans to continue until 2040, when he turns 60: hence the title of his project, ‘2004–2040’. The project involves photographing every object that his right hand uses, as a way of monitoring his everyday activities. Frigo has also begun recording many other aspects of his life: details of his dreams, the songs he listens to, the external surroundings in which he moves each day, people he meets, new ideas, cloud shapes and the daily weather.
Developments in small-scale computerised technologies in the 1990s inspired many designers to experiment with wearable fashion and other objects that could be worn on the body, such as jewellery. Several of these designs involved methods of tracking and displaying elements of the wearers' bodies. An area of human–computing research also developed in this era, called ‘affective computing’ or ‘affective wearables’, which concentrated on working on wearables that were embedded with sensors designed to read users' emotional states and communicate them to others (Picard, 2000). The design arms of companies such as the electronics company Philips developed such prototypes. In 2008, for instance, Philips released a prototype called Fractals, digital jewellery or scarf arrangements that were designed to be a hybrid between clothing and jewellery. These objects sensed bodily changes of the wearer as well as the proximity of others' bodies, using LED (light-emitting diode) configurations to display the data that they gathered (Ryan, 2014).
Perhaps the most public face of self-tracking these days is the Quantified Self website. The term ‘quantified self’ was invented in 2007 by two Wired magazine editors, Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly. They went on to establish meeting groups for interested people and then set up the official website (see Quantified Self, 2015c) and its associated Quantified Self Labs – a collaboration of users and toolmakers who are interested in working together to share technical expertise and experiences of self-tracking. The Quantified Self website provides discussion forums, supports regional meetings of members and two annual international conferences (QS Global in California and QS Europe in Amsterdam), and publishes a blog in which various aspects of self-tracking are explained and the strategies and findings of members about their own self-tracking efforts are publicised. An academic research institute, named the Quantified Self Institute, has also been established in the Netherlands by the Hanze University of Applied Science in collaboration with the Quantified Self Labs. According to the Quantified Self website, as of July 2015 there were 207 quantified self ‘meetup’ groups in 37 countries around the world, with a total of over 52,000 members (Quantified self meetup groups, 2015). Many of these groups hold regular meetings involving ‘show-and-tell’ discussions of how members have been engaging in self-tracking activities. Most of the groups are in the United States, but there are also many in Europe, ten in Asia and two in Australia.
As a journalist specialising in digital technologies and as co-founder of the Quantified Self movement, Gary Wolf has played a major role in announcing the quantified-self ethos and outlining its development. He wrote an initial article seeking to explain the concept of the quantified self for Wired. It was entitled ‘Know thyself: Tracking every facet of life, from sleep to mood to pain, 24/7/365’ (Wolf, 2009). Wolf's first paragraph described some of the numbers he has collected on his own life. These included the time he rose from bed each morning, how often he woke during the night, his heart rate, blood pressure, the time he spent exercising in the past 24 hours, his caffeine and alcohol consumption and his narcissism score. He went on to claim that ‘[n]umbers are making their way into the smallest crevices of our lives’ due to the digital devices that can now collect detailed, continuous data on everyday practices, social interactions and bodily functions (ibid.).
Later in this article Wolf described the genesis of the Quantified Self movement. He recounted how, two years earlier, he and Kelly had begun to notice that many acquaintances of theirs were gathering quantitative data about themselves: ‘A new culture of personal data was taking shape. The immediate cause of this trend was obvious: New tools had made self-tracking easier’ (ibid.). Wolf wrote that he and Kelly then decided to establish a website bearing the title ‘Quantified Self’, a term that they had come up with to describe this phenomenon of detailed digitised self-tracking. Wolf went on to give a TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) talk about the quantified self in 2010 and wrote an article on the topic for The New York Times that same year (Wolf, 2010).
Since the initial Wired article penned by Wolf, the Quantified Self as a subculture has exerted increasing influence over the definition and practices of self-tracking. The term ‘quantified self’ has now entered the cultural lexicon. My research suggests that its frequency of use has been increasing and gathering momentum annually. In July 2015 I made a Google Trends graph comparing the terms ‘self-tracking’, ‘lifelogging’, and ‘quantified self’ to see relatively how often each has been used in Google searches: this was an indicator (if only a crude one) of online searchers' interest in each term. (Google Trends is an open tool that shows how often a particular search term has been entered into Google Search by comparison to other searches globally.) The graph showed that it was not until late 2007 that ‘self-tracking’ and ‘lifelogging’ began to be recognised. The term ‘quantified self’ only began to appear in the graph in May 2010 (not surprisingly, given that it was first coined in 2007) but rose quickly in popularity, beginning to overtake ‘self-tracking’ by January 2012. The volume of searches for ‘self-tracking’ and ‘quantified self’ began to converge in mid-2014, although results for ‘quantified self’ have remained higher for most months. ‘Lifelogging’ began to lose currency by early 2010 and has remained steady, but much lower in relative volume than the other terms ever since.
