The Self-Surveillance Failures of Wearable Communication

Abstract

By discursively analyzing blogs and popular press articles written by people who discontinued using Fitbit, this article reveals the incongruities between the tracking of our bodily information, the communication of that bodily information via wearables, and the promises of changing of users’ attitudes and behaviors with how wearables are actually used in practice. The discourses of discontinuance in this analysis also reveal how former Fitbit engenders feelings of disconnection and may affect users in detrimental ways. As a result, and despite the predominant framing and conceptualization of wearables as “motivating,” “empowering,” and “useful” (self)surveillance tools, I argue that Fitbit is an example of a failure both of self-surveillance and of wearable communication for helping users achieve their health and fitness goals. Finally, I argue that we need to start thinking about wearable communication like other forms of communication that are inherently inconsistent and contradictory, and that can be accepted, negotiated, or rejected by users. Instead of focusing on the disciplinary or controlling potentials of wearables as a form of self-surveillance, this paper considers the resistance and negotiations inherent in the (dis)use of wearables, and demonstrates the necessity of exploring both wearables and surveillance itself in relation to fundamental understandings of communication.

Keywords

wearables self-surveillance fitness Fitbit health tracking

Through mobile applications, web platforms, and wearable devices we can now track every aspect of ourselves, from our sleep patterns and financial spending to our eating and exercise habits. Endless amounts of data about how we move and what we buy, watch, read, or click on are collected both by ourselves and others. Wearables, in particular, communicate information to users with the promise that it will motivate them to be more physically active or become “fit” and “healthy.” We collectively believe this promise enough for one in five Americans to buy fitness trackers in order to “hack” their health motivation (Mann, 2015). Millions of these kinds of devices are sold annually (Neff & Nafus, 2016, p. ix), yet there is also inconsistency with wearables in practice. In fact, a third of Fitbit users stop using their devices within just a few weeks, another third stop using them within the first six months, and of the final third still wearing their Fitbits after six months, only ten percent do so on a daily basis (Patel et al., 2015). These high rates in which people discontinue using their Fitbits reveals a contradiction in the motivational health and fitness discourses associated with and promised by makers of wearable devices with how they are actually used by people. It also reveals the contradictions and inconsistencies inherent between the tracking of our bodily information, the communication of that bodily information via wearables, and the changing of users’ attitudes and behaviors in long-term, positive ways.

This analysis looks at users who negotiate and reject what wearables communicate about their bodies and levels of physical activity. These are users who initially believe or are hopeful about the discursive promises of wearable technologies and their capacities for motivating change through tracking and self-surveillance, but who do not continue using them or who come to believe them to be unhelpful, unmotivating, detrimental to personal health and physical activity goals, and engendering of feelings of disconnection. This analysis shows how users relate to wearables in complicated and inconsistent ways that reveal the ineffectiveness of self-surveillance in relation to health and fitness. Ultimately, this analysis offers an example of a “failure” of self-surveillance as a disciplinary or controlling techniques that pervades our “society of control” (Deleuze, 1992) as opposed to a failure of the self to act in accordance with what wearable communicate to us about our bodies, physical activity, fitness, or health.

Health, Fitness, and Self-Tracking

There is a growing body of research about how people quantify themselves through self-tracking and wearable devices (see Lupton, 2014, 2016b; Nafus & Sherman, 2014; Neff & Nafus, 2016). Lyall and Robards (2018, pp. 113–114) show that self-tracking can be thought of as a helpful tool, a fun toy, and a tutor that helps people in establishing routines from their interactions with devices, the data produced by devices, and between users of the devices. Wearable devices like Fitbit can also be thought of as an “extension, enhancement, augmentation” of ourselves (Francis, 2008) and a way to customize our fitness in the interest of “optimization” (Millington, 2016). Wearables and other measuring devices also communicate knowledge about our personal bodily data, making the data both comprehensible and actionable in achieving whatever health, fitness, or activity objectives we may have (Ruckenstein, 2014). Ultimately, per Crawford et al. (2015, p. 480), “the discourse around wearable devices gives the impression of radical new technology offering precise and unambiguous physical assessment: devices that reflect back the 'real' state of the body.”

