Table Of ContentSELF-TRACKING
Empirical and
Philosophical
Investigations
Edited by
Btihaj Ajana
Self-Tracking
Btihaj Ajana
Editor
Self-Tracking
Empirical and Philosophical Investigations
Editor
Btihaj Ajana
Digital Humanities
King’s College London
London, UK
and
Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies
Aarhus University
Aarhus, Denmark
ISBN 978-3-319-65378-5 ISBN 978-3-319-65379-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-65379-2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017948697
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A
cknowledgements
This edited collection grew out of the workshop ‘The Quantified Self
and the Rise of Self-Tracking Culture’, organised by Btihaj Ajana in June
2016 at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies. The workshop was
part of Ajana’s Marie Curie Fellowship project, supported the European
Union’s Seventh Framework Programme under Grant Agreement No.
609033. We wish to thank Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies and
the European Union for their generous support with the workshop and
this ensuing publication project. We also wish to thank all the workshop
attendees for their useful feedback and comments on our presentations
and panel discussions.
Many thanks also to the research participants and the many self-trackers
who generously shared their experiences and thoughts with us in the course
of conducting our respective research projects and writings.
Finally, we would like to thank the editors at Palgrave Macmillan for
their support with the publication of this book.
v
c
ontents
1 Introduction 1
Btihaj Ajana
2 Engagement and the Quantified Self: Uneventful
Relationships with Ghostly Companions 11
Paolo Ruffino
3 Apps as Companions: How Quantified Self Apps Become
Our Audience and Our Companions 27
Jill Walker Rettberg
4 Human/Technology Associations in Self-Tracking
Practices 43
Dorthe Brogård Kristensen and Carolin Prigge
5 Social Media and Self-Tracking: Representing the ‘Health
Self’ 61
Rachael Kent
6 Self-Tracking as the Mobilisation of the Social
for Capital Accumulation 77
Chris Till
vii
viii CONTENTS
7 The Quantified Workplace: A Study in Self-Tracking,
Agility and Change Management 93
Phoebe Moore, Lukasz Piwek and Ian Roper
8 Data Privacy: Users’ Thoughts on Quantified Self
Personal Data 111
Keith Spiller, Kirstie Ball, Arosha Bandara,
Maureen Meadows, Ciaran McCormick, Bashar Nuseibeh
and Blaine A. Price
9 Communal Self-Tracking: Data Philanthropy, Solidarity
and Privacy 125
Btihaj Ajana
Author Index 143
Subject Index 149
e c
ditor And ontributors
About the Editor
Btihaj Ajana is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Digital Humanities,
King’s College London. She is also associated to Aarhus Institute of
Advanced Studies where she undertook a Marie Curie Fellowship in
2015–2017. Her academic work is 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).
Contributors
Kirstie Ball is Professor of Management at St. Andrews University. Her
research interests focus on surveillance; in particular, she is interested in
subjectivity and the experience of surveillance, employee surveillance,
consumer surveillance, and the blurring of public and private boundaries
in government surveillance regimes.
Arosha Bandara is Senior Lecturer in Computing at the Open
University. His research focuses on addressing the practical problems
associated with building and maintaining self-managing systems. Most
recently, he has been investigating ways in which machine-learning tech-
niques can improve the privacy management capabilities for users.
ix
x EDITOR AND CONTRIBUTORS
Rachael Kent is a Ph.D. candidate at King’s College London. She
is currently researching the use of social media and digital health tech-
nologies as part of the European Research Council funded project, Ego
Media. Kent is also a Graduate Teaching Assistant at the Department of
Digital Humanities, King’s College London.
Dorthe Brogård Kristensen is Associate Professor in Consumption
Studies at the University of Southern Denmark. She holds a Ph.D. from
the University of Copenhagen (2008) and an M.Sc. in medical anthro-
pology from University College London (1998). Her current interests
include digital health, food, social marketing, and medical pluralism.
Ciaran McCormick is Technical Project Officer in Computing at the
Open University. He is a KDB+/Q Developer, Functional Programmer,
and Big Data Devotee.
Maureen Meadows is Professor of Strategic Management at Coventry
University. Her research explores the use of data, particularly customer/
consumer data, by organisations of all kinds; the analysis of ‘big data’
to support decision-making and enhance strategic conversations; and
the impact of data sharing and privacy on customer behaviours and new
business models.
Phoebe Moore is an internationally renowned researcher on labour,
technology, and global governance. Moore’s recent publications in this
area include ‘The Quantified Self: What counts in the neoliberal work-
place’ (New Media and Society 2016) and Humans and Machines
at Work: Monitoring, Surveillance and Automation in Contemporary
Capitalism (Palgrave October 2017).
Bashar Nuseibeh is Professor of Computing at the Open University.
His research interests are broadly in software engineering, requirements
engineering and design, with a special interest in applications in security,
privacy, and digital forensics. His work aims to improve the development
of both cyber-physical systems and socio-technical ones.
Lukasz Piwek is Assistant Professor in Data Science at the School of
Management, University of Bath. His research work focuses on using
Big Data obtained from mobile devices, smart wearables, apps, and
social networks in security, work, health profiling, behaviour change, and
developing new research methodologies.
EDITOR AND CONTRIBUTORS xi
Blaine A. Price is Senior Lecturer of Computing at the Open
University. His research interests are in privacy in mobile and ubiquitous
computing and in lifelogging technologies in particular, including both
personal lifelogging and logging energy and resource usage.
Carolin Prigge finished her Master's Degree in Brand Management
and Marketing Communication in 2016 at the University of Southern
Denmark. Originally from Germany, she has been studying abroad in
Denmark, Spain, and the USA. Her work investigates the consumption
of fitness self-tracking technologies from a postphenomenological per-
spective.
Jill Walker Rettberg is Professor of Digital Culture at the University of
Bergen. She is the author of Seeing Ourselves Through Technology: How
We Uses Selfies, Blogs and Wearable Devices to See and Shape Ourselves
(Palgrave 2014) and Blogging (Polity Press 2014).
Ian Roper works at Middlesex University where he teaches employ-
ment relations and contemporary human resources management. He has
research interests in the nature of professionalism, employment relations,
ethics, and employment regulation. He has written a number of journal
articles and book chapters and edited books on these topics.
Paolo Ruffino is Lecturer in Media Studies at the University of
Lincoln. He has been researching and teaching on video game culture,
gamification, the Quantified Self, and media arts. He is one of the four
founding members of the art collective IOCOSE.
Keith Spiller is Lecturer in Criminology at Birmingham City University.
His research examines the social consequences of surveillance and its
impacts on organisations and individuals. His work has considered
CCTV, security regulation, counter-terror measures, and the impacts of
surveillance technologies within the UK’s travel and financial sectors.
Chris Till is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Leeds Beckett University.
His research interests are in social theory, health, technologies, and bod-
ies. Currently, he is conducting research into the use of self-tracking
technologies in corporate wellness programs to explore the role they play
in digital capitalism.
