Prelims

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METRIC CULTURE: ONTOLOGIES OF SELF-TRACKING PRACTICES

Title Page

METRIC CULTURE: ONTOLOGIES OF SELF-TRACKING PRACTICES

EDITED BY

BTIHAJ AJANA

Kings College London, UK

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China

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Emerald Publishing Limited

Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK

First edition 2018

Copyright © 2018 Emerald Publishing Limited

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ISBN: 978-1-78743-290-1 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-78743-289-5 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-78743-948-1 (E-Pub)

Acknowledgements

This book project emerged out of the conference ‘Metric Culture: The Quantified Self and Beyond’ organised in June 2017 at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies (AIAS) in Denmark. On behalf of all the contributors in this volume, I wish to thank the Institute for supporting the conference and the subsequent book project. Special thanks to Morten Kyndrup, Lena Bering, Helle Villekold, Tanya Majlund McGregor, Vibeke Moll Sorensen and Dorte Mariager for all their help and support. Many thanks also to all the conference participants for their helpful feedback and stimulating discussions which informed the development of this book.

Both the conference and the book project have benefited from the financial support received during the COFUND Marie Curie Fellowship I undertook at AIAS in 2015–2017, supported by European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme under grant agreement no. 609033. The book was also supported by a Publication Grant received from Aarhus University Research Foundation. I wish to thank these institutions for their generous support.

I also would like to thank Jen McCall and Rachel Ward from Emerald Publishing for their assistance with the publication of this book. Thanks also to Christine O’Hagan for her meticulous proofreading of the work.

List of Figures

List of Tables

List of Contributors

About the Authors

Btihaj Ajana is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London, UK. She was recently a Marie Curie Fellow and Associate Professor at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies in Denmark. Her academic work is international and interdisciplinary in nature, spanning areas of digital culture, media praxis and biopolitics. She is the author of Governing through Biometrics: The Biopolitics of Identity (Palgrave, 2013) and the editor of Self-tracking: Empirical and Philosophical Investigations (Palgrave, 2017).

Lyria Bennett Moses is Associate Professor and Director of the Allens Hub for Technology, Law and Innovation in at UNSW Law. She is also Project Leader on the Data to Decisions CRC and PLuS Alliance Fellow. Her research focusses on issues at the intersection of law and technological change.

Jonna Bornemark (jonna.bornemark@sh.se) is Associate Professor in Philosophy, Teacher and Researcher at the Centre for Studies in Practical Knowledge at Södertörn University, Sweden. She is currently active in several research projects within the theory of practical knowledge and phenomenology where she discusses the limits of calculation, skills of judgement, subjectivity and the concept of Bildung.

Janet Chan is Professor at UNSW Law and Key Researcher of the Data to Decisions Cooperative Research Centre. Her research interests include criminal justice, sociology of creativity, organisational studies and science and technology studies. Her current research focuses on the use of big data analytics for security and social policy.

Thomas Blomseth Christiansen is Technologist and Entrepreneur with a special interest in personal health data. He has been building technology for self-tracking of complex health conditions since 2009. Thomas has been self-tracking extensively himself and has among other things fixed his pollen allergy. He is best known for his complete seven-year record of his sneezes since 2011 and over 100,000 observations from consciously tracking e.g. food, water and supplement intake, fatigue, and allergies.

Giada Danesi is Senior Researcher in Social Sciences at the University of Lausanne Switzerland, and Member of the STS Lab. She is working on the project ‘Knowledge Translation through Tool-supported Practices in Health Care: Production and Use of Self-management Tools in Chronic Disease’. Her research focuses on health, illness, body, food, identity, consumption and globalisation. It draws on ethnographic, qualitative and comparative approaches.

Gabija Didžiokaitė is PhD Candidate at Loughborough University, UK, Social Sciences Department. Her current work looks at practices of self-tracking, more specifically at use of calorie counting and diet tracking app MyFitnessPal. She holds an MSc (Research) in Social Sciences, specialising in Medical Anthropology, from University of Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Antoinette Fage-Butler is Associate Professor at the Department of English, School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University, Denmark. Her research lies within online health communication (doctor–patient and patient–patient), mHealth, women’s health issues, risk communication and ethical aspects of health communication.

Rochelle Fairfield (rochelle@humandatacommons.org) works as Executive Director for the Human Data Commons Foundation (HDC) in Vancouver. Her work spans and integrates academia, project facilitation, adult development, industry governance and ethical praxis in all of these. She has written on gender and power, and co-authored the HDC’s 2017 Quantified Self Report Card.

Ditte-Marie From, Associate Professor PhD (dfrom@ruc.dk), is Researcher at the Centre of Health Promotion Research, Department of People and Technology, Roskilde University, Denmark. Her research combines health promotion, welfare technologies and health policies with a special interest in citizens’ engagement in processes of self-optimisation.

Christian Greiffenhagen is Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Previously, he was Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the Department of Social Sciences at Loughborough University, UK. In his research, he is concerned with understanding the social dimensions of science and technology.

Fleur Johns is Professor and Associate Dean of Research at the University of New South Wales, Australia. She works in the areas of public international law and legal theory. She studies patterns of governance on the global plane, employing an interdisciplinary approach that draws on the social sciences and humanities and combines the study of public and private law. In recent years, her work has focused on the role of automation in global legal relations, building on her prior research on financial modeling and other non-legal techniques of governance. She is currently working on a three year, collaborative, Australian Research Council-funded project entitled ‘Data Science in Humanitarianism: Confronting Novel Law and Policy Challenges’. Fleur is the author of Non-Legality in International Law: Unruly Law (Cambridge, 2013) and The Mekong: A Socio-legal Approach to River Basin Development (co-authored with Ben Boer, Philip Hirsch, Ben Saul & Natalia Scurrah, Routledge 2016).