According to Lupton (2016a), it’s often assumed that the knowledge gained through self-tracking allows people to exert more control in achieving good health outcomes (related to weight, quality of sleep, etc.). Because wearables encourage us to record ourselves to “see” things about our behaviors to change our behaviors, they can be thought of as a form of self-surveillance (Meyrowitz, 2007; Till, 2014), or “a mode of personal self-regulation that impacts the conduct of the self” (Halse et al., 2007, p. 223). Similarly, Ruckenstein (2014) argues that the purpose of self-tracking is for us to “auto-regulate” ourselves based on what is measured or the data that is communicated in order for to us to “auto-correct bodies, minds, and everyday doings (p. 70). Thus, Ruckenstein, among others, connects self-tracking (or “personal analytics”) to governmentality, which is a process by which we “become ‘allies in the pursuit of political, economic, and social objectivities’ of the state by being productive, healthy, and independent” (Miller & Rose, 2008, p. 43). In other words, we are supposed to internalize the authoritative and disciplinary goals of the state as being matters of individual choice and behavior. Specifically, in terms of health, this means that instead of being directly disciplined we are encouraged to become self-reliant by self-surveilling, self-disciplining, self-controlling, or governing ourselves into achieving normatively prescribed health and fitness goals, and wearable devices are positioned as a tool for helping and motivating us toward these ends.

However, the notion of “health” is itself a complicated rather than an objective measure. To Neff and Nafus (2016), it is a “loaded word, not merely a description of a bodily state” (p. 19). To Crawford (1980), constructions of health under capitalism are more about or just as much about norms, morality, and ideology as it is about our actual health. He refers to this as “healthism,” or a project of neoliberalism that privatizes health and frames the “problems” and “solutions” of health as individual matters. Building on Crawford, Dworkin and Wachs (2009, p. 24) argue that health and fitness magazines, specifically, reinforce “healthism” and “healthism legitimates neoliberalism and consumerism.” Dominant discourses of health in the context of neoliberalism and the “obesity epidemic” thus emphasize the individual and promote willpower, self-surveillance, self-discipline, and self-control over the body as a means to both lose weight and achieve “health” (see Boreo, 2012; Kwan & Graves, 2013, Saguy, 2014; LeBesco, 2003). People who diet or who attempt to lose weight—or who just maintain an idealized weight whether naturally or by working to—can be thought of as a “symbol of the model U.S. citizen: self-disciplined, health-focused, self-surveillant, and moral.” On the other hand, those who embody fatness are “symbolic of the undesirable U.S. citizen: lazy, disorganized, unhealthy, shameless, immoral, and possessed of a poor work ethic” (Pagliassotti, 2003, p. 2).¹

Overall, health in relation to the contemporary “quantified,” neoliberal context means that bodies have become even more like separate entities for us to manipulate and mold, as “a ‘thing’ separate from the self, a machine, to be tuned and serviced and improved wherever possible” (Benson, 1997, p. 14). According to Dworkin and Wachs (2009, p. 10), “Through goods, services, and rituals of display, each body is part of an endless process of marketplace definition. In such an environment, the consumer begins to see his or her body as an alien object that must be constantly managed through consumption to preserve position and identity.” Nowhere is that more evident than in the U.S. fitness industry, which has increasingly become less about overall well-being and more about individuals being able to “fit in” and advance in life by being thin and fit (McKenzie, 2013). Additionally, contemporary fitness culture promotes a “(ceaseless) quest for fit living,” which “makes the ‘datafying’ of once ‘undatafied’ aspects of daily life a rational thing to do” (Millington, 2016, p. 1197).

Contemporary fitness discourses emphasize human–technology interactivity, data-intensiveness, and customization in the interest of optimization (Millington, 2016). Further, contemporary fitness discourses often frame fitness as a form of “empowerment” while self-surveillance (achieved through devices like Fitbit) is framed as “fun” rather than oppressive (Gil & Scharff, 2011, p. 262). In this context, self-surveillance is not positioned negatively or as something to be resisted, but rather as potentially pleasurable or playful (Nafus & Sherman, 2014), or “welcomed as an ally, an alibi or an ark, or at least accepted without resignation or reluctance” (Lyon, 2007, p. 163). This sentiment captures the technology-body and device-to-person communication that tracking technology companies work to engender, and many people—at least upon purchasing wearable devices and as they start using them—may, indeed, view these devices as allies, as the tools by which we will “change our lives” via losing weight, becoming fit, or being more physically active.

