Imagining Personal Data

Experiences of Self-Tracking

Vaike Fors, Sarah Pink, Martin Berg, Tom O'Dell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000182118
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Digital self-tracking devices and data have become normal elements of everyday life. Imagining Personal Data examines the implications of the rise of body monitoring and digital self-tracking for how we inhabit, experience and imagine our everyday worlds and futures. Through a focus on how it feels to live in environments where data is emergent, present and characterized by a sense of uncertainty, the authors argue for a new interdisciplinary approach to understanding the implications of self-tracking, which attends to its past, present and possible future. Building on social science approaches, the book accounts for the concerns of scholars working in design, philosophy and human-computer interaction. It problematizes the body and senses in relation to data and tracking devices, presents an accessible analytical account of the sensory and affective experiences of self-tracking, and questions the status of big data. In doing so it proposes an agenda for future research and design that puts people at its centre.

1

Self-Tracking in the World

This book explores how self-tracking technologies and personal data have emerged historically, how they participate in our present and how they are shaping and participating in how we envision ourselves and our futures. This temporal approach to self-tracking investigates how both the people who use self-tracking technologies and the designers of these technologies have engaged with them, how they imagine possible individual and societal futures with personal data and the disjunctures and similarities between these imaginaries.

As an increasingly ubiquitous and global everyday form of human engagement with technology and data, self-tracking and personal data present us with an unprecedented view of some of the most vital questions, challenges, opportunities and anxieties that we are faced with as individuals and as a society, as we move into as yet unknown and uncertain human-technological futures. Their presence raises fundamental questions about how it feels – sensorially and emotionally – to live in a world of personal data, how we learn and improvise to engage with the affordances of such a world, and how we give data and technologies meaning.

Imagining Personal Data is for researchers, scholars, students and anyone interested in how self-tracking and personal data are becoming part of how we understand our past, present and future. It is for those who wish to go deeper than what is apparent from the news, marketing and social media hype and use of personal data and self-tracking to ask how they are offering us new ways to think about ourselves and the environments in which we live, and how they enable us to imagine particular possible personal and societal futures. We invite readers to consider with us how we can collectively imagine a route through which these activities, technologies and data can participate in a responsible and ethical future.

We began to investigate self-tracking because we realized that it was fast emerging as a practice with historical, cultural, technological and experiential foundations that was also starting to impact on how we could imagine our personal and technological futures. In 2014, when we first started to ask questions about the meaning of self-tracking, it was only just beginning to become a widespread everyday activity and there existed a limited amount of academic publications on the topic, mainly within informatics and human-computer interaction research traditions through ‘e-health and m-health predominantly in health promotion and health communication circles’ (Till 2014: 448), which is aligned to behaviour change approaches and other more everyday life-oriented development and design of the technology (Rooksby et al. 2014). During this time there was also an emerging body of literature on self-experimentation with emerging technologies in so-called do-it-yourself biology communities (Seyfried, Pei and Schmidt 2014) and by biohackers (Delfanti 2013). Since then we have seen the use of self-tracking wearables and smartphone apps proceed far beyond the rise of self-tracking communities such as the global Quantified Self (QS) Movement – made up of a loosely tied community of self-trackers whose shared aim is to learn more about themselves through self-tracking – where the early studies of self-tracking itself often began (Neff and Nafus 2016; Lupton 2016a). We have also seen self-tracking become ubiquitous in everyday life contexts beyond the earlier explorations of their applications in everyday health monitoring improvement (Swan 2012). They have since been tested and used – to varying degrees of success – for example, in patient self-care (Lupton 2018), in educational programmes (Williamson 2016; Rich 2017), in direct-to-consumer genetic testing (Ruckenstein 2017), in gaming (Smeddinck et al. 2019), in work life (Moore 2018) and in healthcare insurance (Tu 2019). At the time of writing this book almost five years later, the body of academic literature within this field of study has also grown extensively and approaches self-tracking from multiple perspectives, not the least in relation to questions of data and algorithms and their societal implications, across the social sciences and humanities as well as the fields of technology and design. The growing scholarly interest in practices of, and devices for, self-tracking goes hand in hand with a proliferating interest in these technologies among established and committed self-trackers as well as more casual users that track their everyday activity through smartphone apps, either passively or actively. As we approach the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century, according to their website, the Quantified Self community, often seen as a forerunner in this field, brings together 70,000 people across in the world who are more deeply committed to self-tracking (Quantified Self Institute 2016). According to the Futuresource Wearable Technology Market report (Futuresource Consulting 2018), 24.3 million wearable devices – the wristbands and similar technologies that are worn on the body for self-tracking – were sold during the first quarter of 2018. Although in 2014 it was reported that ‘A third of U.S. consumers who have owned one stopped using the device within six months of receiving it’ (Endeavour Partners 2014), the implication is that these technologies are an increasingly visible element of everyday life.

