Co-evolving with self-tracking technologies

Introduction

As digital technologies merge with everyday lives, questions arise as to the extent and manner in which those lives are technologically mediated, modified, or made. A rich body of research in fields ranging from science and technology studies and philosophy of technology to anthropology and media studies explores the interpenetration of technological and human forces and agencies, paying attention to the constant co-evolving, coupling, and mutual re-tuning of human subjects and their technological companions. Such studies suggest that current developments are characterized by intense human–technology interactions that call for a deeper understanding of their elements and underpinnings (Hayles, 2006; Latour, 2005; Lupton, 2016; Verbeek, 2005, 2011).

The Quantified Self (QS), an international collective that shares insights gained through self-quantification and data analysis, has served as a rich ethnographic site for thinking about this co-evolving and the contributions made by technologies to the shaping and modeling of human aims and values, and the capacities and collaborations that define them (Berson, 2015; Greenfield, 2016; Nafus and Sherman, 2014; Sharon and Zandbergen, 2016; Wright, 2018). Ethnographic research describes self-trackers who actively work with technological artifacts, whether in the form of digital devices or personal data, collaborations that mediate and modify human presence and perception, behavior, and decision-making (Bode and Kristensen, 2016). Devices and data contri-bute to new ways of seeing the self and shaping self-understanding and self-expression, suggesting a vision of technology that in its concrete materiality influences not only selves, bodies, and socialities but also communication and learning (Ruckenstein and Pantzar, 2015; Lomborg and Frandsen, 2016).

Our study of the Danish QS community (2012–2017) serves as an additional context and framing to earlier research in the field, offering corrections and modifications to aid future studies. Research on the community globally has mostly focused on carefully curated international QS conferences, as well as meetings in the Bay Area, highlighting personally rewarding self-tracking practices that have a certain stability. In the Danish case, active self-trackers participate in the international QS community and successfully combine their interest in tracking technologies with a professional calling; their careers as self-trackers tend to be relatively long-term. Yet, our account also brings to the fore the perspectives of less committed QS participants who might attend a couple of meetings and self-track for a limited period of time, then lose interest in it. The more dedicated, technologically savvy self-trackers, who have professional interest in software and device development, and the more everyday and leisurely uses of self-tracking devices reveal two different facets of the self-tracking phenomena (Didžiokaitė et al., 2018). By attending to the termination of self-tracking practices, we consider the more mundane rather than semi-professional aspects of self-tracking and explore how self-trackers define and redefine the limits and aims of self-tracking. This provides a reminder that everyday lives are characterized by volatile and less stable inter-relationality with self-tracking technologies which might be rejected, ignored, forgotten, tampered with, or used sporadically and irregularly (Kristensen and Prigge, 2018; Lazar et al., 2015).

We argue that self-tracking practices are set up and operate as “a laboratory of the self” in which the relevant technologies are used as resources and collaborative possibilities in the course of self-making and self-improvement. Departing from post-phenomenological approaches (Verbeek, 2005, 2011), we seek evidence of how technologies mediate perceptions and action, and condition experience. By examining how technologies energize people’s aims, and also how they might be experienced as limiting the everyday, we demonstrate that self-tracking technologies become participants in the transformation of self-experience; some aspects of the self are amplified while others are reduced and restricted. Focusing on how technologies assist in increasing the consciousness of one’s agentic capabilities and heighten awareness of human intentionality, we show how tracking technologies are embraced despite their larger political-economy context of “surveillance capitalism,” characterized by privacy threats and opaque forms of datafied power and domination (Zuboff, 2015).

We thus seek to understand data-driven developments in light of human and non-human agencies, demonstrating that this does not mean abandoning a critical stance; rather, it draws attention to alternative developments that can be used as additional points of critical engagement. With a focus on a form of co-evolving with tracking technologies that is non-coercive and voluntary, we follow “the exceptional” with the intent of exploring whether marginal developments can operate as a fruitful starting point for thinking about future societal trajectories. Here, our study has wider implications for research on new media and digital technologies by attending to how consumer devices and services either become, or fail to become, part of processes of self-making and the defining and organizing of daily lives in the shorter or longer term (Ruckenstein, 2017). Suggesting that the broader insights into the technology-self-relationship that can be drawn based on our study imply a need to pay careful attention to the formation of the digital technology market, we point toward the ways in which calculative practices and metrics become part of the interpenetration of technological and human forces and agencies and how they might be challenged.

