On track to biopower? Toward a conceptual framework for user compliance in digital self-tracking

Abstract

Digital self-tracking technologies, such as mobile applications and wearables have become commonplace, mediating users’ fitness and health management efforts by providing performance recommendations. While digital self-tracking technologies have been welcomed by some as useful tools in users’ pursuit of healthier and happier lives, they have also drawn criticisms, especially regarding body surveillance and control stemming from their embedded performance standards. In this article, we present our study of the experiences of users who regularly but casually engage with digital self-tracking technologies in order to identify factors that affect compliance with performance standards. Based on these data we propose a conceptual framework that brings together domain involvement, domain expertise, data literacy, and the tendency to anthropomorphize technology with performance standards and discuss possible relationships between these factors.

Keywords:

• Biopower
• digital self-tracking
• quantified self
• self-quantification

Notes

1 https://www.superbetter.com/ (accessed May 23, 2020)

2 https://www.happify.com/ (accessed November 14, 2021)

3 The QS community’s motto is “self-knowledge through numbers” (QS 2019).

4 The participant did not provide his age during the interview.

5 While factual learning denotes the acquisition of certain items of information, structural learning is a way of learning about the implied correspondences and interactions between various concepts (Jonassen 2009).