The Politics and Possibilities of Self-Tracking Technology

Jethani, S

The Politics and Possibilities of Self-Tracking Technology

Jethani, S

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Publisher:: Emerald Publishing Limited
Publication Type:: Book
Citation:: 2021, pp. 1-212
Issue Date:: 2021-06-18

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Field	Value	Language
dc.contributor.author	Jethani, S https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2134-0904
dc.date.accessioned	2022-01-26T22:16:02Z
dc.date.available	2022-01-26T22:16:02Z
dc.date.issued	2021-06-18
dc.identifier.citation	2021, pp. 1-212
dc.identifier.isbn	1800433395
dc.identifier.isbn	9781800433397
dc.identifier.uri	http://hdl.handle.net/10453/153589
dc.description.abstract	Collecting data about our lives, our bodies and our behaviours has become a part of everyday practice that promises greater self-awareness, healthier living and increased productivity. This book focuses on the dialectical relationship between users and designers of self-tracking technology to examine how logics of datafication redefine the body. It explores what these emerging relations mean for imagining, designing and analysing sociotechnical systems that bring about self-tracking. Jethani provides a genealogy of self-tracking to situate the notions of quantified and quantifiable selves as problematic data regimes within contemporary digital culture. It charts the origins of self-tracking from within the blueprint of the "Californian Ideology" to a global social movement which now reaches beyond self-experimentation to encompass the wider trajectories of using wearable sensor technology in the neoliberal management of health, wellbeing and productivity. The book reframes and theorises the quantified self by re-examining and developing arguments of how bodies "disappear" (Jewson), are made "docile" (Foucault) and get caught up in "rhythms" (Lefebvre) by datafication. The concept of a "quantised" self is introduced as a means of reading into and exposing the inherent political interests being served when self-tracking technology is introduced into clinical, home and workplace settings. Drawing from case studies of self-tracking in practice, the final chapter sketches the outline of a mutual praxis of critique and design that allows us to reimagine the politics embedded in sociotechnical systems of self-tracking and to consider possibilities of intervention.
dc.language	en
dc.publisher	Emerald Publishing Limited
dc.rights	info:eu-repo/semantics/closedAccess
dc.title	The Politics and Possibilities of Self-Tracking Technology
dc.type	Book
pubs.organisational-group	/University of Technology Sydney
pubs.organisational-group	/University of Technology Sydney/Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
utslib.copyright.status	closed_access	*
pubs.consider-herdc	false
dc.date.updated	2022-01-26T22:16:01Z
pubs.place-of-publication	UK
pubs.publication-status	Published
dc.location	UK

Abstract:

Collecting data about our lives, our bodies and our behaviours has become a part of everyday practice that promises greater self-awareness, healthier living and increased productivity. This book focuses on the dialectical relationship between users and designers of self-tracking technology to examine how logics of datafication redefine the body. It explores what these emerging relations mean for imagining, designing and analysing sociotechnical systems that bring about self-tracking. Jethani provides a genealogy of self-tracking to situate the notions of quantified and quantifiable selves as problematic data regimes within contemporary digital culture. It charts the origins of self-tracking from within the blueprint of the "Californian Ideology" to a global social movement which now reaches beyond self-experimentation to encompass the wider trajectories of using wearable sensor technology in the neoliberal management of health, wellbeing and productivity. The book reframes and theorises the quantified self by re-examining and developing arguments of how bodies "disappear" (Jewson), are made "docile" (Foucault) and get caught up in "rhythms" (Lefebvre) by datafication. The concept of a "quantised" self is introduced as a means of reading into and exposing the inherent political interests being served when self-tracking technology is introduced into clinical, home and workplace settings. Drawing from case studies of self-tracking in practice, the final chapter sketches the outline of a mutual praxis of critique and design that allows us to reimagine the politics embedded in sociotechnical systems of self-tracking and to consider possibilities of intervention.

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http://hdl.handle.net/10453/153589