The ambivalent assemblages of sleep optimization

ABSTRACT

In the last decade, self-tracking technologies have encouraged users to optimize various biosocial practices. Through a wide array of smart digital devices and apps, users are put on notice: are they aware of the screen time they accrue each day, the steps they have (not) walked, or the last time they stood up? In the resulting sphere of mediated self-awareness, sleep is ripe for calculation, analysis, and optimization. Essential yet unconscious, sleep is a practice that manifests as an ambivalent example of wider self-tracking logics; an alluring “data frontier” for users and corporations alike. In this article, I draw on qualitative data (N = 38), collected in Australia, to explore the experiences and practices of self-trackers who monitor their sleep. Using interview data and participant screenshots, I discuss how apps construct sleep standards, social dimensions of sleep metrics, gamified incentives, and the process of assembling codes/spaces around sleep monitoring. In bringing sleep within a sphere of rational control, apps often exclude difference by focusing on consumer choice, wellness, and self-care. While imprecise and fungible, sleep metrics act as proxies for productivity, and reify normative understandings of time-use, energy, and sleep.

KEYWORDS:

• datafication
• optimization
• Quantified Self
• self-tracking
• sleep

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Brady Robards, Mark Davis, and John Gardner for their support and guidance during the projects that inform this article. I would like to also thank the research participants for sharing their time, thoughts, and experiences.

Notes

1 Sarah Pink and Vaike Fors, “Self-Tracking and Mobile Media: New Digital Materialities,” Mobile Media & Communication 5, no. 3 (2017): 219–38; Gabija Didžiokaitė, Paula Saukko, and Christian Greiffenhagen, “The Mundane Experience of Everyday Calorie Trackers: Beyond the Metaphor of Quantified Self,” New Media & Society 20, no. 4 (2018): 1470–87.

2 Simon J. Williams, Catherine Coveney, and Robert Meadows, “‘M-apping’ Sleep? Trends and Transformations in the Digital Age,” Sociology of Health & Illness 37, no. 7 (2015): 1039–54.

3 Alex Lambert, “Bodies, Mood and Excess: Relationship Tracking and the Technicity of Intimacy,” Digital Culture & Society 2, no. 1 (2016): 71–88; Tama Leaver, “Intimate Surveillance: Normalizing Parental Monitoring and Mediation of Infants Online,” Social Media + Society 3, no. 2 (2017): 1–10, https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305117707192; Deborah Lupton, “Quantified Sex: A Critical Analysis of Sexual and Reproductive Self-Tracking Using Apps,” Culture, Health & Sexuality 17, no. 4 (2015): 440–53.

4 Melissa M. Littlefield, Instrumental Intimacy: EEG Wearables and Neuroscientific Control (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), 15–17.

5 Martin Berg, “Making Sense with Sensors: Self-Tracking and the Temporalities of Wellbeing,” Digital Health 3 (2017): https://doi.org/2055207617699767.

6 Melissa Gregg, Counterproductive: Time Management in the Knowledge Economy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 111–17.

7 Sarah Sharma, In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 84; Judy Wajcman, Pressed for Time: The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 1.

8 Christopher O’Neill and Bjorn Nansen, “Sleep Mode: Mobile Apps and the Optimisation of Sleep–Wake Rhythms,” First Monday 24, no. 6 (2019): https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v24i6.9574; Dylan Mulvin, “Media Prophylaxis: Night Modes and the Politics of Preventing Harm,” Information & Culture 53, no. 2 (2018): 175–202.

9 Tarja Salmela, Anu Valtonen, and Deborah Lupton, “The Affective Circle of Harassment and Enchantment: Reflections on the ŌURA Ring as an Intimate Research Device,” Qualitative Inquiry 25, no. 3 (2019): 260–70.

10 Sharma, In the Meantime, 102.

11 Nikolas Rose, Inventing Our Selves: Psychology, Power, and Personhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

12 Sushanth Bhat et al., “Is There a Clinical Role for Smartphone Sleep Apps? Comparison of Sleep Cycle Detection by a Smartphone Application to Polysomnography,” Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine 11, no. 7 (2015): 709–15.