As most anthropologists and sociologists are well aware, and as has been evidenced in recent work we have been involved in, neither new technologies nor new forms of data representation change people’s behaviour or lead directly to societal change. In the context of research about self-tracking technologies and personal data, social scientists have likewise emphasized how people actively use these devices and representations. For instance, the sociologist Deborah Lupton defines self-tracking broadly as involving ‘practices in which people knowingly and purposely collect information about themselves, which they then review and consider applying to the conduct of their lives’ (2016a: 2). Lupton’s definition, which emphasizes how humans determine the ways they will use data, differs from, for instance, the commercial lingo of marketers and designers of self-tracking devices that often emphasize their potential to support and perhaps also provoke ‘behaviour change’. For instance, the designer of the Finnish ‘smart’ ring ŌURA suggests that ‘most of us don’t know what’s happening in our body’ and therefore the ring might ‘open a window to the body’ through which otherwise invisible aspects of oneself can be seen and known (Berg 2017). In this book, we take Lupton’s definition as a starting point, but expand it through our research focus on those less conscious practices of self-tracking whereby people do not necessarily review their personal data and apply their new knowing to how they conduct their lives. As we demonstrate in this book, this expansion reveals the contingent and improvisatory modes through which self-tracking is carried out in everyday life.

In the growing field of disciplinary approaches to self-tracking, critical debates have emerged that are typical of such disciplinary interfaces. Lupton makes a sociological critique of human–computer interaction (HCI) research, which has tended to be dominated by cognitive or behavioural psychology. In favour of the sociological focus on the social, she argues for highlighting the ‘social, cultural and political dimensions’ of ‘self-tracking cultures’ (2014). The sociological critique of how psychological approaches (often adopted in design) focus on the individual and the possibility of ‘behaviour change’ through awareness or motivation is well established. This offers a convincing response to the HCI self-tracking literature where ‘behaviour change’ approaches are certainly embedded – for instance, whereby ‘self-monitoring has been widely embodied in the design of sensing and monitoring applications because of its effectiveness on increased awareness and behavior change’ (Choe et al. 2014: 1144). In ways that align with other sociological responses to behaviour change approaches (e.g. Shove 2010; Strengers 2013), Pantzar and Ruckenstein (2014) have suggested a social practice theory analysis of self-tracking. Indeed, both the critique on neoliberalism that is implicit in a social practice theory approach, which highlights how a behaviour change approach puts responsibility for change on the individual (Shove 2010), and analyses of how self-tracking activity itself becomes implicated in capitalism, suggest that the way we conceptualize the design, use, experience and imaginaries associated with self-tracking technologies and personal data are inevitably political: as Till has suggested, self-tracking can also be understood as a form of ‘digital labour’, whereby users’ exercise and self-tracking can be seen to be supporting commercial organizations, in ways similar to social media, and that it is ultimately ‘free labour’ which produces data of commercial value (2014: 158). This critique of the neoliberal agenda behind the development of self-tracking has also been highlighted in the history of self-tracking as part of the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) Movement, which is described as a community of people that redefine science into self-experimenting and ‘DIY biology’ to both democratize science and unleash participatory innovation processes (Meyer 2013). Further, it has been argued that the commercialization of DIY biology, through the connections to test-beds for biotechnological start-ups, has divided the community between rebels who propose open-source and non-profit initiatives and profiteers who want to develop businesses around self-tracking (Seyfried, Pei and Schmidt 2014).

