Making sense with numbers. Unravelling ethico‐psychological subjects in practices of self‐quantification

Abstract

Prevention enthusiasts show great optimism about the potential of health apps to modify peoples’ lifestyles through the tracking and quantification of behaviours and bodily signs. Critical sociologists warn for the disciplining effects of self‐tracking. In this paper we use an empirical ethics approach to study the characteristics and strivings of the various types of ‘ethico‐psychological subjects’ that emerge in practices of self‐quantification by analysing how people and numbers relate in three cases of self‐quantification: in prevention discourse, in testimonies from the quantified self (QS) movement and in empirical work we did with people with Diabetes type I and with ‘every day self‐trackers’. We show that a free subject that needs support to enact its will is crucial to understand the optimism about prevention. In the QS‐movement the concern is with a lack of objective and personalised knowledge about imperceptible processes in the body. These subjects are decentered and multiplied when we trace how numbers in their turn act to make sense of people in our empirical study. We conclude that there are many different types of ethico‐psychological subjects in practices of self‐tracking that need to be explored in order to establish what good these practices of self‐quantification might do.

Negotiating the practical ethics of ‘self-tracking’ in intimate relationships: Looking for care in healthy living

“…Lupton (2019) proposes using theoretical approaches from feminist new materialism but while this might promise a move beyond individual motivations in fact the paper's focus on affective elements leads to an emphasis on things like the individual pleasure associated with 'taking control'. Within materialist studies in Science and Technology Studies (STS) Pols et al (2019) move further towards an ethical account of tracking in practice, with their discussion of the 'ethico-psychological subjects' who may be created by different practices, but the focus remains on the tracker as 'subject' rather than the wider set of relations within which they may be found. In one of the few studies to use the concept of care we note that Gorm and Shklovski (2019) invoked 'self-care' to explain the 'episodic use' of Fitbit devices as their participants made devices fit around other priorities.…”

“…Consumer devices for 'tracking' aspects of health and fitness have attracted recent academic attention, in which sociological work (Lupton 2016, Weiner & Will 2018, Pols et al 2019 has been joined by media and critical data studies that centre digital technologies (e.g. Ajana 2017, Ruckenstein et al 2018.…”

From quantified to qualculated age: the health pragmatics of biological age measurement

“…The latter group of studies evidence how the uses of health quantification devices and apps are entrenched in a complex and ambiguous relation of knowledge, power and authority (Barta and Neff 2016, Nafus and Sherman 2014, Neff and Nafus 2016), that question the validity of measurements and the efficacy of data, as these are in tension with other forms of valuation and are embedded in situated, fully laden socio‐material arrangements (Langstrup 2013, Pols et al . 2019). Aligned with STS work on users of technology (Oudshoorn and Pinch 2003), in this strand of research, the use of health tracking and quantifying technologies is explored as a process that is lived through, reflected upon and experimented within a situated and evolving relationship with other elements of people's lives.…”

Tracking towards care: Relational affordances of self‐tracking in gym culture

“…Tracking entails relieving oneself of the burden of making the right choices in pursuing 'optimization', by delegating decisions related to nutrition and sports activities, for example, to the calculative capacities of tracking technologies, which in turn may subject the user to surveillance (Sanders, 2017) or relegate them to a less reflexive state (Schüll, 2016). Research on everyday experiences of self-tracking provides nuance to these arguments of responsibilization and delegation, recognizing a more agentic and wilful 'ethico-psychological' (Pols et al, 2019) subjectivity, which is activated by the personalized, experimental and embodied ways in which humans use their devices and produce, interpret, repair and communicate with data (Gorm & Shklovski, 2019;Lomborg et al, 2018;Mopas & Huybregts, 2020;Pink et al, 2017Pink et al, , 2018Weiner et al, 2020;Will et al, 2020). These studies urge us to move beyond the argument that an algorithm or a technology has definitive agential capacities, or that responsibility for one's pursuit of health and care is dumped upon the technology; allowing for a distributive conceptualization of responsibility (Latour, 2005) and care (Mol, 2008), both emerging relationally, within infrastructures or arrangements consisting of technologies and human actors (Barad, 2007;Lupton, 2019;Schwennesen, 2019;Will et al, 2020).…”