Data mattering and self-tracking: what can personal data do?

by | Nov 22, 2019 | Research Publications

Author(s):

  • Lupton, Deborah

Abstract:

Self-tracking practices have attracted burgeoning academic interest in recent years. This article draws on interviews with Australians who identify as regular self-trackers, examining the ways in which they describe their encounters with and enactments of their personal data. Vital materialism perspectives are employed to analyse and interpret the participants’ accounts of what they make of their self-tracked data and how they incorporate this information into their lives and relationships. Examples of participants’ accounts of their data are presented under different headings using the ‘data can … ’ format to illustrate what data can do. For these self-trackers, data can: tell you the truth, empower you, make you feel in control, provide tangible results, help you be organized, motivate you, make you change, be combined to generate new insights, surprise you, be overwhelming, challenge denial, provide a benchmark, monitor progress, supplement memory, be shared, generate intimacy, make you feel good, make you feel bad, be inaccurate and supplement expert advice. This analytical approach identified the complexities and ambivalences of the affordances, relational connections, affective forces and agential capacities that make personal data matter.

Document:

https://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2019.1691149

References:
  1. Barad, K. 2003. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” Signs 28 (3): 801–831. doi:10.1086/345321. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]
  2. Barad, K. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press. [Crossref], [Google Scholar]
  3. Bennett, J. 2004. “The Force of Things: Steps toward an Ecology of Matter.” Political Theory 32 (3): 347–372. doi:10.1177/0090591703260853. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]
  4. Bennett, J. 2009. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press. [Crossref], [Google Scholar]
  5. Bergroth, H. 2019. “‘you Can’t Really Control Life’: Dis/Assembling Self-Knowledge with Self-Tracking Technologies.” Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory 20 (2): 190–206. doi:10.1080/1600910X.2018.1551809. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]
  6. Braidotti, R. 2019. “A Theoretical Framework for The Critical Posthumanities.” Theory Culture & Society 36 (6): 31–61. doi:10.0263271177/0263276418771486. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]
  7. Country, B. S., Wright, S. Suchet-Pearson, K. Lloyd, L. Burarrwanga, R. Ganambarr, M. Ganambarr-Stubbs, B. Ganambarr, and D. Maymuru. 2015. “Working with and Learning from Country: Decentring Human Author-ity.” Cultural Geographies 22 (2): 269–283. doi: 10.1177/1474474014539248. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]
  8. Davis, J. L., and J. B. Chouinard. 2016. “Theorizing Affordances: From Request to Refuse.” Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society 36 (4): 241–248. doi:10.1177/0270467617714944. [Crossref], [Google Scholar]
  9. Depper, A., and P. D. Howe. 2017. “Are We Fit Yet? English Adolescent Girls’ Experiences of Health and Fitness Apps.” Health Sociology Review 26 (1): 98–112. doi:10.1080/14461242.2016.1196599. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]
  10. Didžiokaitė, G., P. Saukko, and C. Greiffenhagen. 2018. “The Mundane Experience of Everyday Calorie Trackers: Beyond the Metaphor of Quantified Self.” New Media & Society 20 (4): 1470–1487. doi:10.1177/1461444817698478. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]
  11. Epstein, D. A., N. B. Lee, J. H. Kang, E. Agapie, L. R. Jessica Schroeder, J. F. Pina, J. A. Kientz, and S. A. Munson. 2017. “Examining Menstrual Tracking to Inform the Design of Personal Informatics Tools.” In Proceedings of CHI ‘17, 6876–6888. Denver, Colorado: ACM. [Crossref], [Google Scholar]
  12. Fors, V., and S. Pink. 2017. “Pedagogy as Possibility: Health Interventions as Digital Openness.” Social Sciences 6: 2. doi:10.3390/socsci6020059. [Crossref], [Google Scholar]
  13. Fotopoulou, A., and K. O’Riordan. 2017. “Training to Self-Care: Fitness Tracking, Biopedagogy and the Healthy Consumer.” Health Sociology Review 26 (1): 54–68. doi:10.1080/14461242.2016.1184582. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]
  14. Fox, N. J., and P. Alldred. 2015. “New Materialist Social Inquiry: Designs, Methods and the Research-Assemblage.” International Journal of Social Research Methodology 18 (4): 399–414. doi:10.1080/13645579.2014.921458. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]