Transforming the self into a laboratory

Earlier research argues that the self-discovery through numbers promoted by the QS conforms to the model of the ideal neoliberal citizen: the self-optimizing individual who voluntarily collects data on their own health and well-being, taking control of and regulating physiologies and everyday behavior (Depper and Howe, 2017; Fotopoulou and O’Riordan, 2016; Lupton, 2013a, 2013b; Sanders, 2017). As Bjitah Ajana (2017) puts it, “At the heart of the Quantified Self movement is, in fact, a desire for ‘control’” (p. 5). We recognize that neoliberal and corporate forces are at play in terms of self-tracking; self-monitoring practices are known to accelerate self-responsibilization in terms of health and well-being (Ruckenstein and Schüll, 2017). Yet, with the aim of uncovering human–technology inter-relationality, our study approaches QS-inspired self-tracking more as an “an unknown” (Dyer, 2016) than a pre-defined ideological project, querying what the “new intimacy of surveillance” (Berson, 2015: 40) can teach us about how people actively and consciously co-evolve with technologies.

Research on self-tracking, focusing on the social, narrative, and affective dimensions, offers support for exploring “the laboratory of the self,” framing self-tracking and associated human–technology interactions as metrics-enhanced self-experimentation and discovery. These studies can be read within the anthropological tradition that challenges notions of the individual and the self as bounded entities with a fixed and stable ontology (Nafus, 2016; Strathern, 2005); instead, the self emerges through self-tracking “as in a constant state of movement, directed by the desire to detect and form new alliances or entities” (Ruckenstein, 2014). The notion of “the emergent self,” constituted through self-tracking practices, offers an important point of departure for exploring the co-evolving and coupling of humans and their technological counterparts. Sharon and Zandbergen (2016) demonstrate that rather than achieving a perfectly adjusted and static QS, self-tracking supports a more dynamic and situational “quantifying self,” one actively engaged with data practices and other quantifying selves. Schüll (2016) explores how the time-series analysis of self-data allows people to detect temporal aspects of their selves, while Sherman (2016) discusses self-tracking as a practice in which bits of the self, extracted and abstracted, become material for restructuring lived experience. Sharon (2016) also points to the mutual constitution and intertwining of data and the self, as well as the emergence of subjective feelings and communicative possibilities in connection with the use of digital technologies. Beyond research on the QS, scholars observe the emergent self by exploring how self-tracking channels experiences and trains “sensing.” In their ethnography of hypoglycemia, for example, Mol and Law (2004: 48) discuss how the use of measurement devices “train inner sensitivity” to blood glucose levels, promoting what they call “intro-sensing.” In addition, Pink and Fors (2017: 2) note that self-tracking technologies mediate “people’s tacit ways of being in the world” promoting an awareness of the mind-body in the environment.

As we will demonstrate below, when seen through the concept of the laboratory of self, self-tracking consists of processes of objectification and subjectification, framing new possibilities as well as imperatives for self-exploration and self-improvement (Foucault, 1988). By using techniques that promise to identify and adjust aspects of the self and control, the vital processes of body and mind, self-tracking aids in transforming the self into a laboratory. In what follows, we explore the effects and experiences related to QS-inspired self-monitoring, paying attention to the human–technology interface and the mediating role of calculative practices in the shaping of daily experiences and how they are understood. The use of digital technologies more broadly has led to shifts in the representation, knowledge, and practices of the self and body, promoting new forms of visualization and communication but also commodification and market formation (Ruckenstein, 2017). “Increasingly, the market sees you from within, measuring your body and emotional states, and watching as you move around your house, the office, or the mall,” as Fourcade and Healy (2017: 23) observe. Device makers have never before been so intimately and parasitically involved in the shaping of daily lives, not only in their urging that people measure themselves but also in feeding those measurements back to them in order to make the measured accountable to themselves. Technologies invite people to engage with their emergent self—as they seek to know and improve their lives—and re-fashion themselves with the aid of metrics. In this framework, the concept of the laboratory of the self provides support for exploring the applications of metrics and studying how numbers and charts are seen as having both positive qualities and negative restrictions. As we will demonstrate below, QS-inspired self-tracking uses metrics as way to gain consciousness of the self and as a guide to strengthening agentic forces until they go astray or nothing more can be learned with them.

