Abstract
The rise of fitness-tracking devices such as the Fitbit in personal health and wellness is emblematic of the use of data-gathering health and fitness technologies by institutions to create a surveillance regime. Using postings on Fitbit community message boards and the theoretical frames of Michel Foucault and sociomaterialist scholars, the goal of this article is to analyse the experiences of those who choose to self-track using a Fitbit and the constellation of barriers and facilitators (human and non-human) related to social class and gender that enable and constrain one’s ability to use a Fitbit as intended. First, we examine the social class assumptions of Fitbit as a risk management tool in the workplace, illustrating what elements must come together – both human and non-human – to create an environment that enables walking throughout the workday to combat the risks of sedentary work. Second, we explore the ways that Fitbit users ‘confessed’ to their past inactivity and how gendered home labour differently enables and constrains some of the users’ abilities to act on their confessions. Ultimately, one’s ability to engage in the idealized use of the Fitbit in the minds of its users, or what we term the ‘Fitbit subject assemblage’, is structured by numerous material and social factors that must be taken into account when examining the mechanics of power in fitness tracking.
In the fall of 2015, Oral Roberts University (ORU) in Oklahoma began requiring students to wear a Fitbit, a wearable technology that tracks steps taken, calories consumed, distance walked and more. The data from these Fitbits are directly sent to the school’s grading system, as students are expected to meet the standard of 10,000 steps per day as well as 150 minutes of physical activity per week as part of its ‘whole-person philosophy’ and ‘mind, body, and spirit’ approach to education (Sherman, 2017: para. 5). In the same year, the US-based retailer Target gave a Fitbit Zip device to all 335,000 employees to encourage more physical activity and thus improved health (Chen, 2015).
Significantly, these forms of health surveillance, whether they are taken up as part of an institutional imperative or as a private activity, are part of what Lupton (2016) refers to as dataveillance, or the practice of watching people using data-generating technologies. While the use of technologies of surveillance by those wishing to enhance their physical fitness, health and beauty are not new (Couch et al., 2017; Rich, 2011), what is new here is the ability of dataveillance technologies to gather considerable amounts of information about people in even more intimate spheres of their lives (Lupton, 2016). By helping users in their efforts to track calories consumed and calories expended through exercise, under the watchful gaze of themselves and/or others, these self-tracking devices operate within a neoliberal climate to produce responsible consumers who do not rely on the state to ensure their health or wellbeing (Lupton, 2016). Particularly in light of the perceived ‘obesity epidemic’ in a social, political and economic environment of neoliberal self-responsibilization, body weight is assumed to directly reflect one’s health as well as one’s personal lifestyle and commitments to not only be healthy, but to further conform to dominant beauty ideals as well (Gard and Wright, 2005). Self-surveillance becomes a moral matter, as taking responsibility for your own health through self-monitoring is expected for those who do not want to be a burden to the rest of society due to what is perceived as a costly medical condition (Rail, 2012). These considerations lead us to a series of questions: in what ways can Fitbits be said to contribute to the creation of a surveillance regime? What kinds of social control does this technology support and give rise to? How do people who use the devices experience this surveillance?
While our opening examples point to the forced use of fitness trackers, in this article, we look to those who appear to have voluntarily purchased tracking devices so as to monitor their health and fitness statistics for their own purposes. In particular, we study online discussions by a subset of enthusiastic Fitbit users who post on Fitbit community message boards about their health and fitness. As such, these individuals – and their Fitbits – are a part of the ‘quantified self’ movement (QS) more generally, which academics describe as the broader practice of ‘monitoring, measuring and recording elements of one’s body and life as a form of self-improvement or self-reflection’ (Lupton, 2016: 1).
In this article, we combine insights from actor–network theory (ANT) and Foucauldian scholarship to explore the constellations of actors – human, non-human, discursive – that make up a Fitbit user. We use the term ‘Fitbit subject assemblage’ to describe the expected identity of a Fitbit user as constructed through the complex assemblage of discourses, desire, digital technologies, and a range of other human and non-human actors. The concept of the ‘Fitbit subject assemblage’ emphasizes the expectations of personal responsibility with regard to health, the behavioural modifications that are associated with Fitbit use, and the assemblage of humans and nonhumans that come together to produce Fitbit use. Idealized Fitbit subjects take walks or engage in other activities throughout the day to increase their step count, always reach (at least) 10,000 steps, and prioritize their health through an engagement with risk-minimizing behaviours. The goal of this article is to assemble the Fitbit subject and to look beyond the bodies of Fitbit users to explore how it is that discourses, materials, technologies and environments come together to produce Fitbit use. Recognizing that the Fitbit subject assemblage is far from discursively or materially stable, we consider two contexts in which Fitbits and the expectations for their users are differently evoked: in the workplace and in confessions of becoming overweight and physically inactive.