13 Ibid., 712.

14 Littlefield, Instrumental Intimacy.

15 O’Neill and Nansen, “Sleep Mode.”

16 Antoinette Fage-Butler, “Sleep App Discourses: A Perspective,” in Metric Culture: Ontologies of Self-Tracking Practices, ed. Btihaj Ajana (Bingley, U.K.: Emerald Publishing, 2018), 157–76; O’Neill and Nansen, “Sleep Mode”; Williams, Coveney, and Meadows, “‘M-apping’ Sleep?”

17 @jack [Jack Dorsey], “Result of Good Sleep,” Twitter, October 27, 2018, 8:09 PM, https://twitter.com/jack/status/1056201333999460352.

18 Andreas Hepp, “The Fragility of Curating a Pioneer Community: Deep Mediatization and the Spread of the Quantified Self and Maker Movements,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 23, no. 6 (2020): 933–34.

19 Catherine Waldby, “Stem Cells, Tissue Cultures and the Production of Biovalue,” Health 6, no. 3 (2002): 305–23; Deborah Lupton, “Lively Data, Social Fitness and Biovalue: The Intersections of Health Self-Tracking and Social Media,” in The Sage Handbook of Social Media, ed. Jean Burgess, Alice Marwick, and Thomas Poell (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2017), 562–78.

20 Wajcman, Pressed for Time, 70–78.

21 Ben Light, Jean Burgess, and Stefanie Duguay, “The Walkthrough Method: An Approach to the Study of Apps,” New Media & Society 20, no. 3 (2018): 881–900; Kristian Møller Jørgensen, “The Media Go-Along: Researching Mobilities with Media at Hand,” MedieKultur: Journal of Media and Communication Research 32, no. 60 (2016): 32–49; Kristian Møller and Brady Robards, “Walking Through, Going Along and Scrolling Back: Ephemeral Mobilities in Digital Ethnography,” Nordicom Review 40, no. s1 (2019): 95–109; Michael Dieter et al., “Multi-Situated App Studies: Methods and Propositions,” Social Media + Society 5, no. 2 (2019): 1–15, https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119846486; Quinn Grundy, Fabian P. Held, and Lisa A. Bero, “Tracing the Potential Flow of Consumer Data: A Network Analysis of Prominent Health and Fitness Apps,” Journal of Medical Internet Research 19, no. 6 (2017): e233, https://doi.org/10.2196/jmir.7347; Kate O’Riordan, “Wearable Technologies and Material Communication Practices,” in Appified: Culture in the Age of Apps, ed. Jeremy Wade Morris and Sarah Murray (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018), 115–24.

22 Møller and Robards, “Walking Through, Going Along and Scrolling Back.”

23 Victoria Jaynes, “The Social Life of Screenshots: The Power of Visibility in Teen Friendship Groups,” New Media & Society 22, no. 8 (2020): 1378–93.

24 PPGs are often signified by bright green lights on the undersides of wrist-worn wearables. They consist of LEDs and optical sensors. Skin reflects light in different ways, as blood moves underneath. This allows the sensor to “see” pulse and infer a heartrate.

25 Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge, Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011).

26 Møller and Robards, “Walking Through, Going Along and Scrolling Back.”

27 Kitchin and Dodge, Code/Space, 5–6, 160.

28 Brittany Fiore-Gartland and Gina Neff, “Communication, Mediation, and the Expectations of Data: Data Valences Across Health and Wellness Communities,” International Journal of Communication 9 (2015): 1466–84.

29 Ibid., 1470–72.

30 Bhat et al., “Is There a Clinical Role for Smartphone Sleep Apps?”

31 O’Riordan, “Wearable Technologies and Material Communication,” 115–16.

32 Fiore-Gartland and Neff, “Communication, Mediation, and the Expectations of Data.”

33 Ibid.

34 Kate Crawford, Jessa Lingel, and Tero Karppi, “Our Metrics, Ourselves: A Hundred Years of Self-Tracking from the Weight Scale to the Wrist Wearable Device,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 18, nos. 4–5 (2015): 489.

35 Littlefield, Instrumental Intimacy; Bhat et al., “Is There a Clinical Role for Smartphone Sleep Apps?”

36 O’Neill and Nansen, “Sleep Mode”; Kelly Glazer Baron et al., “Orthosomnia: Are Some Patients Taking the Quantified Self too Far?” Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine 13, no. 2 (2017): 351–54.