Meet the Danish QS community

The Danish QS group was founded by Jakob Eg Larsen, an associate professor of computer science, Simon Bentholm, a behavioral designer, and Anders Høegh Nissen, a journalist and host of “Hard drive,” a national radio program covering technological developments, after the three had attended an international QS conference in Amsterdam. They invited speakers for the first meeting at the Danish Design Center in August 2012 and around 75 participants attended. Since then, there have been two to four yearly meetings that follow the international QS standard: the first hour is reserved for social networking, which is followed by “show-and-tell presentations” during which self-trackers narrate their experiments in 10-minute time slots, detailing what they did, how they did it, and what they learned. Normally 20–40 people attend, half of them newcomers. After the first meeting, people with a commercial interest in the field increasingly started to participate in order to get feedback or promote their products, then journalists and students also started to show up to “observe” the community, so at one point there were more people observing than actual participants. This development was restrained by the organizers’ stressing that participants should have a personal interest in self-tracking.

The first author conducted ethnographic fieldwork among Danish self-trackers in 2012–2017, during which period she participated in most yearly meetings and followed 18 self-trackers (15 men and 3 women) who have been repeatedly interviewed and engaged in discussion over the years. The gender imbalance of the research participants replicates the imbalance in the QS community. The participants attending QS meetings in Denmark, most of whom are male, comprise computer scientists and engineers with both private and professional interests in technologies, owners or employees of software companies in the field of digital health or self-tracking, health sector professionals and students writing their theses on self-tracking. Several of the Danish participants develop technologies themselves, like Jannik, a student of mathematics, who introduced an electrocardiogram (EKG) he had built; or software engineer Ivan, who made a blood glucose monitoring device. Others, such as Jakob, Thomas, and Mette, ¹ developed data analytics and data-driven therapeutics and interventions. An atmosphere of creativity and entrepreneurship characterizes the meetings, with self-trackers presenting their research designs and latest discoveries.

Discussions with research participants covered their use of self-tracking technologies and the aims and results of data practices and interpretation, with an interest in how notions of self-optimization and self-improvement become articulated and experienced over a longer time span. The initial discussions set the scene for how the QS-initiated self-tracking related to broader questions of surveillance. When tracking is voluntary, the laboratory is of one’s own making—the tracker is both the measurer and measured—and tracking is likely to be associated with a sense of autonomy and increased agency, promoting conscious intentionality in the context of human–technology mediation. Consequently, self-trackers feel that they navigate and deal with issues of commodification of data on their own terms; for instance, one of them underlines that he never shares “raw data.” Another one, a young woman, talks about her avoidance of free applications and services, including Facebook and Gmail, as she would lose control of her data by using them. Instead, she prefers devices from trustworthy companies, where the data is not commodified outside the company. Overall, however, potential forms of datafied power and domination were not very salient in the community during the fieldwork period and only started to be discussed more widely toward the end of it.

The first round of interviews, conducted between 2012 and 2013, focused on the interaction between self and technology in the everyday with an emphasis on the human agency pole: it was easier for the participants to discuss their own agency, rather than the agencies of the non-human. Typically, self-tracking initially focused on self-optimization with a purpose of improving pre-defined aspects of everyday life—in relation to work, productivity, exercise or food intake, for instance. Over time, however, the aim of self-tracking shifted toward more open-ended self-experimentation and self-discovery. People also started to lose interest in self-tracking altogether, suggesting that they had arrived at “a dead end” with the practice. The concept of the laboratory of the self was developed as a methodological aid for further inquiry. To explore the different aspects of self-tracking, a longitudinal focus was introduced and the second round of interviews, conducted between 2015 and 2017, tested whether there was a more general temporal sequence or pattern to be detected in the experiences of self-trackers. The interviews suggested temporal shifts or phases of events that explain how the laboratory of the self materializes over time. In the following, we present empirical material, thematically organized, detailing the initial enthusiasm for “objectifying the self” and the resulting self-discoveries, but also later outcomes: the gradual fading of the novelty of self-tracking practices, the integration of self-tracking practices into everyday life or their complete abandonment.