This research extends theorizations of the materiality of health, fitness and the QS in several ways. First, it builds on previous attempts to theorize Foucault alongside sociomaterialisms (Fox, 2016; Kerr, 2014; Lupton, 2016) and new materialisms, health and technology (Fox, 2017). Second, this article examines the role of social class and gender in the use of fitness-tracking devices, a topic that has previously been undertheorized (see Sanders, 2017). In so doing, it contributes to discussions within science and technology studies as to how to theorize the ‘social’. While Latour (2005) cautions against a foundational sociology that draws upon broad social categories such as ‘gender’, ‘race’ or ‘class’ in order to explain phenomena, we enumerate the specific, material ways that social class and gender are entangled with users’ interactions with Fitbit devices. In other words, gender, race and class are effects of these material assemblages of power, rather than pre-given structures. The categories of class and gender that we explore here are understood to be events and encounters between discourses, practices, humans and nonhumans (Puar, 2012). As such, and following Haraway (1997), instead of seeing social class and gender as black boxes of power that impact pre-existing groups, we seek to open and explore their inner workings to understand how they are constituted through Fitbit use.
We begin this article by describing the theoretical approaches of Michel Foucault as well as the work of sociomaterialist scholars who have extended Foucault’s approach. Next, we describe the methods of this article, whereby we utilize Fitbit community message boards to explore how Fitbit users describe their experiences. In the presentation of findings, we first discuss the positioning of a Fitbit as a risk management tool in the workplace, illustrating what elements must come together – both human and non-human – to create an environment that enables walking throughout the workday to combat the risks of sedentary work. We further analyse how the idealized Fitbit subject assemblage is productive of a privileged class identity whereby the Fitbit user has autonomy and flexibility within the white-collar workplace. Second, we explore the ways that Fitbit users ‘confessed’ to their past inactivity and how gendered home labour differently enables and constrains some of the users’ abilities to act on their confessions. We consider how Fitbit use produces gendered network effects by examining exercise as a ‘third shift’ of expected physical fitness labour for women (Dworkin and Wachs, 2004). We also analyse how posters on these message boards experienced these gendered forms of surveillance with their Fitbits. Ultimately, one’s ability to engage in the idealized use of the Fitbit, or what we term the ‘Fitbit subject assemblage’, is structured by numerous material and social factors that must be taken into account when examining the mechanics of power in fitness tracking.
Theoretical framework
Foucault, surveillance and power
The work of Michel Foucault is utilized extensively within critical public health (Fox, 2016; Lupton, 1995), as well as within examinations of the QS (Lupton, 2016). Foucault’s work illustrates a shift in the governance of the citizenry, from the exercise of power over death to power over life; from repressive, centralized power to productive forms of what he terms ‘biopower’. Biopower, ‘the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations’ (Foucault, 1990: 140), is exercised so as to encourage the citizenry to take up dominant beliefs about the ‘right’ ways to live one’s life and to manage oneself. Surveillance is an integral part of the exercise of biopower, as people under surveillance often accept and internalize dominant beliefs, particularly health-related expectations around ‘normality’ (Foucault, 1995; Markula and Pringle, 2007) and, extending this in the era of chronic disease epidemiology, the notion that even a healthy individual is potentially ‘at risk’ of ill health and must manage this risk (Lupton, 1995).
The embodiment of these networks of power is also apparent in what Foucault (1990) describes as the modern confessional, whereby the priest as confessor is replaced with experts such as psychiatrists and medical practitioners. It is through these confessions that truths – which are always an effect of power – are established about ourselves. Extending these insights, Rail (2012) has described the ‘obesity’ confessional: First, the fat subjects ‘confess’ their obesity to an authorized confessor such as a fitness coach or a clinician. Second, the expert draws on the dominant obesity discourse to understand the ‘truths’ of the obese subject. Finally, the expert provides a path forward for the obese subject to live a new, non-obese life. An important part of the ‘obesity’ confession is that words are often not required to confess at all; instead, the body confesses its sins as it is assumed that fatness is inherently the product of poor health choices (Rail, 2012).
