Minna Ruckenstein

The heart of everyday analytics: emotional, material and practical extensions in self-tracking market

As a result of digital and mobile technology, various kinds of monitoring practices are moving back and forth knowledge hierarchies. The analytics of bodily and mental functions is no longer the privileged domain of professionals. This essay focuses on the ways in which everyday analytics, heart-rate monitoring in particular, becomes embedded and normalized in daily practices and by doing so, paves the way for new market developments. The discussion contributes to the markets-as-practice approach that treats markets as outcomes of processes in which marketable devices are both shaped by, and shape, practices in the market itself. By relying on practice theory, the essay traces historical developments and identifies domain extensions in self-tracking. Everyday analytics progresses with the aid of new devices; however, these are only successful in moving and recruiting consumers if they promote emotional and practical engagements that generate conditions for current and renewed monitoring practices.

Beyond the Quantified Self: Thematic exploration of a dataistic paradigm:

This article investigates the metaphor of the Quantified Self (QS) as it is presented in the magazine Wired (2008–2012). Four interrelated themes—transparency, optimization, feedback loop, and biohacking—are identified as formative in defining a new numerical self and promoting a dataist paradigm. Wired captures certain interests and desires with the QS metaphor, while ignoring and downplaying others, suggesting that the QS positions self-tracking devices and applications as interfaces that energize technological engagements, thereby pushing us to rethink life in a data-driven manner. The thematic analysis of the QS is treated as a schematic aid for raising critical questions about self-quantification, for instance, detecting the merging of epistemological claims, technological devices, and market-making efforts. From this perspective, another definition of the QS emerges: a knowledge system that remains flexible in its aims and can be used as a resource for epistemological inquiry and in the formation of alternative paradigms.

Toying with the world: Children, virtual pets and the value of mobility:

This article approaches childhood as an emergent condition in which children, their caregivers and toys all take an active part and argues that the focus on toys opens important insights for studying processes of social reproduction and change. This is demonstrated by describing children’s interactions with virtual pets that encourage children to become mobile in a manner that is only possible through digital technologies. This mobility is at heart of local orientations of how to be part of the world, but by subscribing to it children are not simply mimicking the adult world: when children make the pursuit of mobility their own project, they also make it distinctively theirs.

Time scales of consumption: Children, money and transactional orders

Recent research into children’s consumption argues for the centrality of children and childhood in rethinking and revising notions of consumer culture. This article introduces the model of time scales of consumption for exploring children’s talk about money. An analysis of short- and long-term cycles of exchange opens for scrutiny the complex ways in which children are affected by, and contribute to, processes of consumption. Culturally, money is usually an open resource; it can be converted into a collector’s item, a bribe, a promise or a goal, and used for solidifying and transforming social relations. Children’s notions of money talk about the cultural underpinnings of money and consumer culture that define and affect both children’s and adults’ future orientations. In addition, the perspective of children confirms that money is linked to everyday cosmologies that reproduce temporal dimensions and rely on the centrality of thrift. Etnographic study of time scales of consumption thus offer important insights for exploring the reproduction and transformation of consumer culture over generations.

Keeping data alive

ABSTRACT Direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic testing has been discussed and critiqued from perspectives that include biomedical, commercial, ethical, legal, regulatory, and participatory stances. This study adds a perspective that emphasizes the ‘liveliness of data’ and treats 23andMe genetic tests as part of an expanding self-tracking market that shapes communication, social life, and identities. In demonstrating how ‘gene talk’ aids and speeds the circulation of findings based on personal data, the discussion cast light on how personal data gain value in people’s lives, thereby enhancing their readiness to position themselves as data subjects. Users are offered a data-enhanced existence, a ‘lifeworld inc.’, in which new kinds of ontological horizons are promoted by technical developments that produce numbers and calculable coordinates for descriptive regimes. Arguing that debates on DTC genetic testing and uses of personal data benefit from a more thorough analysis both of translations of genetic knowledge and emerging data practices, the aim is to critically address the active work by users that keeps genetic data alive, including the emotional longings and practical capabilities that people have in terms of genetic knowledge. Through a more comprehensive framework, recognizing the lively nature of genetic data, we can reveal how genetic testing services promote knowledge formation that mixes intimate and larger scale social and economic contexts.