37 Rose, Inventing Our Selves.

38 Fitbit, “Start Sleeping Better with Fitbit,” fitbit.com (Australia), https://www.fitbit.com/au/sleep-better (accessed June 20, 2019); Fitbit, “What Should I Know About Sleep Stages?” fitbit.com (US), https://help.fitbit.com/articles/en_US/Help_article/2163 (accessed June 20, 2019); “What Happens When You Sleep?” Sleep Foundation, https://www.sleepfoundation.org/articles/what-happens-when-you-sleep (accessed July 19, 2019).

39 Sergio Sismondo, “Key Opinion Leaders: Valuing Independence and Conflict of Interest in the Medical Sciences,” in Value Practices in the Life Sciences & Medicine, ed. Isabelle Dussauge, Claes-Fredrik Helgesson, and Francis Lee (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 31–48.

40 Littlefield, Instrumental Intimacy.

41 Fage-Butler, “Sleep App Discourses”; O’Neill and Nansen, “Sleep Mode”; O’Riordan, “Wearable Technologies and Material Communication.”

42 Annemarie Mol, The Logic of Care: Health and the Problem of Patient Choice (London: Routledge, 2008).

43 Fiore-Gartland and Neff, “Communication, Mediation, and the Expectations of Data.”

44 John Rooksby, Mattias Rost, Alistair Morrison, and Matthew Chalmers, “Personal Tracking as Lived Informatics,” in Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ed. Matt Jones (Toronto: Association for Computing Machinery, 2014), 1163–72; Stine Lomborg and Kirsten Frandsen, “Self-Tracking as Communication,” Information, Communication & Society 19, no. 7 (2016): 1015–27.

45 Salmela, Valtonen, and Lupton, “The Affective Circle of Harassment and Enchantment”; Marika Cifor and Patricia Garcia, “Inscribing Gender: A Duoethnographic Examination of Gendered Values and Practices in Fitness Tracker Design,” in Proceedings of the 52nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, ed. Tung X. Bui (Honolulu: University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2019), 2132–41.

46 Jaynes, “The Social Life of Screenshots.”

47 Littlefield, Instrumental Intimacy, 93.

48 Don Norman (2015), cited in Christopher Till, “Creating ‘Automatic Subjects’: Corporate Wellness and Self-Tracking,” Health 23, no. 4 (2019): 418–35.

49 Niclas Hagen (2013), cited in Williams, Coveney, and Meadows, “‘M-apping’ Sleep?”

50 Phoebe V. Moore, The Quantified Self in Precarity: Work, Technology and What Counts (London: Routledge, 2017).

51 Medibank, “MyMedibank: Member Offers,” medibank.com, https://www.medibank.com.au/livebetter/my-medibank/offers/flybuys/ (accessed June 3, 2019). “Flybuys” is an Australian rewards program commonly linked to supermarkets and department stores.

52 Light, Burgess, and Duguay, “The Walkthrough Method,” 890.

53 This is from the app’s description on the Google Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.qantas.assure.

54 Juno Demelo, “Revamp Your Sleep Sanctuary,” Fitbit, March 28, 2020, https://blog.fitbit.com/revamp-your-sleep-sanctuary/.

55 This is from the software’s “app permissions” section of the Google Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.qantas.assure.

56 Mulvin, “Media Prophylaxis.”

57 Rose, Inventing Our Selves.

58 Bhat et al., “Is There a Clinical Role for Smartphone Sleep Apps?”

59 Waldby, “Stem Cells, Tissue Cultures and the Production of Biovalue”; Lupton, “Lively Data, Social Fitness and Biovalue.”

60 Crawford, Lingel, and Karppi, “Our Metrics, Ourselves,” 492.

61 Williams, Coveney, and Meadows, “‘M-apping’ Sleep?”

62 Fitbit Staff, “The Impact of COVID-19 on Global Sleep Patterns,” Fitbit (US), April 2, 2020, https://blog.fitbit.com/covid-19-sleep-patterns/ (accessed April 30, 2020); Deborah Lupton, “You Are Your Data: Self-Tracking Practices and Concepts of Data,” in Lifelogging: Digital Self-Tracking and Lifelogging—Between Disruptive Technology and Cultural Transformation, ed. Stefan Selke (Wiesbaden, Germany: Springer VS, 2016), 61–79.

63 Mulvin, “Media Prophylaxis,” 197.

64 Sharma, In the Meantime, 84.

65 Baron et al., “Orthosomnia.”

66 Gregg, Counterproductive, 5, 96.

67 Mulvin, “Media Prophylaxis,” 196; Sharma, In the Meantime, 83.