Adults’ digital self-tracking practices are relatively well studied, but these pre-existing models of digital self-tracking do not fit for how adolescents use these technologies. We apply the ...mechanisms-and-conditions framework of affordance theory to examine adolescents’ imagined affordances of self-tracking apps and devices. Based on qualitative data from an online survey of 16- to 18-year-olds in the United Kingdom, we find the following three key themes in how adolescents imagine the affordances of digital self-tracking: (1) the variability of use across adolescents and with adults, (2) the role of the social control of data in school settings, and (3) the salience of social comparisons among their peers. Using these findings, we show how social and institutional configurations come to matter for technological affordances. By examining adolescents’ imagined affordances for self-tracking, we suggest self-tracking research move away from a “one size fits all approach” and begin to highlight the differences in practices from adults and across adolescents.
Encouraging people to donate their organs is not an easy endeavor. Globally, the percentage of organ donors is low. Prior research shows that one of the major impediments to organ donation is the ...perception that donating an organ is equivalent to giving up part of the self. Such a perception may be mitigated by physiological self‐tracking though. Findings from three studies reveal that physiological self‐tracking facilitates greater acceptance of and encourages organ donation. This happens because a focus on one's physiological data, as part of the self‐tracking process, leads consumers to view their body as distinct from their self (i.e., self–body dualism). Consequently, people are less likely to equate donating organs with losing a part of themselves. The findings suggest that encouraging greater use of self‐trackers may help people overcome their organ donation inhibitions.
Digital self-tracking devices increasingly inhabit everyday landscapes, yet many people abandon self-trackers not long after acquisition. Although research has examined why people discontinue these ...devices, less explores what actually happens when people unplug. This article addresses this gap by considering the embodied and habitual dimensions of self-tracking and discontinuance. We consider the potential for digital data – and their unanticipated affects – to linger within habitual practices even after the device is abandoned. We draw on the philosophies of Felix Ravaisson and Gilles Deleuze to understand habit as a capacity for change, rather than a performance of sameness. We trace how self-tracking prompts new embodiments that continue to unfold even after people disengage. In decentring the device as our object of attention, we trouble the logic that self-tracking simply ‘stops’ in its absence. This holds implications for theorizing human–digital relations and for how self-tracking health interventions are implemented and evaluated.
The development of self-tracking technologies has resulted in a burst of research considering how self-tracking practices manifest themselves in everyday life. Based on a 5-month-long photo ...elicitation study of Danish self-trackers, we argue that no matter how committed people might be to tracking their activities, their use of self-tracking technologies can be best described as episodic rather than continuous. Using Annemarie Mol’s theoretical framework for understanding care practices as a lens, we show how episodic use can be interpreted through the logic of care. By using self-tracking devices episodically, users employ strategies of care in a way that can be productive and useful. These strategies often come in conflict with the logics of choice that underlie the design of many self-tracking technologies. We argue that this has consequences for the way self-tracking devices need to be imagined, designed, and introduced as part of workplace and insurance-type tracking programs.
Implementation of quantified self technologies in workplaces relies on the ontological premise of Cartesian dualism with mind dominant over body. Contributing to debates in new materialism, we ...demonstrate that workers are now being asked to measure our own productivity and health and well-being in art-houses and warehouses alike in both the global north and south. Workers experience intensified precarity, austerity, intense competition for jobs and anxieties about the replacement of labour-power with robots and other machines as well as, ourselves replaceable, other humans. Workers have internalised the imperative to perform, a subjectification process as we become observing entrepreneurial subjects and observed, objectified labouring bodies. Thinking through the implications of the use of wearable technologies in workplaces, this article shows that these technologies introduce a heightened Taylorist influence on precarious working bodies within neoliberal workplaces.