Foucault (2003b) has described the practices that people engage in to become subjects within power relations as ‘technologies of the self’. These technologies are practices and techniques performed ‘on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality’ (Foucault, 2003b: 146). Technologies of the self play an important role in ‘subjectivation’, whereby humans come to align themselves with particular identities or categories within power relationships (Markula and Pringle, 2007). We utilize these insights to theorize how Fitbit users are expected to improve upon their bodies using the surveillance of Fitbit.
More recently, critical health scholars have called for the de-centring of humans and human agency in health and fitness research (Fox, 2016, 2017; Lupton, 2016; Norman and Moola, 2017). Building on the work of sociomaterialist theorists such as Latour (1987, 2005), Deleuze and Guattari (1987), Haraway (1997) and Barad (2007), these scholars argue that the role of the material – the non-human – in social life must be considered. When agency is the ability to ‘make some difference to a state of affairs’ (Latour, 2005: 52) rather than to consciously exert one’s will, the number of actors can expand considerably beyond humans. Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) concept of assemblage or a web of relationships between ‘humans, nonhumans, practices, ideas and discourses’ (Lupton, 2016: 40) has been a useful one for scholars seeking to characterize relationships between humans and nonhumans while moving beyond object–subject binaries. In Deleuzian thinking, assemblages can also be considered ‘desiring machines’ where desire is a productive and affective force that connects, entangles and is always becoming (Grosz, 1994; Jackson and Mazzei, 2012). This concept highlights that actors do not act alone, but through connections and complex relationships with other actors. The notion of ‘allies’ is also helpful here, as it emphasizes that becoming is an entangled and never-ending process that relies on interconnected networks of humans and nonhumans (Latour, 1999). It is through these allies that a Fitbit, for example, can come into being. Assemblage and other sociomaterialist concepts are particularly relevant for studies of the interaction between humans and technological devices like Fitbits that can act by shaping people’s activities, experiences and understandings of their bodies (Millington, 2016).
Drawing on these insights about the need to decentre humans in health research, we argue that Foucault’s focus on power relationships should not be limited to people, as we have power relationships with things as well. In particular, we look to Lemke’s (2015) discussion of Foucault’s concept of the ‘government of things’ as a way of bringing the materiality of power into focus within Foucauldian theory. Drawing on Foucault’s (2003a) essay ‘Governmentality’, Lemke (2015) takes as a starting point a conceptualization of power as dispersed throughout ‘a complex composed of men and things’ (Foucault, 2003a: 235) to achieve a common good. Foucault suggests that this relation is not dissimilar to governing a ship, where one must govern both the sailors and the boat and its cargo, the conditions at sea and so on. Lemke (2015: 9) writes, government is not ‘interactions between two stable and fixed entities – ‘humans’ and ‘things’. Rather, Foucault employs a relational approach’, whereby humans and things are intertwined in the act of government. Thus, because the ‘government of things’ takes into account the interrelations between humans and nonhumans, it can allow us to move beyond biopolitics as the government of humans only, a move that we make through our analysis of the Fitbit discussion boards. The use of Foucauldian and sociomaterialist theories can shed light on the materiality of health and how humans rely on nonhumans to work towards a healthy lifestyle. While taking into account discourses of beauty, personal responsibility and health, sociomaterialisms provides a framework for thinking through more specifically how this diffuse power operates through practices, discourses, humans and nonhumans.
Methods
To study Fitbit wearers’ experiences of surveillance and the QS, we look to online communities where commenters converse about topics of mutual interest. We focus on the forum on the Fitbit community message board titled ‘Get Moving’, which as of 12 May 2017 had almost 3000 discussion threads on physical activity and lifestyle. The ‘Get Moving’ forum asks users, ‘How will you find your fit today? Discover workout ideas and share your progress’ (Fitbit, 2017). This project developed through the mutual interests of the authors in self-tracking, surveillance and discipline. We have previously examined the ways in which quantification and self-tracking has been utilized within physical education (Author, 2016, 2018), leading to the current project wherein we explore how Fitbit wearers discuss their private self-tracking practices.
