Abstract
This work of Deborah Lupton on self-tracking practices and technologies is quite an eye-opener as she traces them in their socio-cultural context. She starts off by outlining self-tracking practices, the regular self-monitoring and recording of various elements of individuals’ behaviours and biological functions, and their transformation through digitised and automated measurement techniques, which affect our social, cultural and political milieus.
In the first chapter ‘Know Thyself: Self-Tracking Technologies and Practices’, Lupton engages in investigating how the phrase quantified self has developed, whilst presenting the reader with a diverse array of examples ranging from digital tracking applications found in wearables that detect health, to those that track emotions, and self-tracking embodied through gamification. Yet, not every self-tracking app employs quantifiable data; for instance some focus on qualitative data such as voice, text, or visual images (pp. 29–30). However, the term quantified self, coined by Wired magazine editors Wolf and Kelly in 2007 (p. 12), has lately come to be employed as a general term for self-tracking practices (p. 14).
In the second chapter, ‘New Hybrid Beings: Theoretical Perspectives’, Lupton scrutinises how identities and social relations have been merged into digital objects, making it rather difficult to escape this situation – even if we resist using smartphones, wearables and other computerised software, digitisation has permeated the everyday practices of urban environments and institutional practices of societies. So such questions could appear in one’s mind: How does the embodiment of digitisation, through various practices, actors and agencies, transform us ontologically? And, what could be the possible consequences of such an alteration on power relations? After a more descriptive first chapter, Lupton theoretically dwells here on how capitalism, by harvesting digital data, enforces profit by aggregating these into big data and forms a whole economy encompassing them, that is the (global) digital economy through which power operates (p. 42). Consequently, algorithmic analytics by means of digital data have a significant influence on people’s opportunities and life chances (p. 44), where neoliberal political rationalities exert authority over individuals by shaping ‘beliefs about what type of data are important and relevant and how they should be combined to produce knowledges’ (p. 57). As Beer (2016: 4) highlights, detaching algorithms from the social world as if they were solely technical elements, lines of codes, with their own separate reality would be rather inaccurate, as their existence, (re-)designs and implementations are outcomes of social forces.
In the chapter, ‘An Optimal Human Being: The Body and the Self in Self-Tracking Cultures’, Lupton elaborates on entrepreneurial self and its relationship with digital technologies. This is the neoliberal citizen who is engaged in reflexive self-monitoring practices, therefore being ‘flexible, high-performing, self-managed and responsive to change’. In other words, s(he) is a successful worker who is fit and healthy besides being productive; thus a central figure of the workplace culture (pp. 68–69). Lupton questions how such a ‘perfect human being’ could be different from an excellently functioning machine, which obscures the point ‘where the body ends and the technology begins’; turning many of us into a digitised assemblage (p. 71).
In ‘You Are Your Data: Personal Data Meanings, Practices and Materialisations’, Lupton begins discussing knowledge acquired and made sense of through self-tracking; such as how we as patients can reinterpret our bodies without constantly relying on doctors. Besides, discourses generated through datafication in the areas of commerce and government, render our publics into more calculable, manageable, governable, shortly rational and objective, entities. Thus, new types of knowledge about humans are produced, as a result of algorithmic manipulations that are gauged by modifying different qualities or complexities, through a common metric (pp. 95–98). Nonetheless, visual representations of data can also merge creative and engineering practices, which has been the interest area of various artists and designers, causing data to be playful and emotionally appealing (pp. 102–109).
The fifth and last chapter, ‘Data’s Capacity for Betrayal: Personal Data Politics’, focuses on the political scope of personal data. Commodification has diffused into every area of life, including those data derived from human bodies via self-tracking. That is, although the value of data obtained from self-tracking practices by prosumers is non-commercial, their exchange value is modified into lucrative entities, as they are gathered or purchased by profit-seeking companies (pp. 117–118). Data mining of personal information and turning it into a profitable business has produced social and economic discrimination (p. 119). Here Lupton emphasises ways in which personal data are targeted and used in exploitative means. However, as Hill (2015: 58) argues, human thought is intuitive and hypothetical, being able to work with obscure data as well as performing without pre-established codes or rules, contextualising communication cues within disorderly conditions. Then one could ask: Have we as humans, despite our empathetic qualities, created a social dystopia that fetishizes various forms of digitised computer technologies? However, Lupton in this last chapter also discusses how the Quantified Self movement and a number of initiatives, such as citizen science, environmental activism, healthy cities and community development projects, are becoming interested in accessing and designing projects collected from data, which benefit the broader community (pp. 134–136).