These new technologies promise not only greater ease and accuracy of self-surveillance, and greater benefits from doing so, but also the reframing of such body and behavior tracking practices as being “fun” (Figure 1), “empowering,” and even “emancipatory” ways of achieving “good health.” However, Jethani (2015) argues that we need to examine whether knowledge of the self actually contributes to a kind of “emancipatory praxis” within the neoliberal context. And, according to Neff and Nafus (2016, p. 24) the “realities of how people use these tools in practice” needs to be explored as much as the health and weight-loss “fantasies” surrounding wearable devices. This is especially necessary since most wearables “fail to drive long-term sustained engagement for a majority of users” (Ledger, 2014).

Figure 1.

Fitbit Twitter post from October 13, 2016.

In a study of users of MyFitnessPal, which is a calorie and fitness tracking platform that can be linked to wearable devices, Didžiokaitė et al. (2018) examine how everyday people track their calories. They find that both the use and the effects are temporary, and that people generally stop tracking when they stop using the app. Interestingly, many of the participants they interviewed hoped or expected that calorie tracking would become part of a new lifestyle, but participants reported that they typically lost motivation and returned to earlier lifestyle habits (pp. 1475–1476). Similarly, Elman (2018) notes in a summary of health sciences scholarship that multiple studies show wearables have “no measurable impact on health outcomes” (p. 3763). Patel et al. (2015) argue that wearable devices do not lead to substantial behavior change despite their promises to motivate individuals to practice better habits and be in better health. In fact, the authors find that a majority of users stop using the devices not long after purchasing them. These studies looking at rates of discontinuance are important because they demonstrate the small percentage of people who are meaningfully impacted by wearable devices like Fitbit despite millions of devices being sold every year, according to Fitbit’s quarterly financial statements for investors, and despite the discursive promises communicated by wearable technology companies and others that wearables are “motivating,” “empowering,” or “fun” ways to self-surveil ourselves into health and fitness.

Wearables are not just a form of self-surveillance that quantifies our bodies and communicates information about our physical activity, they are also sites of communicative negotiation or rejection and a failure of self-surveillance to motivate behavior change. If we think about these technologies as communication, we are more likely to consider how users construct dominant, negotiated, or resistant meanings (see Fiske, 1994; Hall, 1997) to wearable communication just like all forms of communication. Lomborg and Frandsen (2016, pp. 1020–1022) argue that self-tracking can and should be thought of as communication; communication between the user and the tracking technology, the user and the self, and the user and a wider social network of peers. They use a ritual view of communication to show how self-tracking can “construct, share and maintain certain values and beliefs in an everyday context” while sharing in the “production of reality” as much as “the transmission of information” (p. 1019). Lomborg and Frandsen demonstrate that theorizing wearables as communication is important for understanding “self-tracking practices and their contextual embedding,” which help explain why self-tracking can be “pleasurable, motivating, and meaningful for users” (p. 1025). I build on this by also arguing that wearable communication is important for understanding why self-tracking via wearables may not be pleasurable, motivating, or meaningful for users. Even if wearables communicate data that users can “engage and interact with to better understand the self” (Lomborg & Frandsen, 2016, p. 1022) that does not inherently mean that all or even a majority of users do so meaningfully or long-term. While some users find wearable communication beneficial or useful (and even motivating, empowering or fun), other users are hopeful they will find them beneficial or useful, but then do not for various reasons. Furthermore, while we may be encouraged to constantly monitor ourselves or self-surveil by tracking via wearables and other means, this analysis questions the efficacy of such techniques, and the way such techniques and technologies are too often viewed in deterministic ways, by looking at the (dis)engagement and (dis)connection of (non)users.