Opening up new directions for self-tracking

As is clear from our discussion, the critique of the place of self-tracking and personal data in contemporary societal structures has been made. Yet less has been said about how we might be able to imagine this change as emerging self-tracking technologies create new possibilities, and as we imagine how self-tracking and personal data might participate in different human futures. This means opening up new possibilities in design. As we have shown in the previous section, changing what people do is not a viable way forward. We emphasize that our approach deliberately avoids falling into the erroneous pattern of seeking to change the behaviour of designers through rational argument. Rather, we propose that the arguments and examples in this book may introduce new ways of thinking in design education, through studio practice. By taking a temporal approach to self-tracking, this book takes a new step to confront precisely how self-tracking and personal data could participate in different human futures. Here, by way of introduction, we invite readers into a moment in our research where such possibilities began to become apparent, specifically through modes of design practice that offer new ways forward.

To explore what departing from such a behaviourist-capitalist agenda could mean in a practical sense, we organized a design workshop on future self-tracking at Halmstad University in Sweden in November 2017. By naming the workshop ‘Future Learning with Digital Health Service Design’ we wanted to disrupt current design systems of self-tracking and health services by re-thinking such devices as future tools for learning instead of as tools for behavioural change. What principles and strong concepts underpinning contemporary self-tracking services could and should be questioned to find new ways forward in the development of the next generation of self-tracking devices? And how would the next generation design of self-tracking devices look and function based on alternate principles for why and how they were to be used? To spark the conversation we had invited two experienced and influential self-trackers – Thomas Blomseth Christiansen and Jakob Eg Larsen from the global QS community – to give their take on the current situation as well as next steps forward. In their talk they presented the One Button Tracker (see Figure 1.1), a low-tech device, to open up technological possibilities for paying attention to subjective experiences of daily living.

Figure 1.1 Prototype of the One Button Tracker – design of a future self-tracking device for tracking subjective experiences by Thomas Blomseth Christiansen and Jakob Eg Larsen (published with permission).

The design of the One Button Tracker was based on the following principles: it is at hand when needed, it can be operated without looking at it, it automatically keeps time, it stores data reliably, it exposes data via a wire, it generates easily understood data and it only turns on when in use. In short, it is a device that has a button that you can push, and thereby create a timestamp, whenever you experience something in your body that you want to pay attention to. According to Blomseth Christiansen and Eg Larsen, these principles mirrored what was needed to create the ‘infinite instrument’ for active self-tracking, that is self-tracking that is designed to help people notice things about themselves from a subjective perspective, in opposition to more conventionally designed self-tracking instruments that measure the body from an imagined objective stance. Blomseth Christiansen is widely known for tracking his every sneeze for five years in order to cure himself of allergies and eczema through long-running experiments with his lifestyle. In the process he collected a unique data-set of over 100,000 observations, and in this process he has become a strong advocate for shifting perspectives from self-tracking of the body, to a more subjective practice of paying attention to experiences in self-tracking and how this experience changes over time when you, through the tracking, learn more about how to pay attention to the experience you want to track.

In many ways this shift in perspectives exemplifies this book’s contribution through its conceptualization of self-tracking as an everyday and design practice, whereby there is a shift from understanding it as the passive monitoring of bodily activities (body monitoring) to understanding it as the active tracking of subjective experiences. Self-tracking technologies and the personal data they produce have become ubiquitous in our lives and promise to be inseparable from our futures. The assumptions that underpin approaches that simply see them as offering increased self-knowledge, improving health, and a life that, often in quite a vaguely defined way, is imagined to be ‘better’, need to be revised. The question is how people learn to live together with these devices, how the devices become part of how people orient themselves in their pursuit to move through their everyday lives, and what the implications of this are for their future imaginaries. As we outline in the next section, this also means a shift to a research approach that accounts for the experience of self-tracking and personal data.

