An Anxious Alliance

Abstract

This essay presents a multi-year autoethnographic perspective on the use of personal fitness and self-tracking technologies to lose weight. In doing so, it examines the rich and contradictory relationships with ourselves and our world that are generated around these systems, and argues that the efforts to gain control and understanding of one's self through them need not be read as a capitulation to rationalizing forces, or the embrace of utopian ideals, but as an ongoing negotiation of the boundaries and meanings of self within an anxious alliance of knowledge, bodies, devices, and data. I discuss how my widening inquiry into these tools and practices took me from a solitary practice and into a community of fellow travellers, and from the pursuit of a single body goal into a continually renewing project of personal possibility.

Caring through Data

“…While CSCW and HCI have largely celebrated personal data as a means to improve individual health outcomes, researchers have also articulated a need to better understand the social context of personal health and wellness data. Studies, for instance, have investigated self-tracking communities like the Quantified Self [10], data-tracking anxieties [50], and sought new collaborative design directions for health and wellness informatics [6,17]. Since the everyday health experiences are increasingly being mediated through shared data, it is important to consider how this trend affects the practices and meanings of care itself, as well as to reconsider the emotional impact of data beyond the individual in the design of healthcare technologies.…”

Living Without a Mobile Phone

“…Instead, researchers tend to fall back to more traditional HCI practices when writing their autoethnographies, either by adopting a fully 'scientific' prose that confines the use of first person [20,31,35], and/or by concluding the autoethnography with a specific design guidelines section, or a concrete set of opportunities for design [2,20,35]. Two notable exceptions to this include Sengers's reflections on IT and pace of life [40], and Williams's use of personal fitness and self-tracking technologies to lose weight [43]. Through her highly personal stories about becoming aware of being oriented to time and work, Sengers aims to raise more general questions about the experiences of time and work that are tied to being modern as Westerners (and more specifically in her case as Americans).…”

“…The HCI community would normally expect this autoethnography to conclude with a specific design guidelines section, or a concrete set of opportunities for design. In line with Sengers [40] and Williams [43], this traditional autoethnography deliberately skips this and instead concentrates on systematically analyzing personal experience to understand cultural experience. Here, I aim to go beyond my own personal experiences and consider what a life without a mobile phone tells us about other parts of our society.…”

Writing PD

“…Another reading at the workshop came from Kaiton Williams on quantified self: an account of his changing perspective towards his body. Unusually for PD, his work is framed as 'auto-ethnography' [44]. This allows him to dismiss disciplinary expectations of generalizability to speak on the personal impact of technology use even while doing research on others' experience of self-tracking technologies.…”

“…I hope to read other accounts that will be markedly different. This has been an unabashedly person-centred attempt to present a perspective on these systems and communities,' he says, quoting the French author Perec as an influence in his discussion of the quotidian and the intimate [44].…”