Foucault (1980) encourages us to think about the ways in which power is productive as opposed to simply confining, stating, “power, after investing itself in the body, finds itself exposed to a counter-attack in the same body” (p. 56). Resistance (even mundane forms of resistance like no longer self-surveilling with a wearable device) inherently circulates alongside power (see Foucault, 1978, pp. 95–96, 1995). In consideration of these foundational theories of power, Lupton (1997) reminds us, “the existence of strategies of power does not necessarily correspond with the successful exertion of power, and… intended outcomes often fail to materialize because disciplinary strategies break down and fail” (p. 102). Research on disconnection is useful for conceptualizing how inconsistencies, contradictions, and failures can both characterize how people negotiate and reject wearables and why we can consider this a form of resistance or a failure of self-surveillance as a disciplinary or controlling technique. To Karppi (2018) and Light (2014), disconnection is as much a part of mediated communication as connection. Karppi (2018, p. 7) argues that disconnections “take different forms: a break, a manifesto, an act, a form of resistance, a failure.” For Light (2014), connection and disconnection are contradictorily “in play together” (p. 9), noting that “there is power in disconnective practice in not doing as much as there is power in doing” (p. 21).

Analyzing Fitbit and Discourses of Discontinuance

This article discursively analyzes blogs and popular press articles from individuals who stopped using their Fitbit devices and who write about health, fitness, wellness, and their general lifestyles. These writers and bloggers do not capture the experiences of typical device users as they can be deemed more interested in and observant of how wearable devices fit into and impact their lives based solely on the fact that they write about or maintain blogs about such matters. However, these writers and bloggers are important because they articulate specific reasons for discontinuance, demonstrating how some users negotiate and resist what wearables communicate as well as, implicitly, the self-surveillance and disciplinary and controlling techniques of devices like Fitbit. This article attempts to further fill a gap in the academic literature about wearables, which mostly focuses on how people feel about and behave before and while using these devices (see Li et al., 2010), by instead considering the way people talk about why they stopped using wearables.

Before I begin my analysis, I will briefly discuss my observations from following official Fitbit accounts across social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram) and from reading their press releases to see how they communicate about Fitbit in relation to health, physical activity, and fitness. I did this between September of 2014 and 2019 to better understand how Fitbit frames itself, how it sells itself through its fitness and health promises via wearables, and how it generally talks to users and potential users about wearable devices, health, physical activity, and fitness. Over the course of five years, I’ve read hundreds of social media posts and dozens of press releases. The social media posts and press releases referenced in this article exemplify the dominant discourses circulated by the company in their public communications and I talk about them to provide context for understanding the popular press articles and blog posts I analyze. My objects of analysis—popular press articles and blog posts—were gathered through “Fitbit” and “wearable” Google News Alerts active between September of 2014 and 2019. During this time, I encountered a number of blog posts and articles where people detailed the start of their Fitbit journeys or provided updates on their health and fitness progress in relation to wearable devices. However, I only saved the blogs and popular press articles that specifically talk about why people stopped using Fitbit. As a result, 32 blog posts and popular press articles were discursively analyzed for this project.

Although the articles and blogs I analyze may seem like disconnected sites, I consider them discursive fragments that can each be viewed as a “link in a dialogic chain” (Montgomery & Baxter, 1998, p. 3). These articles and blog posts do not exist by themselves in isolation, rather they can be thought of as “in conversation,” and the resultant conversations demonstrate how inconsistencies, contradictions, and failure can characterize how people negotiate and resist wearable communication. Conversations about wearables, which are rendered visible through these blog posts and articles (see VanLear, 1998, p. 6), explore the disconnections between wearables, health, physical activity, and fitness, and represent a failure of self-surveillance.

Again, the articles and blog posts analyzed were specifically selected because they detail reasons for discontinuance not because they comprehensively represent all users or former users of wearable devices. People who choose to write about their experiences of no longer using Fitbit represent a particular kind of user in comparison to other who stop using the device and merely throw it in a “junk draw” or add it to the wearable device “graveyard” that is Craigslist (Rogers, 2016). By analyzing discourses of discontinuance, I am not trying to make generalizable claims about former Fitbit users. Instead, I show the incongruity between the discursive promises of wearables with the way people actually use or, more importantly, no longer use them. I also show how people negotiate and resist what wearables communicate about the body and physical activity.

The Motivational, Health, Physical Activity, and Fitness Promises of Fitbit

Millington (2016, p. 1188) argues that current fitness cultures are characterized by “actants” who are both human and non-human. Fitbit alone “offers a suite of products designed to make daily living knowable in quantified form” (Millington, 2016, p. 1188), including their wearable wristband, various other applications, and managed forums. Fitbit’s social media accounts and press releases of course promote all of their products primarily through talking about how they motivate, change, and transform users while becoming integral to and providing meaning to a wearer’s life (Figure 2). “In order to help drive true behavior change, you have to make health fun, engaging and meaningful,” Fitbit states in a 2017 press release, adding that the company has “consistently delivered innovative products, software and services that work together to create an engaging experience our users love and can’t live without” (Fitbit Inc., 2017).

