Author(s):
- Ruckenstein, Minna
- Pantzar, Mika
Abstract:
This article investigates the metaphor of the Quantified Self (QS) as it is presented in the magazine Wired (2008–2012). Four interrelated themes—transparency, optimization, feedback loop, and biohacking—are identified as formative in defining a new numerical self and promoting a dataist paradigm. Wired captures certain interests and desires with the QS metaphor, while ignoring and downplaying others, suggesting that the QS positions self-tracking devices and applications as interfaces that energize technological engagements, thereby pushing us to rethink life in a data-driven manner. The thematic analysis of the QS is treated as a schematic aid for raising critical questions about self-quantification, for instance, detecting the merging of epistemological claims, technological devices, and market-making efforts. From this perspective, another definition of the QS emerges: a knowledge system that remains flexible in its aims and can be used as a resource for epistemological inquiry and in the formation of alternative paradigms.
Document:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1461444815609081
References
| Andrejevic, M (2014) The big data divide. International Journal of Communication 8: 1673–1689. Google Scholar | ISI | |
| Araujo, L, Kjellberg, H, Spencer, R (2008) Market practices and forms: introduction to the special issue. Marketing Theory 8(1): 5–14. Google Scholar | SAGE Journals | ISI | |
| boyd, d, Crawford, K (2012) Critical questions for big data: provocations for a cultural, technological, and scholarly phenomenon. Information, Communication & Society 15(5): 662–679. Google Scholar | Crossref | ISI | |
| Bucher, T (2012) Want to be on the top? Algorithmic power and the threat of invisibility on Facebook. New Media & Society 14(7): 1164–1180. Google Scholar | SAGE Journals | ISI | |
| Delfanti, A (2013) Biohackers: The Politics of Open Science. London: Pluto Press. Google Scholar | |
| Edwards, P, Harvey, P, Wade, P (eds) (2010) Technologized Images, Technologized Bodies. New York: Berghahn Books. Google Scholar | |
| Foucault, M (1988) “Technologies of the self.” In: Martin, LH, Gutman, H, Hutton, PH (eds) “Technologies of the Self.” In a Seminar with Michel Foucault. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, pp. 16–49. Google Scholar | |
| Frau-Meigs, D (2000) A cultural project based on multiple temporary consensus. New Media & Society 2(2): 227–244. Google Scholar | SAGE Journals | |
| Graham, M, Shelton, T (2013) Geography and the future of big data, big data and the future of geography. Dialogues in Human Geography 3(3): 255–261. Google Scholar | SAGE Journals | |
| Haraway, D (1991) A cyborg manifesto. Science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century. In: Haraway, D (ed.) Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, pp. 149–181. Google Scholar | |
| Harris, A, Kelly, SE, Wyatt, S (2014) Autobiologies on YouTube: narratives of direct-to-consumer genetic testing. New Genetics and Society 33(1): 60–78. Google Scholar | Crossref | Medline | ISI | |
| Kelty, CM (2010) Outlaw, hackers, Victorian amateurs: diagnosing public participation in the life sciences today. Journal of Science Communication 9(1): 1–8. Google Scholar | |
| Knorr Cetina, K, Preda, A (2007) The temporalization of financial markets: from network to flow. Theory, Culture & Society 24(7–8): 116–138. Google Scholar | SAGE Journals | ISI | |
| Kuhn, T (2012 [1962]) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Google Scholar | Crossref | |
| Lakoff, G, Johnson, M (1980) Metaphors We Live By. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Google Scholar | |
| Lupton, D (2013a) Quantifying the body: monitoring and measuring health in the age of mHealth technologies. Critical Public Health 23(4): 393–403. Google Scholar | Crossref | ISI | |
| Lupton, D (2013b) Understanding the human machine. IEEE Technology and Society Magazine 32(4): 25–30. Google Scholar | Crossref | ISI | |
| Lupton, D (2014) Self-tracking modes: reflexive self-monitoring and data practices. Available at: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2483549 Google Scholar | |