Under the assumption that topics with more engagement (in the form of replies to an initial post) had resonated with the greatest number of users, the first author sorted through the posts for each year to determine the posts with the most replies as of 12 May 2017. For each of the 5 years that the ‘Get Moving’ forums have been utilized, she selected the five discussion threads that had the greatest number of replies, creating a sample of 25 discussion threads. Within the sample of 25 discussion threads, we analysed the initial post for each topic as well as the first 10 replies to the initial post, for a total of 11 posts per discussion thread and 275 posts total. Some posts were quite lengthy (over 200 words), while a minority were one sentence or less. Overall, these posts provide a window into the conversations that took place on the Fitbit community message boards regarding physical activity. While demographic information of the posters on the message boards is difficult to ascertain as the majority of posters did not allude to it in their profile, it is worth noting that fitness tracker users tend to skew female, to be in the high-income bracket, and to be between the ages of 35–54 years (NPD Connected Intelligence, 2015). When users discussed their geographical location, it appears most were based in the United States, Canada or Britain.
This study follows established ethical precedents for open-source online research (Eysenbach and Till, 2001). Following Eysenbach and Till (2001), we judged that the posts on the Fitbit forum can be considered ‘public’ rather than ‘private’ based on three criteria: first, one does not have to register with the site to read the forum; second, there are a large number of members (over 1000), making it unlikely that posts are considered confidential or private and third, it is unlikely that members perceive the site to be private given that there were over 30,000 topic threads as of October 2017. With over 30,000 topic threads, the community posting we focus upon is quite large for an Internet forum. This research was not deemed to be human subject research in need of oversight by the University’s Institutional Review Board, and therefore, consent was not obtained from the posters on the message boards. Nonetheless, all posts in this article are devoid of identifying information, and all forum posters’ names have been anonymized (e.g. Forum Poster 1 or FP1).
Throughout this process, role of the workplace as well as home labour in fitness and weight management was identified as important sites within the data. More specifically, we considered how the workplace structures one’s freedom to walk throughout the day, as well as how gender shapes one’s work at home and thus time for exercise. The theoretical sensitivities of the authors, who are inclined towards Foucauldian theories as well as sociomaterialist theories, shaped the way that these findings were developed and theoretically interpreted (Giardina, 2017).
Findings: social class, gender and Fitbit self-surveillance
Our findings illustrate two major topics that were addressed by posters on the Fitbit community message boards. First, the ways that the Fitbit subject assemblage aligns more closely with the white-collar and middle-class paid workforce are assessed. We analyse how posters on the message board responded to risk discourse related to sedentary behaviour in the workplace and the numerous human and non-human actors that come together to allow them to respond to those discourses through workplace exertion and self-tracking. Second, the interaction of gender and self-surveillance is examined in the domain of unpaid home labour, with a focus on the ways that a modern confessional (Rail, 2012) occurred on the message boards as users shared their experiences with physical (in)activity or weight gain. We discuss the gendering of these confessionals, considering in particular the importance of household labour and postpartum weight loss in how the posters discussed their efforts to improve their health and their lives. Despite the seeming neutrality of numbers and quantification, the users of the Fitbit message board illustrated some of the ways that fitness-tracking practices are productive of social class and gender.
Fitbit, social class and the treadmill desk
Much of the focus on the Fitbit message boards centred on the workplace and the challenges that employees face trying to accumulate steps throughout the day. In the numerous discussions about increasing step count or of ways to achieve a very high step count (such as 50,000 steps per day), many if not most of the steps needed to achieve such a high step count were assumed to take place at work. Embedded in these conversations were assumptions about the kinds of work that people typically engage in that lead them to be sedentary, illustrating some of the ways that social class is entangled with Fitbit use. The white-collar worker who is sedentary much of the day is constituted through assemblages of online and telecommunication, desks, computers, memos, reading materials and other components that make work more centred on the mind than the body. As we suggest in the following, the autonomy needed to move around throughout the day within this assemblage is not enjoyed by all and is emblematic of how power is differentially distributed throughout these workplace assemblages.
One such way that Fitbit use is a privileged practice is through the expected orientation to the body, which centres on self-improvement and self-reflection in ways that require considerable time, money and hope for the future (see Savage et al., 2013). The ‘Fitbit subject assemblage’ is intimately related to neoliberal discourses of risk and health – and the machining of desire to produce healthy, risk-free bodies – as users are expected to assess their health risks due to physical inactivity or a high-calorie diet and use the data generated by a Fitbit to change their behaviours and mitigate those risks (Fotopoulou and O’Riordan, 2017; Lupton, 2015). While physical activity has long been positioned as a way to reduce the risk of illness, sedentary behaviours have more recently been targeted as the culprit for chronic illness. The ways that many workplaces are structured today mean that sedentary activities such as sitting at a desk, typing on a computer and using online communication are all commonplace. The catchphrase ‘sitting is the new smoking’ is emblematic of the risk discourse surrounding sedentary behaviour, as extended periods of sitting are alleged to increase a person’s risk of mortality even if they are meeting physical activity guidelines (Owen et al., 2010).