Figure 2.

Fitbit Twitter post from July 10, 2015.

Fitbit’s defined goal in its mission statement is to “empower and inspire you to live a healthier, more active life” (Fitbit Inc., 2020). And they stay consistently on this message. A series of press release in the summer of 2015 announce Fitbit’s expansion into Malaysia, Thailand, and India, and each time they framed their expansion as “empowering consumers to lead healthier, more active lives” (Fitbit Inc., 2015a, 2015b, 2015c). Their announcements frequently reference “enhanced motivational features” and discuss engaging, immersing, and empowering users in various ways. In a 2018 announcement of their partnership with employee wellness programs, the company states, “Fitbit Health Solutions develops health and wellness solutions designed to help increase engagement, improve health outcomes, and drive a positive return for employers, health plans and health systems” (Fitbit Inc., 2018). In 2019, they launched a premium app “that uses your unique data to deliver Fitbit’s most personalized experience yet, with actionable guidance and coaching to help you achieve your health and fitness goals” (Fitbit Inc., 2019).

Like Fitbit’s press releases, its social media accounts frequently discuss how the wearable device “motivates” people to achieve their health, fitness, and weight-loss goals. For example, on a December 28, 2017 post to Facebook, Fitbit asks the followers of their page (the page has 2.1 million “likes”) to both “see how Fitbit is motivating people around the world to find their reason to get healthy & fit in 2018” and to share their own stories of Fitbit motivation in the comments. On both Facebook and Twitter, Fitbit regularly features people who were motivated to lose weight via their Fitbits (Figures 3 and 4). Ultimately, Fitbit’s communications across press releases and platforms consistently promise users and potential users of the wearable’s ability (in addition to their related technologies and services) to motivate and hold user’s accountable to achieving their health and fitness goals.

Figure 3.

Fitbit Twitter post from October 16, 2017.

Figure 4.

Fitbit Twitter post from November 30, 2017.

Discourses of Discontinuance

Specified reasons for discontinuance fall into one of two dominant discursive clusters. The first is that they are detrimental or bring about “unhealthy” attitudes and behaviors. The second is that wearables engender feelings of “disconnection,” whether between the person and the cues of their body, the person and the world around them, or the person’s attitudes and behaviors with how they thought the wearable would affect them. These popular press articles and blog posts (typically under some version of the title “Why I Stopped Using My Fitbit”) are indicative of an emerging narrative critical of Fitbit adoption and use. They focus less on confirming the discursive promises of wearable devices and more on the drawbacks of wearable devices and the ways in which people may not actually use them despite their intensions or hopes. The experiences of these users—negotiating and resisting wearable communication, discontinuing use, and writing about why—represent a failure of wearable devices to fulfill their discursive promises and a failure of the disciplinary or controlling technique of self-surveillance.

For some users, Fitbit affects their lives in detrimental or otherwise negative ways, whether engendering “unhealthy” behaviors, self-described disordered eating or exercise practices, or motivating people to engage in physical activity for the “wrong reasons.” The “wrong reasons” cited for engaging in physical activity include exercising out of guilt or shame, and exercising with the goal of thinness rather than fitness. For example, Mason (2017), writes:

I let indiscriminate numbers run my life and rob my joy… it can be an amazing way to introduce good habits. But, for me, it was doing the opposite. It was reinforcing my restrictive rules and promoting my sin. For me, my Fitbit represented all the wrong reasons I had for my healthy lifestyle. It represented exercise because I hated my body, not because I loved it. And it represented the world of control I subjected myself to. It literally represented the chains I bound myself in.

Other writers like Tropf (2018) say that they started “obsessing” over the “calories burned” feature on the wearable device, which comes up repeatedly across blogs and articles about discontinuing Fitbit use. In her blog post, Rusnak (2018) says that Fitbit use lead her back to previous disordered eating patterns, saying “they can inadvertently pose serious health hazards.” Rusnak continues, “When your whole world revolves around the numbers on a little band on your wrist, you run the risk of inflicting serious physical and mental harm on yourself. This is precisely what happened to me.”