Karolin Eva Kappler, PhD (karolin.kappler@fernuni-hagen.de), is Researcher at the DFG-funded project ‘Taxonomies of the Self: Emergence and Social Generalization of Calculative Practices in the Field of Self-inspection’ at the University of Hagen, Germany. She has published numerous articles in journals and books on the topics of social media, self-tracking, Big Data, calculative practices, network analysis, and violence in everyday life.

Dorthe Brogård Kristensen (dbk@sam.sdu.dk) is Associate Professor at the University of Southern Denmark. Her research interest includes digital health, self-tracking, food and consumption. She has published widely among this in New Media and Society, Journal of Consumer Culture, Critical Health, Health and Journal of Marketing Management. She is currently working on a project on technologies of optimisation funded by the Danish Research Council.

Agnieszka Krzeminska is PhD Candidate at the Institute of Culture and Aesthetics of Digital Media at the Leuphana University Luneburg Germany. Her research explores the role of digital technologies for the aim of self-enhancement, self-conception, human-tech co-evolution, mental health and on rethinking influence.

Jakob Eg Larsen is Researcher in human–computer interaction and Associate Professor at Technical University of Denmark where he is heading the mobile informatics and personal data lab. His research particularly focuses on the Quantified Self phenomenon. He has been developing research systems and instrumentation for self-tracking as well as user interfaces for personal data visualisation and is teaching a master’s level course in personal data interaction. Jakob has presented his research and self-tracking at several Quantified Self conferences.

Deborah Lupton (deborah.lupton@canberrra.edu.au) is Centenary Research Professor in the News & Media Research Centre, Faculty of Arts & Design, University of Canberra, and a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. Her latest books are Digital Sociology (Routledge, 2015), The Quantified Self: A Sociology of Self-tracking (Polity, 2016) and Digital Health: Critical and Cross-disciplinary Perspectives (Routledge, 2017).

Eryk Noji (eryk.noji@fernuni-hagen.de) is Researcher at the DFG-funded project ‘Taxonomies of the Self: Emergence and Social Generalization of Calculative Practices in the Field of Self-inspection’ at the University of Hagen, Germany. His research focuses on relations between digital technologies, social practices and identities.

Chelsea Palmer (ms.chelsea.palmer@gmail.com) is Educator, Community Organiser and Decentralist. After an undergraduate degree focused primarily on Lacanian linguistic theory, she left university to work in the tech sector, from data ethics advocacy to blockchain education. She returned to academic writing to co-author the HDC’s 2017 Quantified Self Report Card, and to compose essays applying critical theory to the Internet age, which are available alongside corresponding educational rap videos at her site www.stuckincyber.space

Vincent Pidoux is Sociologist of Science, Technology and Medicine at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. He is actually working as Senior Researcher at the University of Lausanne on the project ‘Knowledge Translation through Tool-supported Practices in Health Care: Production and Use of Self-management Tools in Chronic Disease’. His research focuses on the study of chronic illness self-management, knowledge translation, translational medicine/research, interdisciplinarity, neurosciences and mental health.

Mélody Pralong is PhD Student in Anthropology at the STS Lab of the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, working on the project ‘Knowledge Translation through Tool-supported Practices in Health Care: Production and Use of Self-management Tools in Chronic Disease’. Her doctoral thesis explores diabetes management in the school setting, and focuses on care practices that occur within the heterogeneous system of humans and non-humans actors.

Paula Saukko is Reader in Social Science and Medicine at the Department of Social Sciences, Loughborough University, UK. Her work combines medical sociology and science and technology studies. Her long-term research interest is experiences and technologies of diagnosis and her current projects focus on digital health and antimicrobial resistance.

Cris Shore is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and Guest Professor of Public Management at the Stockholm Centre for Organisational Research (Score). His research explores the effects of New Public Management and audit culture on society and human subjectivity. His latest book (edited with Susan Wright) is Death of the Public University? Uncertain Futures for Universities in the Global Knowledge Economy (Berghahn, 2017).

Gavin J. D. Smith (@gavin_jd_smith) is Deputy Head of the ANU School of Sociology. His research explores the social impacts of digitech/data and the subjective experiences of watching and being watched. His recent book Opening the Black Box: The Work of Watching (2015) provides an ethnographic account of CCTV camera operation in the UK. His work appears in journals such as Body & Society, The British Journal of Criminology, Critical Public Health, Big Data & Society and Urban Studies.

William G. Staples is Professor of Sociology, Chair of the Department of Sociology, and Founding Director of the Surveillance Studies Research Centre at the University of Kansas, USA. Staples is well known for his work in the areas of surveillance, social control and historical sociology. He is the author, most recently, of the second edition of Everyday Surveillance: Vigilance and Visibility in Postmodern Life (2014), considered a foundational work in the interdisciplinary field of Surveillance Studies.

Nicole Thualagant, Associate Professor MSc (Sociology) 6 PHD (nicole@ruc.dk), is Researcher at the Centre of Health Promotion Research, Department of People and Technology, Roskilde University, Denmark. Her research focuses on health policies, the rationale behind policies in relation to welfare states regimes as well as the consequences for ideals of citizenship.

Susan Wright is Professor of Educational Anthropology and Director of the Centre for Higher Education Futures (CHEF) at the Danish School of Education, Aarhus University, Denmark. She studies people’s participation in large scale processes of transformation and works with concepts of audit culture, governance, contestation and the anthropology of policy.