This discourse of risk was part of the message board discussions about exercising while at work, with little consideration for structural barriers that create differential access to workplace movement opportunities. FP1 was most explicit about the need to walk throughout the day to minimize health risks: I sometimes find it hard to remember ot
1
get up: if not to walk, then at least to stretch. […] i DL’d [downloaded] an app that is basically a timer. I have it set to 25 min of work, then it sets to 5 minutes of stretch. There are tons of them out there. Actually my ‘get up and stretch’ reminder says ‘SITTING KILLS: Go get tea!’ and ‘MOAR STEPS!!!’[…]
The connection between risk behaviours and risk reducers was further articulated by FP2: ‘At first, I felt guilty, taking walking breaks. But then I figured, if the smokers can take breaks, so can the walkers!’ Some competing discourses (Markula and Pringle, 2007) are at play in FP2’s narrative here. This user not only reinforces the risk-reducing importance of walking at work, but also provides an additional rationale for justifying risk-reducing walking breaks by analogizing them to risk-inducing smoking breaks. For FP2, the healthy, active Fitbit subject assemblage is defined over and against the unhealthy other (i.e. smokers). At the same time, FP2 expresses guilt about taking a break from paid labour to engage in non-sedentary behaviours, illustrating a conceptualization of a good employee as committed to their work and nothing else, including their mental and physical health (Grosz, 1994).
For others, walking or exercising was discussed as a mechanism for adding steps, rather than due to an explicitly articulated avoidance of risk. This was the case for FP3, who explains, ‘I do sit behind a desk at work but take every chance to leap up and walk somewhere to see a colleague or pass paperwork on’. FP4 had a similar approach: I also try to take the stairs as much as possible at work. If I have to go to the cafeteria for lunch, I often will go to one in a neighboring building rather than the one in my building.
Some went so far as to incorporate activities like yoga into their workday, such as FP5: How large is your office? Mine is a decent size, with a door I can close. I have a yoga mat in my office, and I’ll do yoga. I subscribe to Gaiam TV, which has 100s of yoga videos of varying lengths. I’ll start one and go through the poses in about 10 minutes. […] My Fitbit does record this movement and I burn a few extra calories.
For these users, technologies of the self, such as taking breaks throughout the day, using an office for doing exercises such as yoga and getting up from their desk regularly, were utilized for the purposes of self-improvement.
The quotes from the forum posters above point to the myriad allies – human and non-human actors – that come together as a network to enable and produce these middle-class fitness practices (Latour, 1987). As Latour (1988) might put it, the specific workplace environment to which users are reacting, namely ‘desk sitting’, is an interplay between humans delegating particular functions to technologies (word processing, information gathering and more), while technologies are prescribing behaviours back to us (sitting at a desk being the most germane here). Many actors are required for users to walk to the extent that they document via the message board: apps, smartphones, adjacent buildings, television, offices, office doors and more, all come together to aid these users in their walking.
No ally, however, was discussed with as much reverence as the treadmill desk. This desk was invoked numerous times in the discussion boards not only as a way to build in exercise throughout the day, but further, to achieve the step counts that were considered impossibly high by some. When user FP6 posted to ask ‘Who has the time to average 50,000 steps a day!? How can this be possible?’ FP7 responded, ‘It possible … Theadmil desk for one’. Similarly, in a post about people who log extremely high step counts, FP8 posted a link to a treadmill desk as ‘The secret trick’. Fitbits and other devices such as treadmill desks that get people walking throughout the day are intended to counter the postures that are prescribed by computers and desks. The machined desires of the message board posters that centre around particular versions of fitness and wellness are productive of these assemblages that enmesh fleshy bodies, doors, yoga mats and videos and treadmill desks.