Additional posts reiterate how Fitbit brought about unexpected, undesirable, and detrimental thoughts and behaviors, particularly in terms of body image as well as mental and physical health. Blogger Stewart-Brown (2019) writes that it is “causing unnecessary anxiety, exacerbating obsessive compulsive behaviors and eating disorders.” Prins (2015) also echoes this sentiment, saying that self-quantification itself may be doing “more harm than good” in terms of the “psychological toll of body policing and its connection to body shame, dieting, and disordered eating.” In this way, Fitbit is like diet and exercise culture more generally, which “has long been associated with the tyranny of slenderness and the enforcement, by patriarchal disciplinary practices, of an ideal body type that carries a powerful symbolism of self-discipline…” (Heyes, 2006, p. 126). Diet and “health” companies have a “perennial appeal of a self-disciplining practice that almost always fails its ostensible goals” (Heyes, 2006, p. 126). They continue to increase their presence and profits without showing any increase in effectiveness (Lyons, 2009). Moreover, Fitbit (non)use is similar to the way people start and stop weight-loss diets (Gaesser, 2002) and the way people take up physical activity but “give up” fairly soon after starting, or who regularly repeat the cycle of starting and stopping (Sassatelli, 2010).

Additional writings about the detrimental qualities or failures of Fitbit for motivating “healthy” behaviors include Romm (2016) detailing how wearing a Fitbit produced feeling stress and angst more than it did motivation to achieve fitness and health goals. Similarly, in an article for Business Insider, Brodwin (2015) writes:

All this logging and calculating was, quite frankly, really depressing. Each of my actions came to be less about doing something I enjoyed — from enjoying the crunchy, sweet deliciousness of a mid afternoon snack to sweating it out at a candlelit yoga class — and more about how it would weigh into a bigger, calculated view of my overall ‘fitness.’

These stories from former Fitbit users exemplify how the physical activity goals set by the creators of wearable devices and the information communicated by devices to users may affect perceived physical and mental health in ways contradicting the discursive promises and benefits promoted by Fitbit and typically associated with wearable device adoption. While individuals who opt-in to wearing devices, and thus opt-in to self-surveillance as a means for achieving their goals, none of them ultimately found using them to be “fun,” “emancipatory,” or motivating of behavior change in desirable ways. On the contrary, many bloggers express feeling the opposite and repeatedly use words like anxious, depressed, obsessive, disordered, and harm to characterize their experiences with wearables.

Another dominant discourse throughout the analyzed articles and blogs discusses the disconnect that Fitbit users feel with their own bodies, the world around them when using the device, and between the wearable communication and how users thought they would feel and act but ultimately did not. A number of writers say that they did not like relying on external sources to tell them information about their own bodies or that they felt disconnected from their body’s internal signals or cues. Some users even say this disconnection—as well as the “unreliable” information communicated to users about their levels of physical activity and calories burned—actually lead to overeating and even weight gain (Gollayan, 2016; Urist, 2016). The unreliability of using wearables for weight management is supported by at least one study showing that the monitoring and feedback provided by wearables does not offer an advantage, and may even result in less weight lost, than other kinds of “behavioral interventions” (Jakicic et al., 2016).

The disconnect between listening to one’s own body versus what wearables communicate to us about the body appears again and again in blogs and articles. Adamic (2017) contends that Fitbit disrupts our relationships with our bodies, giving us “skewed” analyses of our health, saying, “The quest of ‘knowing thyself’ is distorted, not enhanced, when we let the fitness trackers and food calorie apps take over.” Sharp (2016) discusses similar feelings as she writes about “not listening” to her body while wearing a Fitbit. She continues, “Was I tired? Was I sore? Did I have more energy? Was I more hungry? While I had worked so hard to improve my relationship with food and tune into my innate hunger and satiety cues, I was struggling to apply those same mindful techniques to my activity.”

Likewise, in a blog for the U.K. wellness website, Balance Garden, Hodson (2018) writes, “We are at the mercy of our own data tracking. We are spending more time in our heads analyzing, but not in our bodies, feeling. This growing disconnect is what I have a problem with.” And another blogger, Murray (2018), writes:

I took the arbitrary numbers from my fitness tracker and claimed them, as absolutely truth. Sure—I was losing weight. But my overall health was in a dismal place. It’s no wonder that I was completely disconnected with my hunger and fullness cues… Fitness trackers discourage you from listening to your body.

