Politics and Possibilities of Self-Tracking Technology (eBook)

Data, Bodies and Design

Suneel Jethani (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2021
184 Seiten
Emerald Publishing Limited (Verlag)
978-1-80043-340-3 (ISBN)

Infos

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 "e;Californian Ideology"e; 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 "e;disappear"e; (Jewson), are made "e;docile"e; (Foucault) and get caught up in "e;rhythms"e; (Lefebvre) by datafication. The concept of a "e;quantised"e; 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.

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 18.6.2021
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Kommunikation / Medien ► Medienwissenschaft
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
• ISBN-10: 1-80043-340-9 / 1800433409
• ISBN-13: 978-1-80043-340-3 / 9781800433403