CHILDREN IN CREATIONIST CAPITALISM

The term ‘creationist capitalism’ attempts to capture a shift or a trend in capitalism that is currently being described as a move away from consumption to that of prosumption. At the heart of prosumption is the intertwining of economic profit-making with individual creativity. This study explores how creationist capitalism is produced and pushed forward in corporate practices and understandings. Particular attention is paid to virtual worlds that rely on user-generated content. The case study of Habbo Hotel examines company practices that shape childrens experiences online and opens for scrutiny some of the complex political and ethical issues that these practices pose. The aim is to demonstrate that childrens interactions, particularly online, should be explored within a framework that identifies the intimate links between social aspirations and economic production. In virtual worlds, childrens social aims and desires interweave with capitalist profit-making in imaginative and sometimes unexpected ways.

Living the metrics: Self-tracking and situated objectivity

This paper evaluates self-tracking practices in connection with ideas of objectivity via exploration of confrontations with personal data, particularly with reference to physiological stress and recovery measurements. The discussion departs from the notion of ‘mechanical objectivity’, seeking to obtain evidence that is ‘uncontaminated by interpretation’. The framework of mechanical objectivity tends, however, to fall short when people translate physiological measurements to fit their expectations and everyday experiences. We develop the concept of ‘situated objectivity’ with the goal of highlighting the everyday as a domain of interpretation, reflection and ambiguity, proposing that the concept offers an analytical entry point to a more profound understanding of how people engage with their personal data. Everyday data encounters are not methodical and systematic, but combine knowledge in an eclectic manner. Framed in this way, self-tracking practices are less occupied with ‘facts of life’ than translating and transforming life based on earlier experiences, cultural understandings and shared expectations. Paradoxically, new measurement devices and software, which are supposed to be based on sound, universal and generalisable principles, hard facts and accurate descriptions, become raw material for daily decisions, as people seek bespoke answers and craft personalised theories of health and life. From this perspective, self-tracking measurements can be used to experiment and learn, gaining value in relation to the communicative processes that they promote and contributing to possibilities for rethinking health knowledge and health promotion.

Playing Nintendogs: Desire, distributed agency and potentials of prosumption

This article focuses on participatory forms of capitalism, children’s consumer desires and engagements with a game console. The Nintendo DS is needed in order to enter a gaming world where relationships are built between children and non-human objects with human-like capacities. The discussion proposes that playing a simulation game, Nintendogs, tells us a more general story about how social relations are affected and shaped by technologies. In order to understand consumer desires in a nuanced manner, how they are supported and how they become intensified in everyday discourse and practice, it is important to examine ways in which commodities sustain distributed agency and participate in chains of interaction. Together these different aspects open for scrutiny the fundamental ways in which commodities and consumer desires contribute to the production of human beings. On the one hand desire becomes manifest as longing for commodities and social recognition, on the other, it is also a form of self-preservation that promotes social engagements with various kinds of entities, real or imaginary.

Social rhythms of the heart

ABSTRACT A long-term research focus on the temporality of everyday life has become revitalised with new tracking technologies that allow methodological experimentation and innovation. This article approaches rhythms of daily lives with heart-rate variability measurements that use algorithms to discover physiological stress and recovery. In the spirit of the ‘social life of methods’ approach, we aggregated individual data (n = 35) in order to uncover temporal rhythms of daily lives. The visualisation of the aggregated data suggests both daily and weekly patterns. Daily stress was at its highest in the mornings and around eight o’clock in the evening. Weekend stress patterns were dissimilar, indicating a stress peak in the early afternoon especially for men. In addition to discussing our explorations using quantitative data, the more general aim of the article is to explore the potential of new digital and mobile physiological tracking technologies for contextualising the individual in the everyday.

Co-evolving with self-tracking technologies:

Seen in a longitudinal perspective, Quantified Self-inspired self-tracking sets up “a laboratory of the self,” where people co-evolve with technologies. By exploring ways in which self-tracking technologies energize everyday aims or are experienced as limiting, we demonstrate how some aspects of the self are amplified while others become reduced and restricted. We suggest that further developing the concept of the laboratory of the self renews the conversation about the role of metrics and technologies by facilitating comparison between different realms of the digital, and demonstrating how services and devices enlarge aspects of the self at the expense of others. The use of self-tracking technologies is inscribed in, but also runs counter to, the larger political-economy landscape. Personal laboratories can aid the exploration of how the techno-mediated selves fit into larger structures of the digital technology market and the role that metrics play in defining them.