The Quantified Self

What do Crawford et al. (2015) identify as the fundamental claim of wearable devices?

"A fundamental claim of wearable devices is that data will bestow self-knowledge: the kind of self-knowledge that will create a fitter, happier, more productive person." (Crawford, Lingel & Karppi, 2015)

How do Crawford et al. (2015) describe the split between experience and data in self-tracking?

"There is their experience, and there is the data about them — the data are perceived as more objective and reliable than a subjective human account." (Crawford, 2014, cited in Crawford et al., 2015)

How does Lupton (2015) describe quantitative data's status within self-tracking cultures?

"Quantitative data are represented as objective forms of information compared to the information gathered from people's own subjective experiences of their bodily sensations and rhythms." (Lupton, 2015)

What term describes the worldview produced when people primarily understand their bodies through data, and who coins it?

"Numerical ontology" (Oxlund, 2012) — data comes to "suffuse everyday practices and the ways in which people relate to their own bodies." Cited in Ruckenstein & Schull (2017). Useful for arguing self-tracking produces a narrow, datafied conception of selfhood.

What is Crawford et al.'s (2015) concept of the moral epistemology of self-tracking?

The idea — visible from early bathroom scale advertising — that "better self-knowledge leads to a better life." Knowing one's body through data is framed as both a practical and moral good, linking measurement to virtue and self-improvement. (Crawford et al., 2015)

How do Nafus & Neff (2016) describe the limitations of data as a form of self-knowledge?

Data acts as a "transducer" — it preserves only selected qualities of lived experience, meaning "there is much room for people to maneuver in the imperfect translation." (Nafus & Neff, 2016, cited in Ruckenstein & Schull, 2017)

What is Foucault's concept of biopower and how does Sanders (2017) apply it to self-tracking?

Biopower operates at two levels: micro (disciplinary/individual) and macro (regulatory/state). Sanders argues self-tracking extends biopower by producing subjects who "voluntarily conduct themselves" in accordance with health norms — internalising surveillance as self-care. (Sanders, 2017)

How does Sanders (2017), drawing on Rose (1999), describe how neoliberal biopower operates?

Neoliberal biopower "governs at a distance" — rather than direct state intervention, it shapes conduct by authorising expert knowledges that articulate norms of healthy embodiment and constituting subjects as free yet responsible individuals. (Rose, 1999, cited in Sanders, 2017)

What key phrase from Ruckenstein & Schull (2017) captures how self-tracking aligns with neoliberal health governance?

Self-tracking contributes to "turning health care into self-care" — individuals are expected to manage health proactively through data, shifting responsibility from state healthcare systems to individual self-management. (Ruckenstein & Schull, 2017, p. 265)

How does Lupton (2013), cited in Ruckenstein & Schull (2017), reframe patient empowerment in digital health?

"'Empowerment' becomes a set of obligations." Being a responsible digital health citizen means submitting to datafied self-monitoring — making what appears as personal choice into a normative duty. (Lupton, 2013, cited in Ruckenstein & Schull, 2017)

What does Lupton (2015) argue about sexual and reproductive self-tracking apps?

They reduce sexual activity to "the numbers" and frame sexual self-care as a form of "labour involving scheduling, discipline, productivity" — turning intimacy into a performance metric and medicalising women's bodies through intensive data collection. (Lupton, 2015)

How does Sanders (2017) describe the relationship between post-feminist patriarchy and self-tracking?

Patriarchy in its post-feminist form "delegates" the enforcement of gender norms to expert guidance via apps and media, encouraging women "to work on and transform the self" and "regulate every aspect" of their conduct — framing structural discipline as personal choice. (Sanders, 2017)

What is the Pregnancy Panopticon (Quintin, EFF 2017)?

Fertility and pregnancy tracking apps collect highly sensitive reproductive data — sexual activity, moods, menstrual cycles — which can be shared with third parties and in some US states potentially used as legal evidence. Secondary data use proceeds with "very little information given to users." (Barassi, 2017; Quintin, EFF 2017)

How does Sanders (2017) characterise the gendered design of self-tracking technologies?

Devices are overwhelmingly designed by men — "women comprise less than 30% of the United States' tech workforce" — meaning "modes of measurement, data interpretation, and goal-setting likely reproduce male visions of women's health and reposition women as subjects of a specifically male evaluative gaze." (Sanders, 2017)

What is McRuer's concept of compulsory able-bodiedness and how does Elman (2018) apply it to wearables?