In this article, we build on the work of Ruckenstein and Pantzar, who have demonstrated how our understanding of self-tracking has been influenced by the metaphor of the Quantified Self (QS). To ...complicate this very selective picture of self-tracking, we shift the focus in understanding self-tracking from members of the QS community to the experiences of ‘ordinary man and woman’. Therefore, we interviewed ‘everyday calorie trackers’, people who had themselves started using MyFitnessPal calorie counting app but were not part of any tracking community. Our analysis identifies three main themes – goals, use and effect – which highlight the mundane side of self-tracking, where people pursuing everyday, limited goals engage in basic self-tracking and achieve temporary changes. These experiences contrast with the account of self-tracking in terms of long-term, experimental analysis of data on the self or ‘biohacking’, which dominates the QS metaphor in the academic literature.
Seen in a longitudinal perspective, Quantified Self-inspired self-tracking sets up “a laboratory of the self,” where people co-evolve with technologies. By exploring ways in which self-tracking ...technologies energize everyday aims or are experienced as limiting, we demonstrate how some aspects of the self are amplified while others become reduced and restricted. We suggest that further developing the concept of the laboratory of the self renews the conversation about the role of metrics and technologies by facilitating comparison between different realms of the digital, and demonstrating how services and devices enlarge aspects of the self at the expense of others. The use of self-tracking technologies is inscribed in, but also runs counter to, the larger political-economy landscape. Personal laboratories can aid the exploration of how the techno-mediated selves fit into larger structures of the digital technology market and the role that metrics play in defining them.
Real‐time biodistribution monitoring and enhancing the therapeutic efficacy of platinum(II)‐based anticancer drugs are urgently required to elevate their clinical performance. Herein, a ...tetraphenylethene derivative (TP) with aggregation‐induced emission (AIE) properties and an iodine atom are selected as ligands to endow platinum (II) complex TP‐Pt‐I with real‐time in vivo self‐tracking ability by fluorescence (FL) and computerized tomography (CT) imaging, and improved anticancer efficacy by the combination of chemotherapy and photodynamic therapy. Especially, benefiting from the formation of a donor‐acceptor‐donor structure between the AIE photosensitizer TP and Pt‐I moiety, the heavy atom effects of Pt and I, and the presence of I, TP‐Pt‐I displayed red‐shifted absorption and emission wavelengths, enhanced ROS generation efficiency, and improved CT imaging capacity compared with the pristine TP and the control agent TP‐Pt‐Cl. As a result, the enhanced intratumoral accumulation of TP‐Pt‐I loaded nanoparticles is readily revealed by dual‐modal FL and CT imaging with high contrast. Meanwhile, the TP‐Pt‐I nanoparticles show significantly improved tumor growth‐inhibiting effects on an MCF‐7 xenograft murine model by combining the chemotherapeutic effects of platinum(II) and the photodynamic effects of TP. This self‐tracking therapeutic complex thus provides a new strategy for improving the therapeutic outcomes of platinum(II)‐based anticancer drugs.
A new platinum(II)‐based anticancer agent TP‐Pt‐I is synthesized using aggregation‐induced emission molecules and iodine as ligands. Through rational ligand orchestration and utilization of the properties of each moiety, TP‐Pt‐I demonstrates excellent in vivo self‐tracking ability by fluorescence and computerized tomography imaging, and improved anticancer efficacy by combining chemotherapy and photodynamic therapy.
This article foregrounds the ways in which members of the Quantified Self ascribe value and meaning to the data they generate in self-tracking practices. We argue that the widespread idea that what ...draws self-trackers to numerical data is its perceived power of truth and objectivity—a so-called “data fetishism”—is limiting. Using an ethnographic approach, we describe three ways in which self-trackers attribute meaning to their data-gathering practices which escape this data fetishist critique: self-tracking as a practice of mindfulness, as a means of resistance against social norms, and as a communicative and narrative aid. In light of this active engagement with data, we suggest that it makes more sense to view these practitioners as “quantifying selves.” We also suggest that such fine-grained accounts of the appeal that data can have, beyond its allure of objectivity, are necessary if we are to achieve a fuller understanding of Big Data culture.
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