Assisted by metrics

The empirical material suggests that the self-tracker acts as “an everyday scientist,” using the everyday as the location and object of experimentation. Numbers and visualizations are utilized to offer a value-free hermeneutic, transforming life, in all its ambiguity and messiness, into controllable “life slices” (Ruckenstein, 2014; Pantzar and Ruckenstein, 2017). By promoting a move away from embodied and emotional dimensions of the self, tracking devices generate confrontations with “the authentic self,” as suggested by Mette, an owner of the US-based company Mymee, which specializes in “data-driven coaching.” Mette explains that people tend to see things in black and white terms in the everyday, letting their moods affect how they respond to the world and their perceptions of “who they really are.” Self-monitoring, Mette argues, is a means of making the data speak for, and through, the human subject: data can be integrated into a “checklist” and give valuable insights into more subjective questions like “Where am I heading?,” or “How am I doing?.” When data sets are combined to explore how the intake of different food products affects well-being or how sleep patterns affect daily performance, a visible concrete “gestalt” emerges from the data with which the tracker can engage.

This dimension of self-tracking resonates with the notion of mechanical objectivity, which attained dominance as a scientific ideal in the middle of the 19th century. In mechanical objectivity, the goal is to reduce human interpretation by relying on machines, such as cameras and microscopes, and mechanical action in seeking evidence (Daston and Galison, 2010). Much like cameras, self-tracking devices and applications seek to displace human agency in the production of images of life; visualizing sleep cycles or monitoring heart rate variability proposes a mechanical and objective way to capture aspects of self and the everyday through data-gathering and analysis. Data visualizations display correlations that force self-trackers to confront seemingly objective aspects of their life: the actual effects of their actions. The act of selecting the data points—whether they concern sleep, menstrual cycles, stress, sneezes, bodily pain, weight gain, consumption of certain food products, or felt anger—assists in orienting the self-tracker toward those aspects of life that need improvement. Jannik, a student of engineering, who was 23 years old when first encountered in 2013, provides an example of an attempt to shake off the human bias by means of mechanical objectivity. He tracked his time use, movements (through Google Maps), and intake of food (by registering calories, vitamins, and minerals) and phrased his project in the following manner: “I like making lists to see what I actually do, and where I can optimize.” According to this logic, self-tracking technologies accumulate self-data in quantities that would be impossible to keep in mind and remember. The acquired data gives a sense of security, of having practices documented, thus serving the purpose of easing the burden of keeping track, while identifying areas where it might be possible to improve and optimize.

Discovering parts of the self

Mechanical objectivity is an important characteristic of the laboratory of the self, offering support for detecting aspects of the self in the data. It tends, however, to fall short when self-trackers start to make sense of self-data in the context of their lives. Here, a more “situational” (Pantzar and Ruckenstein, 2017) relationship to self-data emerges as it allows trackers to become “conscious” of themselves, their capacities and creative potentials. Despite the fact that technology-savvy self-trackers often apply vocabulary originating in computer science—such as “test,” “boost,” “optimize,” and “calibrate”—in practice, human intention, agency, and goal-setting frame the more open-ended tracking activity. One of the Danish self-trackers, Jens, recounts how intensively he engages with the process of measuring, trying out “all those gizmos” and learning what he could do with them. He points out that the goals and results of tracking are not the main ambition; rather, he finds the process itself pleasurable and, for him, as immersing as playing. He compares self-tracking to “being an adventurer,” exploring “new frontiers” and seeing “where it leads.” Personal laboratories call for open-ended journeying and a strengthening of the agentic forces of the self. “Let us see what we can do with this,” as Jens puts it, explaining that “the point is to force you to do things that you do not habitually do” in order to create “an experience that you become aware of, which creates a new experience.”

Self-tracking offers a “means of animating the world” which, as Thrift (2011) suggests, “fram[e] the world in new ways which deliver a kind of structured uncertainty from which it is possible to detect new things” (p. 22). Echoing earlier research on the QS, Danish self-trackers describe how the data in itself is nothing, and that the self is not an entity that can be firmly located and identified (Sharon and Zandbergen, 2016; Sherman, 2016). Instead, the self emerges in the process of self-exploration. In practical terms, self-tracking produces a state in which self-trackers become conscious of their agentic aims and powers. This occurs, for instance, in the process of reflecting upon the available metrics, in selecting which variables and data points to use or when observing the visualized data.