Compulsory able-bodiedness (McRuer, 2006) is the assumption that able-bodiedness is the only natural and desirable way of being. Elman argues Fitbit naturalises this by recording all movement solely as steps — making wheelchair movement a measurement error rather than a valid form of mobility. (Elman, 2018)

What did Fitbit officially state about wheelchair users' data accuracy, and what does Elman (2018) argue this reveals?

The device "has not been designed to account for this type of use, and could lead to an inaccurate representation of a person's activity levels." (community.fitbit.com, 2017, cited in Elman, 2018) — disability is not a different mode of embodiment but a measurement error. The self-tracking self is implicitly able-bodied.

What paradox does Elman (2018) identify in wearable advertising featuring disabled people?

Disabled bodies are symbolically visible as inspiration but materially invisible in actual device design — disability "disappears technologically even as it is celebrated rhetorically," functioning as inspiration porn that depoliticises compulsory able-bodiedness by emphasising individual will over structural access.

How does Davis (2017) connect the history of statistics to eugenics?

"Statistics is bound up with eugenics because the central insight of statistics is the idea that a population can be normed." (Davis, 2017) Almost all early statisticians were eugenicists — the statistical norm doesn't just describe difference; it actively creates deviance and justifies its correction.

What did Karl Pearson's eugenic definition of the unfit include, and why is this relevant to self-tracking?

"The habitual criminal, the professional tramp, the tuberculous, the insane, the mentally defective… the diseased from birth or from excess." (Pearson, cited in Davis, 2017) This eugenic logic of ranked fitness persists when self-tracking frames bodily deviation as individual moral failure rather than structural difference.

What do Nafus & Sherman (2014) mean by soft resistance?

The Quantified Self movement constitutes a "modality of resistance to dominant modes of living with data" — critical engagement disrupts algorithmic and normative imperatives. But it is a compromise, since it operates within rather than rejecting these technologies. (Nafus & Sherman, 2014, p. 1785)

According to Couldry & Powell (2014), in what ways can self-tracking be agential?

As autobiography and diary-keeping; identity work; source of sociality and solidarity; a means of personal control; and counterpower and data activism — foregrounding "the agency and reflexivity of individual actors" rather than treating users as passive subjects of structural power.

What does Barassi (2017) find about users' critical engagement with pregnancy apps in BabyVeillance?

Despite apps providing "corporations and the state pre-birth surveillance of its newest citizens," users actively critique white heteronormative assumptions in app design and develop "solidarity around subversive techniques" such as creating fake profiles to resist commercial surveillance. (Barassi, 2017)

What does Sanders (2017) propose as an alternative to rejecting self-tracking entirely?

"Subversion rather than renunciation" (Sanders, 2017, p. 55) — approaching self-tracking as open, experimental, and playful rather than goal-oriented, with space for users to collaborate in app design rather than conforming to commercially embedded norms.

What are Neff & Nafus's (2016) four revenue streams for self-tracking technologies?

(1) Hardware and software sales; (2) providing data for secondary uses to third parties; (3) tailored advertising models; (4) conducting and selling data analysis. Users provide more data than they receive — an inherently asymmetric exchange that generates value from bodies without compensation.

What does the Ruckenstein & Schull (2017) distinction between data rich and data poor reveal about self-tracking?

Companies accumulate vast user data (data rich) while individuals only access their own personal metrics (data poor) — creating "asymmetric relations between those who collect and store data and those whom data collection targets." (Andrejevic, 2014, cited in Ruckenstein & Schull, 2017)

What is Elman's (2018) argument about corporate wellness programmes and disabled workers?

Under US law, up to 30% of insurance premiums can be tied to health outcomes — meaning disabled and chronically ill workers who cannot meet normative metrics face annual financial penalties of up to US$2,000, despite evidence wellness programmes have "no measurable impact on health outcomes." (Elman, 2018)

What is epistemicide (Redvers et al., 2024) and how does it relate to self-tracking?

"The killing, silencing, annihilation, or devaluing of a knowledge system." (Redvers et al., 2024) The privileging of positivist, individualised data as the universal form of health knowledge suppresses Indigenous and relational epistemologies that understand health as inseparable from environment and community.

How do Redvers et al. (2024) describe Euro-Western health systems' relationship to nature?