Not all of the users accepted the assumptions inherent in the idealized workplace Fitbit subject assemblage where users are expected to use their work flexibility to take steps throughout the day. The Fitbit subject assemblage is neither discursively stable, nor materially stable. Instead, on these message boards who or what a Fitbit subject assemblage might be is differently considered, negotiated and problematized. FP9, who is worth quoting at length here, criticized the other users’ recommendations: Other than having a conversation with your boss about an actual lunch break, where those 30 minutes to an hour are your time and not company time, there’s not much you can do, except do your job to the best of your ability. Taking a 5 minute break every hour may sound reasonable, but the companies we work for aren’t always thinking very long term about employee health. I can assure you, your co-workers and boss would notice and you might very well get some negative consequences […] 10,000 steps is a fair amount of walking. It’s highly unreasonable to think everyone can get a lot of this done while at work […].
As FP9 notes, the ability to leave one’s desk throughout the day for walking breaks is not a freedom that everyone can enjoy. For example, some workplaces invest in their workers through workplace wellness programmes (Allender et al., 2006) that encourage walking meetings or indeed by promoting Fitbit use as Target has done. However, these workplace practices are typically reserved for highly educated and skilled workers (Target being an exception in this regard) who are considered to be difficult to replace. 2 As a consequence, walking or otherwise exercising throughout the workday is easier for white-collar workers with autonomy and control over their time. While people of many social backgrounds are susceptible to risks associated with sedentary behaviours and physical inactivity, not everyone is equally able to respond to those risks as advocated by the ‘Fitbit subject’ discourse.
It is useful to consider the way that class is produced through these assemblages, since as Slack and Wise (2015) point out, ‘agency and power are not distributed equally throughout networks. (p. 146)’ The assumption apparent on the message board that everyone is enmeshed within the idealized Fitbit subject assemblage that we described above that included a private office, walking breaks, workplace yoga and a treadmill desk does not acknowledge the privilege of such workplaces or the difficulty of accessing these tools that enable steps in the workplace. In this way, class identity can be said to be produced through assemblages that make a high step count while at work possible – or desirable – and those that do not. It is through these assemblages that taking responsibility for your body and health in a workplace where you are highly valued and given the freedom and space to take steps measured by a Fitbit throughout the day can produce a middle- or upper class body and identity.
The Fitbit confessional and household labour as a fitness barrier and facilitator
Weight loss factored into many of the discussions on these message boards, often taking on a confessional tone whereby the posters described their ‘sins’ of physical inactivity or weight gain and how the Fitbit has played a role in their redemption. As forms of communication have shifted in the digital age, so too have confessions. Lupton (2012) has argued that the confessional tone of online social communities such as Facebook and Twitter shifts the confessional dynamic. Everyone can be an ‘expert’ regardless of credentials because a Fitbit produces data that can be measured by anyone against widely publicized health metrics such as the 10,000 steps recommendation or body mass index (BMI). Who is authorized to be an expert, and who is enabled to participate in the gaze through social media, is a group that is becoming ever greater in number with devices like the Fitbit.
The ‘Fitbit confessional’ often included a tale of realizing how inactive or overweight the user had become and some kind of redemption where they set themselves on the right path of weight loss or physical activity. As an illustrative example, FP10 discussed her ‘rock bottom’ moment and how she has since changed her lifestyle: One of the biggest things is that I had no realization of how stagnant I’d become since graduating college and having 3 surgeries. I felt like I was active enough and that I was doing plenty. Wrong! I was barely getting 3,000 steps per day, but it felt like so many more because the decline was rather gradual. I’ve had the ‘Bit about 6 months now, and I’ve already done two races and I’m starting training for a half marathon.
Other posters responded positively to such confessions, sometimes offering their own or agreeing that Fitbits help to diagnose inactivity. FP11 stated, ‘Great point [FP10]. THAT is what fitbit is good for. Helping you realize, over time, that you may have become really inactive. It does so because it helps you measure and become mindful of how much you move’. In these confessions, Fitbits are positioned as the experts that diagnose the user as being unacceptably inactive. With the proof of numbers, penitents can recognize their level of inactivity and seek to address it with the help of the feedback generated by their Fitbit. The force of desire for a body that is healthy and fit produces these subjects who count their steps and the confessions in which the resultant numbers are entangled. Pleasure is an important aspect of these confessions; in those same discussions of denial, the pleasure that posters experience in achieving goals (‘I’ve already done two races’) and in working towards their goals (‘I’m starting training for a half marathon’) suggest that pleasures are both denied and experienced within the Fitbit subjectivity.
