ABSTRACT
The aim of this study is to surface pragmatic forces and the semiotically constructed self-governed persona in the self-tracking context. In so doing, the article adopts a pragma-semiotic approach to investigate the self-tracking app “Habiticia” as an example of the construction of new regimes of algorithmic self-governance. The adopted approach benefits from intersecting pragmatics and Greimassian semiotics as proposed by Sbisá, Sbisá and Fabbri and Cooren. The article deploys Foucault’s notion of “self-governance” to frame Habiticia self-tracking activities through the motifs of the optimization of the self, self-regulation and subjectivation. It concludes that a semio-pragmatic model can make a significant contribution to the notions of the quantified self and digital surveillance. The study contributes to the research on the quantified self-movement, self-tracking apps and governance through developing a dialog with linguistic pragmatics.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
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Rania Magdi Fawzy
Rania Magdi Fawzy is an Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics at the College of Language & Communication (CLC), Arab Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime Transport. She is an editor for Discourse Context & Media, Elsevier. Her areas of research interest include pragmatics, social semiotics and multimodality, with a present focus on algorithmic governance and effectual polarization of social technology platforms.