Self-tracking practices as knowledge technologies

An edited excerpt from the concluding chapter of my book The Quantified Self: A Sociology of Self-Tracking.

As I have remarked in this book’s chapters, via the mainstream self-tracking devices and software that are available, certain aspects of selfhood and embodiment are selected for monitoring while a plethora of others are inevitably left out, ignored, or not even considered in the first place. Those aspects that are selected become more visible, while others are obscured or neglected through this process. The technologies themselves, including the mobile, wearable and ‘anti-wearable’ sensor-embedded objects and the software that animate them, tend to be the product of a narrow demographic of designers: white, well-paid, heterosexual men living in the Global North. In consequence, the tacit assumptions and norms that underpin the design and affordances of self-tracking technologies are shaped by these people’s decisions, preferences and values. Thus, for example, devices such as Apple Watch initially failed to include a menstrual cycle tracker as part of its built-in features (Eveleth, 2014); sexuality self-tracking apps focus on male sexual performance and competitive displays of prowess (Lupton, 2015); apps that use westernised concepts and images of health and the human body are inappropriate for Aboriginal people living in remote areas of Australia (Christie and Verran, 2014). How people from outside this demographic might engage or not with these technologies and how technologies might be better designed to acknowledge the diversity of socioeconomic advantage, cultures and sexual identities are subjects rarely pondered upon in the world of technology design …

At the same time as self-tracking practices are reductive and selective, they are also productive. They bring into being new knowledges, assemblages, subjectivities and forms of embodiment and social relations. In Chapter 2 I referred to the four types of technology identified by Foucault, which work together to produce knowledges on humans. Acts of reflexive self-monitoring involve all four of these knowledge technologies. Via prosumption, self-trackers generate data on themselves (technologies of production); they manipulate and communicate the symbols, images, discourses and ideas related to their own data and the devices that generate these data (technologies of sign systems); they are involved in strategies that are designed to assist them in participating in certain forms of conduct for specific ends (technologies of power); and all of these practices are overtly and deliberately directed at performing, presenting and improving the self (technologies of the self).

What is particularly intriguing about this expertise is that it both operates at the level of the ‘nonexpert’ (the self-tracker), where it is configured, and is inextricably interbound into the digital data economy and the forms of government regulation of the body politic. The authority of the knowledgeable expert on human life is dispersed among members of the lay public to a greater extent than ever before. However, the shared nature of this authority and expertise also undermines the power that self-trackers possess over their own information. Reflexive self-monitors are able to generate their own truth claims about trackers’ own bodies/selves, but these trackers are increasingly unable to control how these truth claims are used by other actors or what the potential ramifications for their own life chances and opportunities are once these data come under the control of others.