As one self-tracker suggested, “It is all about finding a direction”: gaining awareness through reflecting on the intentionality and direction of tracking, and in that process arriving at an experiential and “felt” understanding of oneself (Van Den Eede, 2015). Tracking establishes a contact point with “the self” as aspects of the self emerge in the processes of realizing a human intention and the insights are then shared with others. The sharing of data interpretations in QS meetings is crucial because the practice provides visibility, inspiration, and feedback (Lomborg and Frandsen, 2016), which indicates that the use of data and metrics is not merely a tool but has a performative and social objective.

In QS meetings, participants discuss whether it is possible to find solid data points to track productivity, creativity, or happiness. They acknowledge that data cannot be completely detached from the everyday, and neither can the emergent self be accessed through mechanical objectivity alone. The quantification of a particular area typically serves to expand the reach and salience of that area in the context of daily lives; for instance, using a pedometer intensifies the act of walking. Yet, as Sebastian describes, such intensification should not be confused with a comprehensive representation of the self or the everyday:

Everything is relative … to me it does not make sense to talk about looking for a kind of substance. Or getting to know myself. Because it changes all the time. But I do find it an entertaining task for about three months. It is all about saying, what happens if I adjust the context? Do I change? Or if I adjust the context, do I get where I want to be? Then I must try that.

Like Sebastian, many self-trackers recognize and reflect on both the possibilities and limitations of self-tracking, as well as the dependency and interconnectedness of the intention that guides tracking and the interventions and effects that follow. The self emerges in what one is tracking, produced along with the increased awareness that accompanies human–technology mediation and translated into expressions of the self. From this perspective, the laboratory of the self particularly caters for biohackers and explorers with an inner urge to excavate and expand the range of experience (Ruckenstein and Pantzar, 2017).

Conditions for intro-sensing

The laboratory of the self, which the tracking technologies help to create, assists in the channeling of bodily reactions, everyday doings and environmental experiences (Pink and Fors, 2017): during this process, one can become more conscious of the beating heart or the daily acts of walking (Oxlund, 2012; Pantzar and Ruckenstein, 2015). This kind of intensification of the self and the everyday is intimately linked to sensory experiences, translating into “a certain degree of self-centeredness,” as Axel puts it. He explains how he started to self-track in order to optimize his daily exercise with the aim of losing weight and “relating to himself”:

I cannot remake myself without concentrating on myself. I had arrived at a place where it was necessary to start relating to myself. I had related to things around me and very little to myself.

An increased intensity in self-focus can feel liberating. Axel used Endomondo to track his daily running, referring to the activity as “his free zone.” The intensity is also reflected in an increased bodily awareness. An example is provided by Jens, who, in the early days of his self-tracking, talked about his diet being “fun” because he could observe his progress in graphic visualizations, comparing the chart detailing his weight to that of his running habits. While doing that, he observed something that he did not expect from his weight-tracking: he enjoyed eating more than he used to, with a newly gained confidence. As he put it, “In all the superficial hollowness I suddenly became more aware. It was a total sensory experience.”

The experiences of Danish self-trackers resonate with the notion of “intro-sensing” (Mol and Law, 2004) when describing increased awareness in terms of sensory impact, for instance, the felt effects of eating and exercise. Thomas talks about “the sharpening of the senses,” and also the “production of new senses” that make him more conscious of “happenings” of which he had not previously been aware. He poses a series of questions to illuminate this:

What happens with your blood sugar after you have eaten, and when you are eating? Do you get tired? What is happening? Do you feel any tickling? Any coating on the tongue? Without the loop with the instrumentalization, those things would have never happened.

With “instrumentalization,” Thomas refers to the conversion of events and experiences into sensor-based and data-driven frameworks. In a similar vein, Jakob describes how tracking sharpens the senses: “you can suddenly just sense it.” He used a pedometer to measure his steps, aiming for the customary 10,000 per day. At some point, he began to be able to skip looking at the numbers; he could just “feel” when he had reached his goal. In a study of videos of QS show-and-tell talks, Smith and Vonthethoff (2017) argue that such conversion diverts the attention away from embodied senses toward a technical sensing apparatus: “bodily intuition is being outsourced to, if not displaced by, the medium of unbodied data.” Danish self-trackers offer a complementary account, suggesting that numbers and charts are crucial for intro-sensing, teaching the individual how to feel the body from the inside and training inner sensitivity.

