Self-Tracking Cultures

Wolf’s own article highlights that the radical feature of a ‘data-driven life’ is the transition and acceptance of numbers and measurement from the professional and commercial arena into personal and home life. How is this so? Analysing a wide range of self-tracking discourse, Lupton (2014), offers three broad sociological rationales for the rise in ‘self- tracking cultures’.

First, is a trend towards self-optimisation – that is, emphasising the importance of self- awareness and self-improvement. Lupton argues that in a neoliberal society, the ‘ideal’ and ‘responsible’ citizen is one “willing and able to take care of her or his self-interest and welfare” (Lupton, 2014; p.79). In this way, the citizen becomes an asset, rather than a burden, to the state. Rather than narcissism, interest in oneself – precisely and intimately – becomes necessary to be successful; we are each expected to take care, and make the best of ourselves. Importantly, people undertake such action willingly, even playfully; this is ‘sous-veillance’ rather than surveillance (Mann et al., 2002). Such individualisation and privatisation of risk are encompassed in Bauman’s analysis of ‘liquid modernity’ (Bauman, 2000).

Taking this further, self-knowledge, and hence self-tracking, promises the means to determine one’s destiny in an uncertain world. Lupton notes that as fixed social structures and ties dissolve, people have far greater individual freedom, but as such, greater

responsibility for their own decisions, successes and failures. Self-tracking is then a means of taking control of one’s life – especially in relation to external pressures of health, time, money, family life etc. Other STS scholars however, remind us that the agency and independence of modern living entails more than a sense of responsibility. Both Sharon and Zanderberger (2016), and Nafus and Sherman (2014) describe a theme of ‘soft resistance’ in their ethnography of the Quantified Self movement. Some of the most enthusiastic self-tracking projects are for example resisting the categories, traditions

and limitations of modern healthcare provision. In so doing, self-tracking is not just ‘taking control’ or acting responsibly, but is, in practice, a way of communicating and generating alternative narratives about oneself.

Second, in tandem with a desire for self-knowledge and self-optimisation, is what Lupton calls the ‘valorisation of data’ (Lupton, 2014). In recent years, quantified data has become an elevated, primary way of knowing about the world. As Wolf (2010) suggests “If you want to replace the vagaries of intuition with something more reliable, you first need to gather data. Once you know the facts, you can live by them.” This thesis is focused on the personal domain, however the rise of metrics and an ‘audit culture’ (Craig et al., 2014) attest to this as a broader, societal phenomenon. As Taylor et al. (2015) note, data has become “a proxy for the facts”. In the context of Big Data, boyd and Crawford (2012) describe this as a ‘mythology’, noting the “widespread belief that large data sets offer a higher form of intelligence and knowledge that can generate insights that were previously impossible, with the aura of truth, objectivity, and accuracy.” (p.663). Even more

forcefully, Beer (2016) describes this as ‘metric power’.

What has become so powerful and dominant in industry, government and science has perhaps inevitably translated into the personal domain. As Wolf (2010) again notes, cold hard numbers appear to trump fuzzy human intuition. Amidst Wolf’s rhetoric, proponents of the Quantified Self, and the deep criticisms offered by social scientists, it would be easy to believe that numbers and the ‘objectivity’ of data are both undeniable and have proved utterly seductive. However, Sharon and Zanderberger (2016) are again instructive in qualifying this somewhat. There is clearly at least an attraction to the idea that data can be ‘objective’ and many self-trackers do subscribe to this. Nonetheless, many are also constructively sceptical, always asking themselves what their data means, and in many cases taking apart and trying many different modes of self-tracking. We should hence be careful to view claims about the discourse of self-tracking, in the context of its actual practice. Here, people are evidently doing a lot more than simply taking the numbers as given.

The third and final point contributing to the rise of self-tracking plays further on this belief that even if at times questionable, data offers a further, higher, previously unobtainable form of knowledge. Lupton notes that advances in digital self-tracking

“render visible elements of one’s self and body that are not otherwise perceptible”. Like an x-ray, we may believe we can really look under the hood, and see in, to the otherwise ineffable ‘human machine’ (Lupton, 2013). Indeed, there is a frequent belief in

underlying patterns, habits and indicators, which the right sensors and data can divine. As with lifelogging, which aims to augment memory, so there is a belief in augmenting the body with such sensors. Sharon and Zanderberger (2016) describe the way self-trackers talk about data as ‘signals’ or further ‘layers’. Self-tracking’s premise is to offer a new, compelling way of seeing and imagining the body.

These technologies and cultures which distinguish a data-driven life should not be thought of as separate; they are clearly ‘mutually shaping’ (Lievrouw and Livingstone, 2002). As noted previously, the focus of this thesis is on the experience of this data-driven life. In particular, how people see themselves, the world, and their pasts through data. As such, before considering different perspectives on the design of interactions with data, it is vital to critically understand the nature of the relationship between data and

experience of the world. How is it that data obtains a mythologised status as a ‘fact’ and what transformations are undertaken in representing the world through quantified data?