They treat humans as "entirely separate from Nature," despite "all socioeconomic and health inputs being completely dependent on a healthy and livable planet." This constitutes "ecological denial" perpetuated by ongoing epistemicide — putting all of humanity at risk from nature-disconnected systems. (Redvers et al., 2024)

How do Ebi & Hess (2020) link climate change to health inequality?

"The greatest health harms will continue to be seen in populations where exposure and susceptibility are high and in countries that have contributed the least greenhouse gas emissions" — disproportionately affecting Black, Indigenous, disabled, low-income populations, and women and girls. (Ebi & Hess, 2020)

Why does the individualisation of health through self-tracking become especially harmful in the context of climate change?

Climate-driven health harms — heat mortality, respiratory disease from wildfire smoke, food insecurity — cannot originate from or be mitigated by individual behaviour. Self-tracking reframes health as personal responsibility precisely at the moment when collective planetary action is most urgent, obscuring structural and ecological causation.

What is dataveillance (Van Dijck, 2014) and how does it differ from surveillance?

Unlike optical surveillance targeting specific behaviour, dataveillance is continuous networked tracking of digital information — its aim is not to see a specific behaviour but to "continuously track for emergent patterns" in order to predict and shape future conduct. (Van Dijck, 2014, cited in Ruckenstein & Schull, 2017)

What is domestication theory (Haddon & Silverstone) and how does it apply to self-tracking?

Technologies initially feel strange and prompt critical reflection; once domesticated into routine use, the ideological norms embedded within them exert influence invisibly. Applied to self-tracking: the disciplinary power of wearables grows precisely as they become normalised — the Fitbit on the wrist is no longer examined, only obeyed.

What is the social model of disability (UPIAS, 1976) and why does it challenge self-tracking's framing of disability?

UPIAS (1976) argued "it is society that disables physically impaired people — disability is something imposed on top of our impairments by the way we are unnecessarily isolated and excluded from participation in society." Self-tracking advertising inverts this, framing disability as something individuals overcome through willpower rather than something societies must structurally address.

What does the Sandile Mkhize Fitbit ad (2018) reveal, and which theoretical framework does it violate?

Mkhize states "my environment wasn't going to change so it had to be me" — directly contradicting the social model of disability, responsibilising the individual for structural inaccessibility. Fitbit still cannot track wheelchair movement in 2026, meaning the advert's inspiration porn serves corporate branding while the technology excludes the very bodies it celebrates.

What does the Cigna corporate wellness programme (2014) reveal about self-tracking and neoliberal governance?

Cigna distributed wearables to employees to predict and reduce health costs — a spokesperson stated "we can literally bend the cost curve." This illustrates how self-tracking transforms workers' bodies into risk-management data, shifting health responsibility from employer and state to individual while generating institutional profit from biometric data.

What specific evidence from Parsons et al. (2025) demonstrates what self-tracking cannot capture?

Heat waves are "the leading weather-related cause of death in the United States"; wildfire smoke causes hospitalisation increases especially in children due to higher oxidative stress; over two billion people lack regular access to safe nutritious food. None of these risks originate in individual behaviour or are measurable by step counts. (Parsons et al., 2025)

How do Elias & Gill (2018) describe how beauty apps extend patriarchal discipline?

Beauty apps diffuse expertise formerly held by magazines and professionals — they normalise surveillance of self and others, embedding norms of feminine appearance in intimate digital spaces and making what is structurally enforced discipline feel like personal choice and self-improvement. (Elias & Gill, 2018, described in lecture)

What does the data as capital metaphor capture and what does it miss?

It captures how self-tracking extracts value from users without compensation (Neff & Nafus, 2016). But data is not capital in the Marxist sense — it is not depleted by use and lacks classical exchange value. More precisely, data is a tool for extracting surplus value from users' uncompensated labour — closer to a means of production than capital itself.

What does the Visible app illustrate about both the potential and limits of resistant self-tracking?

Visible was co-founded by people with ME and chronic fatigue experience, enabling patients to make invisible symptoms legible to clinicians. But the potential remains for data to be weaponised in insurance or benefits claims — agency exists within the technology, but data still flows to third parties operating within ableist institutional frameworks.

What is technological solutionism (Morozov, 2013) and how does Williamson (2015) show it operating at state level?

Technological solutionism is the belief that social and health problems can be resolved through data and technology. Williamson shows states embed this logic early through school fitness programmes like FitnessGram, which markets itself as preparing "the students of today to be the healthy workers of tomorrow" — building calculable publics from childhood and naturalising data-driven self-governance. (Williamson, 2015)