Being in a mediated world: self-tracking and the mind–body–environment

Abstract

Self-tracking is an increasingly ubiquitous everyday activity and therefore is becoming implicated in the ways that everyday environments are experienced and configured. In this article, we examine theoretically and ethnographically how the digital materiality of these technologies mediates and participates in the constitution of people's tacit ways of being in the world. We argue that accounting for the presence of such technologies as part of everyday environments in this way offers new insights for non-representational accounts of everyday life as developed in geography and anthropology and advances existing understandings of these technologies as it has emerged in sociology and media studies.

Pedagogy as Possibility: Health Interventions as Digital Openness

“…In this article we draw on examples from ethnographic research undertaken in Sweden by Vaike Fors, although these examples were part of a wider ethnographic study by both authors across Australia and Sweden, which supports the insights that we demonstrate here (see for example (Pink and Fors 2017a, 2017b, Pink et al 2017a). In total we undertook research with sixteen participants and we also conducted an autoethnographic study while wearing activity wristbands for one month each (see Pink et al 2017b).…”

“…As they show, 'mundane data' produced through self-tracking intervenes as part of complex entanglements of digital materiality, involving 'people, things, affects, and temporalities' as they move forward in the world. In this sense it contrasts starkly with behaviour change interventions that seek to motivate people to live more healthily (Pink et al 2017a). They conclude that 'any interventions for change that involve data need to always account for (1) how data becomes part of the generative processes of everyday life, and (2) how data is engaged in any particular context as affective technologies' (Pink et al 2017b).…”

“…Since, as we have argued elsewhere, self-tracking personal data is continually emergent from our everyday relationships with our environments (Pink and Fors 2017a) but, simultaneously, self-tracking technologies constitute interventions of a kind in our everyday lives. Indeed, as noted above, they have often been seen in the context of health behavioural change initiatives to offer interventions towards creating healthier ways of living.…”

“…For example we have elsewhere argued for an approach to self-tracking that understands the human-technology relationship as one that plays out as part of continually-emergent everyday environments that we continually experience sensorially and affectively, and where digital data is equally part of the environment as is the weather and the ground underfoot (Pink and Fors 2017a). A possible reason for this is that while existing research in the social sciences has indeed attended to the embodied, lively (Lupton 2016(Lupton , 2017, emplaced (Pink and Fors 2017a), and affective (Pink et al 2017a) elements of self-tracking, these have not tended to be explored in relationship to pedagogies for behaviour change, even when they have developed critical perspectives on design for behaviour change (e.g., Pink et al 2017b). In the next section we take this discussion further by demonstrating how an approach to self-tracking as embodied, affective, and emplaced can be advanced further through a learning perspective.…”

“…When seen as such, self-tracking technologies inevitably fail as forms of intervention towards better health. In this article we investigate what happens when we take the second strand-the notion of enabling learning as an incremental and emergent process-seriously as a mode of intervention towards health through self-tracking technologies (see for example (Lupton 2017;Pink et al 2017a). We show how such a shift in pedagogical understanding of the routes to knowing these technologies offer creates opportunities to move beyond simplistic ideas of behavioural change as the main application of digital body monitoring in everyday life.…”