| Mayer-Schoenberger, V, Cukier, K (2013) Big Data: A Revolution that Will Transform How We Live, Work and Think. London: John Murray Publishers. Google Scholar | |
| Nafus, D (2014) Stuck data, dead data, and disloyal data: the stops and starts in making numbers into social practices. Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory 15(2): 208–222. Google Scholar | Crossref | |
| Nafus, D, Sherman, J (2014) This one does not go up to 11: the Quantified Self movement as an alternative big data practice. International Journal of Communication 8: 11. Available at: http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/2170 Google Scholar | |
| OECD (2013) Exploring the economics of personal data: a survey of methodologies for measuring monetary value. OECD Digital Economy Paper No. 220. Paris: OECD Publishing. Google Scholar | Crossref | |
| Pantzar, M, Ruckenstein, M (2015) The heart of everyday analytics: emotional, material and practical extensions in self-tracking market. Consumption Markets & Culture 18(1): 92–109. Google Scholar | Crossref | ISI | |
| Porter, T (1995) Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Google Scholar | |
| Roberts, S (2012) The reception of my self-experimentation. Journal of Business Research 65(7): 1060–1066. Google Scholar | Crossref | ISI | |
| Rose, N (2007) The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Google Scholar | Crossref | |
| Ruckenstein, M (2014) Visualized and interacted life: personal analytics and engagements with data doubles. Societies 4(1): 68–84. Google Scholar | Crossref | |
| Ruckenstein, M (2015) Uncovering everyday rhythms and patterns: food tracking and new forms of visibility and temporality in health care. Studies in Health Technology and Informatics 215: 28–40. Google Scholar | Medline | |
| Ruckenstein, M, Pantzar, M (2015) Datafied life: techno-anthropology as a site for exploration and experimentation. Techne: Research in Philosophy & Technology 19(2): 193–212. Google Scholar | |
| Swan, M (2012) Sensor mania! The internet of things, wearable computing, objective metrics, and the Quantified Self 2.0. Journal of Sensor & Actuator Networks 1(3): 217–253. Google Scholar | Crossref | |
| Swan, M (2013) The Quantified Self: fundamental disruption in big data science and biological discovery. Big Data 1(2): 85–99. Google Scholar | Crossref | Medline | ISI | |
| Thrift, N (2005) Knowing Capitalism. London: SAGE. Google Scholar | |
| Till, C (2014) Exercise as labour: Quantified Self and the transformation of exercise into labour. Societies 4(3): 446–462. Google Scholar | Crossref | |
| Tomas, D (1995) Feedback and cybernetics: reimagining the body in the age of the cyborg. Body & Society 1(3–4): 21–43. Google Scholar | SAGE Journals | |
| Turner, F (2006) From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Google Scholar | Crossref | |
| Urban, G (1996) Metaphysical Community: The Interplay of the Senses and the Intellect. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Google Scholar | |
| Van Dijck, J (2014) Datafication, dataism and dataveillance: big data between scientific paradigm and ideology. Surveillance & Society 12(2): 197–208. Google Scholar | |
| Viseu, A, Suchman, L (2010) Wearable augmentations: imaginaries of the informed body. In: Edwards, J, Harvey, P, Wade, P (eds) Technologized Images, Technologized Bodies. New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 161–184. Google Scholar | |
| Ware, C (2004) Information Visualization: Perception for Design. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Google Scholar | Crossref | |
| Wiener, N (1948) Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Google Scholar | |
| Williamson, B (2015) Algorithmic skin: health-tracking technologies, personal analytics and the biopedagogies of digitized health and physical education. Sport, Education and Society 20(1): 133–151. Google Scholar | Crossref | ISI | |
| Wyatt, S (2004) Danger! Metaphors at work in economics, geophysiology, and the Internet. Science, Technology & Human Values 29(2): 242–261. Google Scholar | SAGE Journals | ISI |