Other bloggers and writers think through the ways in which Fitbit disconnects users from the world around them or how it, basically, “sucks the fun out of everything” (Basu, 2015). For instance, Green (2015) writes in his blog post, “Why I Got Rid of My Fitbit”:

My walks were no longer delightful excursions to marvel at nature or delight in old back alleys. They were forced marches to accumulate steps. The fun of it all took a dramatic stage left exit and I was left alone to take ever more steps.

Also, Green’s blog indirectly references the “Fitbitisms” previously discussed. But instead of Fitbit becoming an indispensable part of our lives—needed for creating meaning during physical activity—Green suggests that wearable devices instead depleted meaning from his life where there otherwise could or would have been some. Schrobsdorf (2016) expresses a similar sentiment when he writes about the joy of doing Fitbit-less yoga while on vacation in Costa Rica and feeling “less connected” when he put the Fitbit back on his wrist upon return. The feelings of both writers corroborate an argument advanced by Karppi (2018, p. 17) in his work on disconnection: “the established conditions that try to force thinking into a particular mold also liberate forces to think against them.”

One writer, Crane (2015), discusses disconnection in two different ways. Firstly, she writes, like Green, that all of the “number crunching” got tiring and she just wanted to walk her dog while not thinking about the distance walked in terms of the number of steps. Secondly, Crane talks about the disconnect between her actual movements and levels of physical activity and what was communicated to her by the wearable. Crane grew frustrated by the fact that her efforts were inconsistent with the wearable communication about her efforts, writing, “I can spin for an hour, and my Fitbit stats will tell me that I mine as well have been laying on my couch.” Crane’s experience with the disconnect between her perceived levels of physical activity and the wearable’s communication about her physical activity fits with research detailing the problem of inaccuracy with tracking devices (Patel et al., 2015).

Another articulation of disconnection is between our health, physical activity, and fitness intensions and goals with “human nature.” Garber (2015) writes in a piece for The Atlantic, “The Ennui of the Fitbit,”

We bore and burn out easily—particularly, it seems, when it comes to fitness. Look at Google’s tracking of health-related searches, recent year to recent year. So many peaks in January, when our hopes for our Future Selves are high! So many valleys the rest of the year, when the realities of our Current Selves set in!… A Fitbit tracks behavior; it doesn't, on its own, change it.

This article reflects emerging knowledge about fitness, dieting, and the adoption of technologies connected to fitness and dieting: our intentions or hopes do not always match with—or can be disconnected from—our behavioral realities. According to Neff and Nafus (2016, p. 53), “simply knowing (and agreeing) that a behavior is healthy or unhealthy may not be enough to change it.” LeBesco (2003, p. 31) addresses this disconnect in an analysis of dieting and the “theory of reasoned action,” which assumes that “behavioral intension is the immediate determinant of behavior and that all other factors that influence behavior are mediated through intention” (Carter, 1990 as cited in LeBesco, 2003, p. 31). Yet as LeBesco points out, and these discourses of disconnection demonstrate, “reasoned action” assumptions fail to account for human complexities and contradictions as knowledge and communication—even about our own bodies—does not necessarily change our attitudes or long-term behaviors.

Finally, disconnection also occurs between how users talk about the ways in which Fitbit did not work for them with how they perceive others may use and still benefit from wearables. Across numerous blogs and articles there is a tacit belief that these devices might work for or be motivating to others even if they were not for the person writing about their experience. “While these may be great features for you, they just weren’t for me,” Bahadur (2014) writes. On the blog “Whole Health Dana” (2015), the author says, “Please note that I don’t necessarily think the Fitbit is bad. I am just saying to listen to your body. It just wasn’t for me.” Lastly, Scott (2019) writes, “I can look to lay blame on my Fitbit but when the people around me show me how technology has helped them achieve their goals my gaze turns back to Fitbit and how I’m still fat.” These examples demonstrate a negotiation and rejection of the wearables by the individual writers for themselves, but not necessarily for everyone. This reveals a disconnect between their personal experiences and the internalized promises of wearables. Unlike many of the other bloggers and writers discussed in this analysis, these writers suggest that they have failed despite wearable technology rather than seeing how self-surveillance through wearable technologies actually failed to help them in achieving their goals.

