You Are just a №: the quantified self from a semio-pragmatic perspective

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Greimassian semiotics
• pragmatics
• algorithmic agency
• Foucauldian self-governance
• self-tracking apps
• quantified self-movement

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

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.