While Foucault’s theorizations of the modern confessional focus on the interactions between humans – the person who is confessing, the confessor and the power/knowledge of humans that pervades this relationship – it is important to note the non-human actors that play a vital role. Numbers are important in these realizations of ‘rock bottom’, and these numbers come from a variety of measurement tools and statistics. For example, numbers on a weight scale have long influenced a person’s perception of their body and perhaps their need to change it, as was the case for FP12: ‘I got the message about 9 months ago when i hit 249 pounds and my physician suggested gastric bypass…i looked into it and decided that it wasn’t for me and began a new lifestyle of eating and exercise’. The weight scale is a vital part of the production of obesity, assigning people to acceptable and unacceptable categories. Weight scales turn fleshy bodies into a number that is perceived to convey the truth of that body.
Increasingly, however, the Fitbit is a part of this confessing assemblage. This confessing assemblage is the entanglement of discourses and desires that are critical of physical inactivity and weight gain, online message boards where the confessions occur, the users who make and observe the confessions, and now, the network of self-tracking devices and apps that quantify the individual failings that bring about these confessions. FP10 stated that she ‘was barely getting 3,000 steps per day’ at her low point. FP13 voiced support for another’s confession: ‘I was in the same boat as you, got 2000 steps on a good day. Finally decided to start walking at the mall’. Extending this assemblage, the Fitbit band is not particularly useful by itself, as the majority of feedback to users is displayed on the Fitbit app that necessitates the use of a smartphone as well. Apps like the Fitbit app and MyFitnessPal, an app that calculates calories consumed and calories expended to keep users on track to reach a goal weight, are an important part of the non-human confessional as well. These devices make legible the numbers that position a person as healthy or unhealthy. It is not only a person who interprets confessions and diagnoses ill health; in this case, it is a step counter and an app that do so. The ‘confessing assemblage’ described above highlights the human and non-human actors that enact these confessions.
Rather than being an acorporeal space where people can form limitless subjectivities, as Ringrose (2011) notes, ‘online space is … “plugged into” offline space in a continual flow of energies that constitute the virtual/real’ (p. 601), making those spaces productive of social norms such as class and gender striations. As a result, some of these ‘Fitbit confessional’ discussions pointed to the ways that gendered power dynamics regarding home labour, or the ‘second shift’, are produced within these assemblages. The second shift, which is the home labour that women are expected to do once they finish their ‘first shift’ of paid labour, (Hochschild, 1989) is an infinite collection of humans and nonhumans that need to be cleaned, sorted and put away in a never-ending cycle. The fact that the second shift refers to the expectation that women will do this work speaks to the ways in which these humans, nonhumans and discourses come together to produce gendered home labour dynamics. In a 2013 discussion, FP14 discussed her ‘turning point’: Last January I reached a turning point. I had gotten to 278 lbs., have two bad knees and an aortic heart valve with stenosis […] I told my husband that I needed to change and could not eat the foods he loves anymore. We came to an agreement whereby he has a freezer filled with his favorite home-cooked meals and I eat what works for me. I signed up for MyFitnessPal and have now a fitbit force which is synced with Pal. To date I have lost 70 lbs. and intend to continue until I am at a healthy weight. […] I could barely walk last year and am now doing a mile a day on my treadmill. Just take the first step and never look back.
FP14 could not simply choose to change her lifestyle on her own, just as agency is not only the property of humans within these assemblages. Her lifestyle changes entailed negotiating with her husband – and food storage techniques that enable more flexibility – to plan to change her diet such that it would not interfere with ‘the foods he loves’. As FP14’s post suggests, her lifestyle change created even more home labour for herself since she has to prepare separate meals for herself and for her husband. The desire that produces FP14’s suppression of appetite and pleasure for the purposes of weight loss – and indeed, the pleasure that comes from self-denial as well as success in achieving one’s health and fitness goals – intersected with her husband’s needs that opposed hers and the technologies that were needed to accommodate such a lifestyle. This post explicitly links the second and third shifts of labour that women are expected to engage in, thus suggesting how the third shift of physical fitness practices can put stress on the second shift of household tasks such as cooking. In other words, expectations of feminized labour alongside everything that is entailed to make a lifestyle change are the products of the agency of gendered discourses, practices, desires, humans and nonhumans.