The everyday realities of self-tracking and personal data

The idea that self-tracking should be viewed and discussed in broader terms than suggested through a quantifying research agenda is now well established both inside and outside academia. Outside academia, the QS community devoted their international conference 2018 to the intersection between the ‘Quantified Self-method’ (that is, making observations of yourself, analysing them and making conclusions) and formal and informal learning. By stating that ‘all Quantified Self projects aim at learning’, this group of early and advanced adopters pushes the scope of self-tracking beyond ideas of self-tracking as solely quantifying body activities to create behavioural change, into a social, cultural and societal direction with the aim to ‘contribute to this expanded understanding of what it means to learn, and to help the culture of everyday science grow as a force for change’ (Quantified Self Labs n.d.). In the same vein, academic research in the social sciences and humanities has shown that, for people who use trackers, self-tracking is not solely about measuring the body in terms of quantities and collecting data for statistical analysis according to a rational and scientific agenda (Lupton 2016a; Neff and Nafus 2016; Ajana 2018; Brogård Kristensen and Ruckenstein 2018).

As a example, consider the experiences of Chris Dancy – the ‘most connected man in the world’ (Dancy n.d.) – who has used sensor technologies to track and measure almost every aspect of his everyday life. In a short video linked to his website Chris shows the filmmakers around his home, explaining to them how he has used technologies that he makes invisible or hidden from others, to monitor as much detail of his life as possible. This has included ingestible, wearable and location-based sensors, voice-recording devices, apps and services, connected devices such as digital scales and every light bulb connected to the internet individually, a sleep monitor and more. He tells the filmmaker that when he checked in about 2014, there had been something like 20,000 things measuring his life. We meet Chris again later in this book: his example is one where self-tracking and digital health come together in perhaps extreme but also novel and effective ways, and indeed creates a public and practical narrative for self-tracking that coincides with many aspects of our argument. To explain what it was like living in a world of data where nearly ‘everything’ was tracked, Chris told Sarah about a period when he had taken time out from this tracking:

Chris: I didn’t take off sensors until I went to a retreat in 2015 and then I took off everything and that was kind of mind blowing – not taking them off, but putting them back on.

Sarah: So you stopped completely then?

Chris: For a week I went to a 10 day silent Buddhist retreat … I’d been meditating and someone had suggested to me that a silent retreat would be enlightening, and the most I’d meditated before up to that point was three or four hours, straight, like in one sitting, I’d never done eight hours a day, so I really wanted to understand what it was that’s so amazing about this, you know and as I said taking the sensors off wasn’t hard, putting them back on was … it was terrible the first couple of days. I felt like I feel the data you know, it’s one thing to track and to have a lot of automation in your tracking, its another thing to take it off … everyone said … won’t you be nervous or … you’d be so relieved when you take it off, it was actually effortless to take everything off and there were no clocks at the retreat, there were no books, there was nothing to read, it was easy, I mean if you go into a pretty timeless environment, coming out of that timeless environment is hard … the first thing I noticed when I was putting on … was how sad everyone was … after I left the retreat and my friend took me into an San Francisco I just started looking around at how … distracted everyone was, and that made me feel really sad and I hadn’t checked my email or put my phone back on yet, but I’d put my watch back on … [it made him think:] Oh, it’s heavy to be alive.

Sarah: And you said you could feel the data.

Chris: I felt as I put on each thing and turned on each system (how many systems were there then … how many things).

While Chris’s life was highly quantified, as his discussion explains, this simultaneously created an experiential environment, where data is ‘felt' emotionally and sensorially. It is th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• 1 Self-Tracking in the World
• 2 Encountering the Temporalities and Imaginaries of Personal Data
• 3 Ubiquitous Monitoring Technologies in Historical Perspective
• 4 Algorithmic Imaginations
• 5 Traces through the Present
• 6 Anticipatory Data Worlds
• 7 Personal Data Futures
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index