It is about: „Control and Care – Ambiguous Self-Relations and Life Maintenance Practices with Anthropomorphized Self-Tracking Technologies„
I would like to share my conclusion of this almost 6 years, that I’ve spent on reaesrach, data collecting, observing, interviewing, analyzing and modeling on the phenomenon of self-tracking and self-monitoring which is often contextualized with self-optimisation.
It is about balancing the control and care aspects in us when we try to maintain our lives in a best responsible way. It covers this dialectics of care and control, as self-affirmation, self-challenges and many more, and analyzes the role of technology for our self-relations, self-understanding and the drafting upon our identities.
Here’s the summary respectively my conclusion
This dissertation presents an analysis of the relations to self and technology that emerge from and in the use of self-tracking technologies to demonstrate and discuss further and, I argue, more significant technically mediated relations to self and technology, going beyond mere self-optimisation.
At the outset of this work, I linked to current cultural studies and sociological assessments of self-tracking as a self-exploitative travesty deeply rooted in neoliberal thinking, unconsciously heteronomous, launched by state and economic interests, which appears – or is intended to appear attractive to users under the sign of self-optimisation, as techno-optimistic groups, such as the Quantified Self network, and publications, such as in WIRED magazine, proclaim. Applying the analytical skepticism that Steve Woolgar articulated in STS as a pointed provocation, „It could be otherwise,“ my own ethnographic and auto-ethnographic treatment of the topic started from a different premise. I asked about the more profound experiences, logics, and dynamics in the encounter with these technologies and what they can tell us about contemporary human life and experience in a technologized world.
The self-relations made visible, addressed, and reinforced through the use of ST technologies can be subsumed under two broad themes: self-control and self-care. These two are addressed at one time each for themselves, but also appear simultaneously through a special ambivalent seeming and yet also concurrent existence.
„Balancing Care and Control – My dissertation as an Ethnographic Study on Self-Tracking.“ weiterlesen