What is it about?
This paper explores self-tracking by investigating its enculturated meanings, focusing on Western Europe. For this purpose, we analysed promises behind self-tracking technologies articulated in TV-commercials considering their relation to the late-modern socio-material constitution. The findings suggest that self-tracking addresses several ideal-typical late-modern problems, like the contingency of everyday living. Self-tracking technologies promise to counteract these problems by employing number-based rationalisation strategies. They aim to increase and condense performance capacities and activate the users. Thereby, they turn out to be technologies of an instrumental reason attempting to counter collective issues by optimising the individual.
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Why is it important?
The paper provides a critical vision of self-tracking technologies (e.g., smartwatches, fitness trackers). Self-tracking technologies are aligned with a late-modern vision of societies, and therefore have embedded meaning in what people should do to become a better version of themselves
Perspectives
Self-tracking technologies can be very useful for keeping track of your exercise and monitoring your health; however, they also embed assumptions on what it means to create a better version of yourself that can be problematic. They entail that there is always a better version of you in you, and this "optimal" version can be achieved through the functionalities available on self-tracking technologies.
Maria Menendez Blanco
Libera Universita di Bolzano
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: “There is a better you in you”: Promises and Ideologies of Self-Tracking Technologies, tripleC Communication Capitalism & Critique Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society, August 2023, Information Society Research,
DOI: 10.31269/triplec.v21i2.1411.
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