BackgroundNowadays, digital self-tracking devices offer a plethora of possibilities to both healthy and chronically ill users who want to closely examine their body. This study suggests that self-tracking in a private setting will lead to shifting understandings in professional care. To provide more insight into these shifts, this paper seeks to lay bare the promises and challenges of self-tracking while staying close to the everyday professional experience of the physician.ObjectiveThe aim of this study was to (1) offer an analysis of how medical doctors evaluate self-tracking methods in their practice and (2) explore the anticipated shifts that digital self-care will bring about in relation to our findings and those of other studies.MethodsA total of 12 in-depth semistructured interviews with general practitioners (GPs) and cardiologists were conducted in Flanders, Belgium, from November 2015 to November 2016. Thematic analysis was applied to examine the transcripts in an iterative process.ResultsFour major themes arose in our body of data: (1) the patient as health manager, (2) health obsession and medicalization, (3) information management, and (4) shifting roles of the doctors and impact on the health care organization. Our research findings show a nuanced understanding of the potentials and pitfalls of different forms of self-tracking. The necessity of contextualization of self-tracking data and a professionalization of self-care through digital devices come to the fore as important overarching concepts.ConclusionsThis interview study with Belgian doctors examines the potentials and challenges of self-monitoring while focusing on the everyday professional experience of the physician. The dialogue between our dataset and the existing literature affords a fine-grained image of digital self-care and its current meaning in a medical-professional landscape.
a b s t r a c tThis article explores to what extent the functions of interpersonal offline gossip can be mapped on to the virtual community of Second Life and its subsequent in-world and out-world interactions. A long-term hybrid ethnographic study was conducted that involved recurrent actual and virtual meetings with informants. The main objectives are, first, to look for similarities and to explain dissimilarities and, second, to gain some much-needed insight into how moral life is structured in social virtual communities and how important the role of gossip is. Results show overlaps between online and offline gossip concerning uses and functions. Gossip is important as a means for reputation management; as a cultural learning system; as a sanctioning system; and as entertainment. Just as in traditional offline communities, gossip is a central mechanism to regulate virtual moral life that stretches out to blogs, websites, and face-to-face meetings. Yet, technology amplifies the effects by creating new possibilities such as logging the evidence in order to spot cheaters. This way, in-world gossip becomes an inflated form of traditional gossip.
Purpose
This paper aims to fill this gap (infra, originality) by providing a conceptual framework for discussing “technologies of the self and other,” by showing that, in most cases, self-tracking also involves other-tracking.
Design/methodology/approach
In so doing, we draw upon Foucault’s “technologies of the self” and present-day literature on self-tracking technologies. We elaborate on two cases and practical domains to illustrate and discuss this mutual process: first, the quantified workplace; and second, quantification by wearables in a non-clinical and self-initiated context.
Findings
The main conclusion is that these shapings are never (morally) neutral and have ethical implications, such as regarding “quantified otherness,” a notion we propose to point at the risk that the other could become an object of examination and competition.
Originality/value
Although there is ample literature on the quantified self, considerably less attention is given to how the relation with the other is being shaped by self-tracking technologies that allow data sharing (e.g. wearables or apps such as Strava or RunKeeper).
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