Ultimately, all of these instances show that, contrary to the discursive promises of Fitbit to motivate us to be healthy and hold us accountable to our health, fitness, and physical activity goal, wearables may actually prove detrimental and engender various feelings of disconnection. Although these examples do not constitute a comprehensive analysis of all users, they exemplify the ways people talk about the contradictions inherent between the reasons for adoption and discontinuing use of Fitbit. These are examples of both the failures of self-surveillance and of wearable communication for comporting one’s body or behaviors to socially idealized notions of health and fitness. Failures are not of the self to surveil and discipline ourselves into health and fitness, rather the failure exists between what is discursively promised by these technologies, our motivations when we opt to use them, and what is actually experienced by users when they’re wearing or no longer wearing them.

Conclusion

In summary, the popular press articles and blogs I analyzed can be categorized into two dominant discursive clusters negotiating the promises of Fitbit as a wearable technology and what Fitbit communicates to users about their bodies. The first dominant discourse of discontinuance is that Fitbit is detrimental, for various reasons, to users’ overall health goals. The second discourse of discontinuance is how Fitbit actually made people feel disconnected rather than more connected by the data created from and communicated by wearables. Of course, these and other articles and blogs also articulate other reasons for discontinuance, such as users simply finding the wearable “useless” (Bahadur, 2014; Morganelli, 2018), “unmotivating” (Jandreau, 2014), or “unhelpful” (Ludington, 2014).

For some users, devices like Fitbit may be helpful, and those users will continue to wearing them long-term. Others may be uninterested in using it or actively refuse to use it from the beginning. And others still may try it and either dislike it or like it but discontinue using it at some point in time. There are many possibilities for use or behavior, and varying levels of sustained interest or investment in wearables themselves and these need to be more fully examined beyond initial adoption. This article thus offers a different perspective as to how wearable communication does not always—and maybe rarely—translates to feelings of “motivation,” “fun,” or “empowerment. Nor does it prove an “effective” form of long-term self-surveillance for the purposes of health and fitness. Wearables may also fail to hold individuals accountable to their fitness goals and intentions, and they may fail to alter our attitudes and behaviors toward achieving these goals. The possibilities for using or not using, liking or disliking, and accepting or rejecting wearable communication that need to be explored apart from how these may operate as another form of self-surveillance in the digital, neoliberal age. We need to examine when users negotiate the promises and discontinued use of these devices, whether it’s because the wearable is perceived as detrimental, as engendering feelings of disconnection, or some other mundane reason users cite for no longer wearing them. Ultimately, we need to empirically analyze wearable communication to see how it is inconsistent, contradictory, and negotiated or rejected in different ways by different people.

Although this project focuses on blogs and popular press articles as sites for analyzing discourses of discontinuance, many of these discourses are also present across social media discussions of Fitbit and they should be analyzed as well. Even users who try to create accountability by wearing Fitbit and doing challenges with friends or users of these various social media platforms may find that it does not help them in achieving their physical activity or fitness goals. Across these platforms, users frequently discuss their experiences using and no longer using wearables by saying things like “I wasn’t motivated to walk more or be more active in any way” and “all it did was confuse me with 'way too much information’” (Pringle, 2016). Furthermore, future directions for research should include more comprehensive analyses, such as interviews and even surveys, to capture how and why people use or do not use these over long periods of time.

In conclusion, these discourses of discontinuance remind us not to allow wearable technology to determine our thinking around what could be a technique of self-surveillance instead of how many people experience or do not experience them in practice. The promises of wearables do not inherently match their (non)use, and both the concerns over and hopes of self-surveillance via wearable technologies remain largely unattuned to the everyday experiences of (non)users. We need to extend our analyses of wearables beyond their surveilling, disciplining, or controlling capacities. What wearables communicate to us about our bodies—and what companies like Fitbit promise wearables will help us to do—are not always accepted, acted on, or motivating to people. They can be accepted, but, as these discourses of discontinuance and a growing amount of literature on wearables show, they are just as or more likely to be negotiated and rejected all together.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Melissa Zimdars

Note

Author Biography

Melissa Zimdars is an Assistant Professor of Communication and Media at Merrimack College in North Andover, Massachusetts.

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