In a conference paper and my forthcoming book The Quantified Self: A Sociology of Self-Tracking Cultures, I identify five modes of self-tracking. What I call ‘private self-tracking’ is undertaken for voluntary and personal reasons that are self-initiated. ‘Pushed self-tracking’ involves encouragement for people to monitor themselves from other agencies, while the mode of ‘communal self-tracking’ relies on people sharing their personal information with others. ‘Imposed self-tracking’ involves moving from encouragement to requiring people to collect or engage with data about themselves, so that they may have little choice in doing so. The ‘exploited self-tracking’ mode represents the ways in which personal data may be used by other actors and agencies for their own purposes, either overtly or covertly.
Since writing the initial conference paper, developing these ideas in my book and also for a journal article based on the paper, I have added some thoughts about the possibilities for forms of self-tracking that go beyond these modes. As I argue, self-tracking conforms to a conservative political agenda that represents citizens as automated/autonomous subjects, ideally engaging in self-responsibilised practices of monitoring and life optimisation and emitting valuable ‘data exhausts’ for repurposing by other actors and agencies.
As yet, there has been little discussion of the ways in which self-tracking may be used for resistant or strategic political interventions – as means to challenge accepted norms and assumptions about selves and bodies rather than conforming to these norms and assumptions. Few commentators have drawn attention to how self-tracking highlights certain forms of information about specific kinds of individuals or social groups while it neglects or ignores others, and how idealised citizen subjects are configured via dominant self-tracking cultures while those who fail to meet these ideals are stigmatised or disciplined.
Nascent moves towards a more political use of self-tracking are evident in some citizen sensing initiatives, when they are used to expose or challenge assumptions about geographical areas, the social determinants of ill-health, the environment and living conditions in the effort to draw attention towards social inequalities, government neglect or environmental mismanagement.
There is ample further scope for alternative approaches to self-tracking as a form of knowledge production that seek to identify, record and highlight details of socioeconomic disadvantage or social stigma rather than simply perpetuating them, or to generate knowledge of others rather than being directed at serving the solipsism of self-knowledge. Resistant self-tracking efforts may serve to make visible forms of power relations, injustice and inequalities that are currently hidden from view. It is here that a new mode of self-tracking may develop. The possibilities for a new form of data politics that takes up these more critical and challenging practices are intriguing.
This Sociological Life 