2(1) 2016: Quantified Selves

Browsing 2(1) 2016: Quantified Selves by Subject "ddc:004"

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  • Article
    Bodies, Mood and Excess. Relationship Tracking and the Technicity of Intimacy
    Lambert, Alex (2016) , S. 71-88
    A range of commercial mobile technologies are emerging which use psychophysiological sensors to monitor bodies and behaviour to produce new forms of knowledge about social relationships. In this paper I am concerned with how this kind of relationship-tracking influences intimacy. I am specifically interested in what I call the “technicity of intimacy”, the cultural techniques which emerge through the historically contingent technologisation of intimacy. Based on archival research, I argue that relationship-tracking promises to take up the intensive social labours associated with contemporary intimacy. Yet, the psychophysiological measurements these technologies rely on produce partial and ambiguous indicators of intimate life, gesturing toward an excess of intimate meaning that cannot be interrogated. The self-reflexive concern with this excess drives further tracking experiments and techniques. Yet intimacy remains a continuous mystery, and this problematises the value of self-tracking as a system dedicated to achieving meaningful selfknowledge and completeness.
  • Article
    Casual Power. Understanding User Interfaces through Quantification
    Gekker, Alex (2016) , S. 107-122
    The paper draws parallels between quantification as found in the user interfaces of video games, to similar elements of more “serious” devices, in particular mapping and navigational platforms. I present an autoethnographic study of a mundane experience that would be familiar to many Google Maps users: locating a nearby place of interest and figuring out how to reach it. The navigational case is used as a canvas for a further analysis of the role of quantified elements in user interfaces. My autoethnography shows how the mundane actions performed on the screen are informed by the necessary reductions that mapped media perform on the physical world. Such reductions are imitated and enabled by user interfaces designed to control and guide user attention. Designers aim to simplify and streamline user interactions with the system and such practices are built on tracking the user and habituating the actions she performs through the screen.
  • Article
    How Old am I? Digital Culture and Quantified Ageing
    Marshall, Barbara L.; Katz, Stephen (2016) , S. 145-152
    In previous work we argued that ageing bodies and changes across the life-course were becoming measured, standardised, and treated according to a new logic of functionality, supplanting traditional categories of normality (Katz/Marshall 2004). In particular, the binary between the ‘functional’ and the ‘dysfunctional’ has become a powerful tool in mapping and distributing bodies around datapoints, functional subsystems, and posthuman informatics. In this paper, we extend this line of analysis by exploring how current developments in self-tracking technologies and the proliferation of digital apps are creating new modes and styles of ‘quantified ageing’. In particular, we identify four interrelated fields for inquiry that are specifically relevant in setting out a research agenda on ageing quantified selves and statistical bodies: 1) ‘Wearables’ and mobile technologies, including both technologies designed for selfmonitoring/self-improvement (health, fitness, sleep, mood and so on) and those designed for surveillance of and ‘management’ of ageing individuals by children, caregivers or institutions. 2) Digital apps, including those that collect and connect data uploaded from wearable devices, and those that deploy various algorithms for ‘calculating’ age and its correlates. 3) The rhetorics of games and scores in age-related apps such as those used in digital ‘brain training’ games that track a person’s imagined cognitive plasticity and enhancement, while promising protection against memory loss and even dementia. 4) The political economy of data sharing, aggregation and surveillance of ageing populations. Conclusions ponder wider sociological questions; for example, how will the insurance industry acquire and use data from digital health technologies to produce new actuarial standards? How will older individuals plan their futures according to the risks assembled through quantifying technologies? We argue that the technical turn to new ways of quantifying and standardising measurements of age raises a range of complex and important questions about ageism, agency and inequality.
  • Article