In other cases, household labour was evoked as enabling more steps, making the case that the second shift can be health-promoting. FP15 began the conversation ‘How do people get above 20,000 steps?’ with this post: ‘I am active (run three miles in the morning, work all day, goof around with children in the evening while I do housework but getting above 20000 steps per day seems elusive to me. Help!’ FP16 replied, ‘I hit 20.000 one time. It was my day off and I walked for about 3 hours, grocery shopped and was active around the house. I semi ignored my family, it was crazy! […]’. For both of these users, household labour is thought to increase step counts as recorded by a Fitbit. In this case, being an active parent – playing with one’s children, maintaining the home – means being a physically active parent, with a high step count as the result. If consumption is part of how women’s identities come to be defined (Ringrose and Walkerdine, 2008; Skeggs, 1997), we would argue that the consumption of a Fitbit alongside a high step-accumulating lifestyle is productive of the identity of a responsible and respectable mother who takes their health seriously. Gender here is enacted through connections between the home, the workplace, the store, the modes of transportation used between them, and the myriad other actors that produce steps and activity throughout the day that are positioned as the activities of women. In other words, power was not only exercised between humans; nonhumans had their say. Power shaped the sexist structural barriers as well as gendered stereotypes that influenced how users engage with their fitness trackers, such as time limitations for physical activity that are imposed by the gendered second shift and therefore their abilities to embody the Fitbit subject assemblage.
Conclusion
The online community examined in this study is a site for confessions of past failures, current failures and the road to better health practices. Users assess their risk and utilize technologies to engage in self-improvement, but they do so in diverse contexts that differently allow for them to assume the dominant Fitbit subjectivity assemblage. Recommendations for getting extra steps throughout the workday all but ignore the privileges that are required to take breaks throughout the day or even to feel that your body and health are worth investing in over the long term (Savage et al., 2013). The gendered second and third shifts of labour are shaped by Fitbit as well, in the ways that home labour is folded into fitness discourses for women, whether as a barrier or a facilitator to fitness. As women are being told that they can do and be anything (Ringrose and Walkerdine, 2008), especially with the help of a Fitbit, the same barriers persist that lead to considerable challenges to achieving this Fitbit subject assemblage.
By exploring what it is that makes up the Fitbit subject assemblage, this analysis has examined the implied standards, discourses and material objects of Fitbit use that shape how users try to assemble themselves as ethical subjects within fitness discourses. The Fitbit is a technology of the self that favours particular relations, bodies and social positions over others. A Fitbit is not used on its own; technologies such as weight scales, smartphones, fitness apps and caloric information enable users to track multiple aspects of their bodies and lives. Extending this net even further, the ability to take walks throughout the day and to eat meals that allow for a negative energy balance (according to the MyFitnessPal app) depends on a number of material factors such as timer apps, freezers, sidewalks, treadmills, walking paths and more. It is important to consider the workings of these networks of actors, not least because these networks shed light on the ways that power operates through Fitbit. For all of the emphasis on personal responsibility within these discussions, the ability to take personal responsibility seems deeply dependent on networks of allies.
The goal of this article has been to extend the analysis of Fitbit use and Fitbit subjectivities beyond the individual to the social-material circumstances that enable particular ways of being a Fitbit subject for some, while constraining others. Through an examination of the material ways in which gender and class are enacted through Fitbit use, the ‘black box’ of power, to borrow from Latour (1987), is opened. As Harman (2009) explains, A black box is any actant so firmly established that we are able to take its interior for granted. The internal properties of a black box do not count as long as we are concerned with its input and output. […] a black box allows us to forget the massive network of alliances of which it is composed, as long as it functions smoothly. (pp. 33–34)
To see the Fitbit as a black box is to see it as a device that objectively reports the activities of the user and equally enables all to embody the idealized Fitbit subject assemblage through access to self-knowledge. By opening the black box of the Fitbit, our hope has been to cast the net of how power functions with and through these devices a little wider.
These questions are of political importance. In a time where wearing a Fitbit is not necessarily a choice, as is the case for those at ORU or for Target employees, understanding how power works through Fitbit – both discursively and materially – can help critical health scholars challenge many of these assumptions about personal responsibility. While it is theoretically possible to become a Fitbit subject from any social location, it is undoubtedly more difficult to do so if you do not have the flexibility to walk throughout the day, a body that can take 10,000 steps per day, the availability of safe and interesting areas to walk in, or even the appearance of a person who can walk in those safe areas without arousing suspicion. By examining and interrogating these power dynamics, a better understanding of how the QS is shaping fitness practices – and indeed, for whom – can be better understood.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the University of Maryland Flagship Fellowship.