  15. Fox, N. J., and P. Alldred. 2017. Sociology and the New Materialism: Theory, Research, Action. London: Sage. [Crossref], [Google Scholar]
  16. Gullion, J. S. 2018. Diffractive Ethnography: Social Sciences and the Ontological Turn. New York: Routledge. [Crossref], [Google Scholar]
  17. Haraway, D. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press. [Crossref], [Google Scholar]
  18. Jackson, A. Y., and L. A. Mazzei. 2012. Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research. New York: Taylor & Francis. [Google Scholar]
  19. Karlsson, A. 2019. “A Room of One’s Own? Using Period Trackers to Escape Menstrual Stigma.” Nordicom Review 40 (s1): 111–123. doi:10.2478/nor-2019-0017. [Crossref], [Google Scholar]
  20. Kristensen, D. B., and M. Ruckenstein. 2018. “Co-Evolving with Self-Tracking Technologies.” New Media & Society 20 (10): 3624–3640. doi:10.1177/1461444818755650. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]
  21. Lupton, D. 2015. “Quantified Sex: A Critical Analysis of Sexual and Reproductive Self-Tracking Using Apps.” Culture, Health & Sexuality 17 (4): 440–453. doi:10.1080/13691058.2014.920528. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]
  22. Lupton, D. 2016a. The Quantified Self: A Sociology of Self-Tracking. Cambridge: Polity Press. [Google Scholar]
  23. Lupton, D. 2016b. “The Use and Value of Digital Media for Information about Pregnancy and Early Motherhood: A Focus Group Study.” BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth 16 (1): 171. doi:10.1186/s12884-016-0971-3. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Google Scholar]
  24. Lupton, D. 2017. “Personal Data Practices in the Age of Lively Data.” In Digital Sociologies, edited by J. Daniels, K. Gregory, and T. McMillan Cottom, 339–354. Bristol: Policy Press. [Google Scholar]
  25. Lupton, D. 2018. “‘I Just Want It to Be Done, Done, Done!’ Food Tracking Apps, Affects, and Agential Capacities.” Multimodal Technologies and Interaction 2 (2). doi:10.3390/mti2020029. [Crossref], [Google Scholar]
  26. Lupton, D. 2019a. Data Selves: More-Than-Human Perspectives. Cambridge: Polity Press. [Google Scholar]
  27. Lupton, D. 2019b. “‘it’s Made Me A Lot More Aware’: A New Materialist Analysis of Health Self-Tracking.” Media International Australia 171 (1): 66–79. doi:10.1177/1329878X19844042. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]
  28. Lupton, D., and G. J. D. Smith. 2018. “‘A Much Better Person’: The Agential Capacities of Self-Tracking Practices.” In Metric Culture: Ontologies of Self-Tracking Practices, edited by B. Ajana, 57–73. London: Emerald Publishing. [Crossref], [Google Scholar]
  29. Lupton, D., S. Pink, C. H. LaBond, and S. Sumartojo. 2018. “Personal Data Contexts, Data Sense and Self-Tracking Cycling.” International Journal of Communication 12. http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/5925/2268. [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]
  30. Özkul, D., and L. Humphreys. 2015. “Record and Remember: Memory and Meaning-Making Practices through Mobile Media.” Mobile Media & Communication 3 (3): 351–365. doi:10.1177/2050157914565846. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]
  31. Pantzar, M., and M. Ruckenstein. 2017. “Living the Metrics: Self-Tracking and Situated Objectivity.” Digital Health 3. doi:10.1177/2055207617712590. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]
  32. Pink, S., S. Sumartojo, D. Lupton, and C. H. LaBond. 2017. “Mundane Data: The Routines, Contingencies and Accomplishments of Digital Living.” Big Data & Society 4 (1). doi:10.1177/2053951717700924. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]
  33. Pink, S., and V. Fors. 2017. “Self-Tracking and Mobile Media: New Digital Materialities.” Mobile Media & Communication 5 (3): 219–238. doi:10.1177/2050157917695578. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]
  34. Rivers, D. J. 2019. “Strava as a Discursive Field of Practice: Technological Affordances and Mediated Cycling Motivations.” Discourse, Context & Media. doi:10/1016/j.dcm. 2019.100345. [Google Scholar]
  35. Smith, W. R., and J. Treem. 2017. “Striving to Be King of Mobile Mountains: Communication and Organizing through Digital Fitness Technology.” Communication Studies 68 (2): 135–151. doi:10.1080/10510974.2016.1269818. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]
  36. Sumartojo, S., S. Pink, D. Lupton, and C. H. LaBond. 2016. “The Affective Intensities of Datafied Space.” Emotion, Space and Society 21: 33–40. doi:10.1016/j.emospa.2016.10.004. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]
  37. TallBear, K. 2014. “Standing with and Speaking as Faith: A Feminist-Indigenous Approach to Inquiry.” Journal of Research Practice 10 (2). http://jrp.icaap.org/index.php/jrp/article/view/405/371. [Google Scholar]