“Hitting the wall”

The longitudinal perspective of our study demonstrates that expectations concerning tracking vary and develop over time. The technology that at first stimulates and heightens awareness of intentionality and agentic forces and senses can become increasingly limiting in terms of self-experience. When re-contacted after a period, several self-trackers talked about how tracking restricted their lives or contradicted their subjective experiences. The original enthusiasm for the focused attention on some aspect of the self or the everyday had shifted into a more negative or skeptical attitude. They had arrived at “dead ends” for various reasons: devices break and batteries die, they no longer have fun when playing with the gadgets or the data visualizations, they fail to see progress or have succeeded in arriving at a specific goal, and tracking feels burdensome and restricting. Simon noticed that tracking disturbed the actual experience of running in nature or meditating, as attention centers on the monitoring task rather than the milieu and embodied perceptions. Examples such as these urge self-trackers to ask whether the use of technology resonate with their aspirations as human beings.

Arriving at “dead ends” does not necessarily mean that self-tracking has failed, or that it does not work; rather, experiencing technology as too limiting and restrictive is a crucial element in how self-trackers detach themselves from their personal laboratories. Axel’s motivation to self-optimize stopped when he could no longer improve his performance. “It is only fun as long the results go in one direction,” he explains. After having lost 10 kg he had reached his objective and felt no urge to continue. In order to motivate them, numbers need to inspire and offer validation in terms of self-tracking aims, or personal worth (Lupton, 2017). For the self-trackers trained as engineers, software developers, or designers, arriving at “a dead end” is a challenge to build better devices and to work toward more engaging and socially rewarding software solutions. The restrictions of current technology fuel a sense of agency, inspiration, and creativity. Jakob, who develops self-tracking technologies, compares himself to users with limited capabilities to surpass equipment limitations:

If the possibilities for use that are integrated into the technology do not support what I can do or what I want, then I might hit the wall. But because I can take out a splint and put it together in a new way, I can find a way out. Then I reach [a new goal], although 99% [of users] have already given up. They think: ‘Well I couldn’t [do it]’, and then it [the tracking device] goes into the cupboard.

As Jakob rightly suggests, most self-trackers abandon their devices when they “hit the wall.” The capabilities to go forward with self-tracking after “hitting the wall” form an important dividing line between professionally committed QS members and the more mundane users, who track in order to reach certain pre-defined goals, sporadically, or for shorter periods of time (Didžiokaitė et al., 2018; Lazar et al., 2015).

An example of “hitting the wall” is provided by Simon, who noticed that tracking disturbed, and can destroy, the experience, as attention centers on the monitoring task rather than the milieu and embodied perceptions. Simon used a log to write notes about his meditation and a device to measure his pulse in order to track his physiological state of relaxation. Increasingly, however, he found that the focus on measurement destroyed the meditation flow:

If you are carrying a device that actively does something other than meditation, then the focus might shift from the meditation to the device that you are carrying. What happens is that you might become more conscious of the device.

When Simon talks about the disturbing aspects of self-monitoring, he details that the tracking technology requires work and the device adjusting: “You know, place it on the earlobe and all that. It was a rather intricate procedure when I just needed half an hour to meditate.” In his case, the benefits of self-tracking diminished over time, and eventually self-tracking became neither very valuable nor worth the effort:

I had to realize that I did not really look at the numbers; rather it had become a burden. I still want to develop positively, but I do not think I need numbers for that.

In a similar vein, when we first met Jannik, he was concerned about optimizing his time use and his tracking was focused on eliminating “wasted time” in his life. He gradually realized, however, that he was becoming stressed about spending so much time on optimizing, and increasingly started to prioritize socializing, seeking “life quality” rather than optimizing his time use. Examples such as these underline the ongoing negotiation of the value of tracking technologies, and their positioning as part of the lifeworld. Thus, the longitudinal research perspective captures “the laboratory of the self” but also its gradual dissolution.

Integration into everyday life

Simon still uses the RunKeeper to track his running and he continues to write about his meditating in his log—although he has stopped measuring heart rate variability during the sessions—even if he sometimes misses “the objective data” to evaluate his progress. He feels that self-monitoring during meditation brings “lots of luggage into something that is relatively pure.” Jens, meanwhile, suggests in an email that he is in “a tracking limbo.” Although he is still tracking his weight, pulse, and running, he no longer interacts actively with the gathered data. A year later, Jens confirms that the data collections receive little attention. As suggested by Pink and Fors (2017), Jens’ self-tracking happens “in the background of the everyday, and is encountered sporadically”:

I do not think of it as self-tracking. I think of it as me and my phone. That is how it is when I go running: I start Endomondo. Some years ago I was very concerned about my weight. In the morning the first thing I did was to look at my iPad to see the curve. I have not looked at it for more than two months now. It is the same thing with my Apple watch. I never look at it. I know I produce some numbers that I can return to, if I want. But I do that very seldom.