Interest in the quantified self among Google searchers was no doubt encouraged by news media interest, which has also grown steadily since 2009. The term has spread from being a proper noun that referred specifically to the official Quantified Self website and community to being now used as a common noun – a general term for self-tracking practices. Descriptions such as ‘the quantified organisation’, ‘the quantified patient’, ‘the quantified doctor’, ‘the quantified body’, ‘quantified sex’, ‘the quantified home’, ‘the quantified mind’, ‘the quantified baby’, and even ‘the quantified pet’ have appeared in popular cultural artefacts such as blog posts and news items, demonstrating the taking up of the term ‘quantified self’ and its application to more specific topics.
A study of reporting of the quantified self that I conducted using the Factiva global newspaper database to search for English-language articles that mentioned this term in the six years period between January 2009 and July 2015 found that it was increasingly prevalent in news articles over this period. In 2009 only two news articles appeared mentioning the quantified self: one, in the American Life Science Weekly, reported a study on the relevance of self-tracking to healthcare; and the other, in the Canadian Globe and Mail, discussed the Quantified Self movement and the people involved in it. However, the number of articles rose to 21 in 2010 and 33 in 2011, and by 2012 148 articles had been published that used the term. The year 2013 witnessed greater interest: by the end of that year 466 news articles discussing the quantified self had been published. This figure rose even higher in 2014, when 564 articles appeared.
My review of the news media coverage of the quantified self found that the tenor and scope of reporting the phenomenon have also changed since the initial publication of news stories. Early news reports focused on the innovative aspects of quantifying the self and debated whether such close attention to the details of a person's life and bodily functions would extend beyond ‘uber geeks’ – those ‘weirdly narcissistic’ few who are interested in ‘extreme naval gazing’ to the general population, as Forbes magazine put it (25 April 2011). By 2012 news articles represented quantified-self practices as growing in popularity and becoming not only an important feature of health promotion but a part of everyday life, as a way of maximising productivity and happiness as well as health. As the British Sunday Telegraph Magazine (2 December 2012) contended: ‘It began with a small group of digital obsessives recording their every heartbeat. Today the “quantified self” movement is a gadget-filled fitness craze.’ By June 2013, The Guardian (UK) was asserting that ‘the “Quantified Self” movement [is] all the rage for people tracking their physical activity, food intake, vital signs and even their personal genome through digital services'.
Data privacy and security issues concerning the personal information that is generated by self-tracking devices began to receive attention in the later years of reporting. A Forbes magazine report (31 July 2014), for example, referred to a new market research report that found that there were numerous data security risks associated with a large number of self-tracking apps and devices that were examined. This meant that the personal data uploaded to these technologies could easily be accessed by others and on-sold to third parties for commercial gain. Several articles raised the question of whether people were becoming too obsessed with digital self-tracking and focusing on their numbers to the exclusion of other aspects of their lives. The Guardian (7 March 2015) published an account by a woman who believed that she had fallen into this trap to the point where she had asked herself: ‘Do I even exist without my Fitbit? Without data, am I dead?’ Reference was made, in a Toronto Star news story of 19 January 2015, to the ‘big data junkies’ who ‘self-hack’ incessantly. Despite these concerns, news articles have continued to report on the apparent popularity of wearable devices for self-tracking and on the opportunities for developers to profit from them. An Australian Business Insider report, for example, claimed that, ‘[in] just a few years, there could be more people using wearable tech devices than there are in the US and Canada’ (15 July 2015).
Contemporary self-tracking technologies
Digitised self-tracking has attracted a high level of attention from developers and entrepreneurs seeking to capitalise on the practice. They are taking a keen interest in how best to produce technologies to market to self-trackers, and often attend quantified-self meetups and conferences (Boesel, 2013; Nafus and Sherman, 2014). The range and variety of self-tracking technologies that are now available, particularly new digital devices and software, are vast. The Quantified Self website lists over 500 self-tracking tools; in addition to geolocation, these include health-, fitness-, weight-, sleep-, diet- and mood- or emotion-tracking apps, services and devices that are able to record social interactions, emails, networks and social media status updates and comments (Quantified Self, 2015b). Other tools noted there allow users to track their meditation practices, television watching, computer use and driving habits, financial expenses, time use, beneficial habits and work productivity, and to monitor local environmental conditions, progress towards learning or the achievement of personal goals (see also the Personal Informatics website for another long list of tools: Personal Informatics, 2015).
The use of sensors is a pivotal feature of contemporary self-tracking technologies. Many different types of digital sensors are now used to monitor a diverse array of aspects of human and nonhuman activity. Biosensor devices collect data from living organisms or systems. They contribute to self-tracking efforts to monitor bodily phenomena or elements of the physical environment. Biosensors include reactive agents that can respond to changes in bodily functions and indicators – such as blood glucose, hormone, enzyme or oxygen levels. Once used only by healthcare workers, environmental scientists or people with chronic illnesses who engage in self-management of their condition, biosensors are now available far more widely to the general public. Indeed smartphones now routinely include sensors such as global positioning systems (GPS), digital compasses, gyroscopes and accelerometers that can be employed for monitoring people's movements and geolocation. Some smartphones incorporate heart rate, body temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure and air temperature sensors.