The experiences of Danish self-trackers suggest that “the laboratory of the self” instigates intensified self-work but, in the longer term, might dissolve or atrophy, thereby emphasizing self-tracking as a realm of incremental knowing and learning (Pink and Fors, 2017). Axel still talks about optimizing in relation to self-tracking, but the word has taken on a new meaning as a more general goal in life; optimization is about the quality of life, involving “softer” and less quantifiable aspects of existence, such as maintaining a life/work balance, providing a nice atmosphere at the office and being a spouse and a parent. He explains,

If optimization becomes an end in itself, it becomes rather hollow. Especially if you are not an elite sportsman. What are you then trying to achieve? On the other hand, I also believe it contains something good. That part about trying to improve as a human being. That is more of a life-long goal.

Jannik remarks on the usefulness of self-tracking for a certain period of time in order to “calibrate knowledge about the self.” As he puts it, “By using data, you can adjust your intentions and eradicate some prejudices about yourself.” He continues,

In the end, we do not really need the data to find the answers. For instance, what kind of food is good for me. In principle we already know this. We have to learn to listen to ourselves to be honest. To listen to the body and find the answer. Data mostly confirms what we already know.

In the everyday, self-tracking is no longer centered on the practice—it is not even thought of as “self-tracking” but as an integral part of how “everyday lives and worlds are experienced and mediated” (Pink and Fors, 2017: 11). The data generated by self-tracking devices becomes a part of everyday sense-making, reminding people of what they already know and to what they aspire.

Developing the laboratory of the self

Following the Danish self-trackers has cast light on how tracking technologies assist in shaping everyday life, leading to questions of how sensors and devices become part of the processes in which the self is defined, extended, reduced, or restricted. Their experiences speak emphatically against the idea, suggested by Bowker (2013: 170), that in the QS movement “the qualified self seems to be slipping out of the picture” and that “the interpretative work is done inside the computer and read out and acted on by humans.” Instead, through responding to the data and adjusting aspects of life, self-trackers appear to be taking exactly what Bowker (2013) describes as “a hermeneutic approach which enables us to envision new possible futures as we risk being swamped in the data deluge” (p. 171). QS-related self-tracking recognizes the emergent self in its multiplicity, introducing with the aid of digital metrics a space for personal journeying.

Seen in a longitudinal perspective, QS-inspired experimentation provides a frame for self-discovery that allows for the mutual constitution of self and technology, and an interior world of dialogue and evaluation. Self-trackers use technologies to take the self apart, to highlight certain “authentic” aspects of it or to intensify human agencies or senses. They try out applications and devices: starting off somewhere, learning about themselves and coming out of the experience in another place. In doing so, they pursue self-improvement; they might attain it, discover that self-improvement is no longer as interesting as it was, or become aware of the restrictive nature of technology and instead seek connections with other people or the environment. Self-tracking can develop into a less remarkable part of everyday routine or become associated with alienation, boredom, and the waste of time. Ultimately, some devices are abandoned, while others support newly formed or prevailing habits and routines.

The concept of the laboratory of the self provides a context for exploring processes of self-experimentation and discovery. It can, however, also be developed further to aid in modifying and renewing the conversation about the role of metrics and technologies in defining the self and the everyday by using it for framing experiences and processes concerning digital technologies more generally. In terms of critical scholarship, self-tracking technologies appear a prime example of the digital technology market: they invite us to set up metrics-enhanced personal laboratories, promoting the idea that with the assistance of consumer goods, we become active organizers and creators of our own lives (Ruckenstein, 2017). By taking advantage of technological possibilities, commercial agents have found a way to commodify and be present in the most intimate moments of daily lives. Self-trackers participate in the processes of vitality enhancement; they are marketed tools to control and play with life and respond to and monitor everyday movements or physiologies; indeed, smart phones, with their applications, are our new “companion species” (Lupton, 2016; Rettberg, 2017). As one of the self-trackers suggested, rather than actively engaging in self-tracking, “it is me and my phone.”

While commodification is a process that seeks intimacies and alliances in the inter-relationality of humans and technologies, and parasitically latches onto them, self-trackers also ignore and avoid such unity of aims, constantly adapting technologies and metrics to their own ends and searching out alternatives. They express discontent and disinterest by not using applications, or by abandoning them and moving elsewhere. “Markets are contingent,” McFall et al. (2017) argue “upon the associated action of individuals in attaching, rejecting, complaining, negotiating, reviewing, modifying, hacking, appropriating and refusing market offerings” (p. 14). Market-making efforts depend on identifying and attracting people who have the time, interest, and patience to become involved, although the active translation and contextualization work conducted by users of products and services often goes unnoticed (Pinch and Oudshoorn, 2005).

These findings are a reminder of how important it is to acknowledge the contributory and transformative efforts of self-trackers rather than merely assuming that technologies are adopted or embraced uncritically. The current application and device market is characterized by an overflow: a fraction of the technology finds long-term users. Self-tracking practices materialize because users dedicate time and effort to get value out of products and services, and they are ready to learn new skills and promote practical and communicative engagements that generate conditions for current and renewed practices (Pantzar and Ruckenstein, 2015). The conscious and reflective attitude to metrics and calculative practices that QS-inspired self-trackers share is a clue to what they are after. They use metrics as a tool that allows them to focus on certain aspects of their lives, but this kind of narrowing down is also why they criticize self-tracking. Numbers have a place in performing and transforming life, but they should be kept in their place or they become a burden.

In the current “audit culture” (Strathern, 2000) landscape, it is of vital importance to continue to evaluate and re-evaluate the offered metrics. We suggest that a context-aware focus on numbers and calculative practices extends the utility of the concept of the laboratory of the self beyond the QS and self-tracking to other digital applications, including social media, dating services, or academic publication-sharing sites that offer numbers of likes, shares, downloads, recommendations, and scores for people to experiment with, to relate to, and to track. Developing the concept of laboratory of the self facilitates comparison and continuity between different realms of the digital, demonstrating how services and devices amplify certain aspects of the self at the expense of others. The concept can promote the exploration of how the emergent selves fit into larger structures of the digital technology market and the role that metrics play in defining them. This kind of approach can further highlight how social media users intersect with, or disrupt the pre-coded aspects of the self and the everyday (Baym, 2013), and how numbers become part of the attachment felt toward a service or a platform, supporting and shaping participation (Gerlitz and Lury, 2014).

Auxiliary metrics

Tracking tools and data analytics are more commonly used as instruments of sorting and selecting than as personal laboratories. Machine logics tend to rely on profiling; they can deepen and accelerate social divisions and inequalities, and citizens and consumers might have no say in how their selves or daily lives are defined and sliced by algorithms. Self-trackers are exceptions to this generalization because they can ask themselves whether the use of metrics resonates with what they aspire to become. Their experiences call for a reflective and open-ended relationship to metrics, allowing users and targets of metrics to define how they might best be of service. This kind of definition work underlines the importance of not letting the measurer fade into the background: the metrics used need to be made traceable and modifiable to the measured. Exposing the logic of the measurer has already been envisioned as the basis for developing “new data literacies” (McCosker, 2017), aiding in the tracing of segmentary power and operations of different platforms.

The personal and societal consequences of metrics and tracking technologies depend on what is learned from the gathered numbers, who is allowed to do the learning and who decides these issues (Zuboff, 2015). What is noteworthy in Danish self-tracking experiences is the conscious intentionality nurtured in terms of what data should be collected and how it could assist the measured. Numbers are not a goal per se; rather, they are taken advantage of in a manner that can value non-attachment to pre-defined outcomes. This is precisely what is discouraged by an audit culture that relies on pre-defined standards and quality controls. Yet, metrics can also be used for “detouring from prescribed courses, exploring limits, and defying rules” (Sanders, 2017: 21). The aim of tracking is to intensify a phenomenon—not only to measure it or predict it, but also in order to see it more clearly and to examine it. Based on these findings, we argue that by foregrounding what matters qualitatively in terms of metrics and personal data, and learning how metrics open and close options and restrict or improve practices in the long-term, we can increase the capacity to resist oppressive and harmful calculative practices and assist in developing better alternatives.