Self-tracking as communication

Abstract

Self-tracking has attracted a lot of attention from researchers and public opinion makers owing to its potential for improving life conditions through preemptive action on health, and as a tool of user empowerment vis-à-vis health-care professionals and private and public institutions. Nevertheless, the ‘stuff’ that is typically tracked – exercise and diet being the dominant tracking activities – refers to cultural and social practices that, for the individual user, are utterly mundane and reside in an experiential realm of everyday life. Self-tracking has to be understood in relation to behavior that is predominantly about getting things done in ways that are possible, suitable and meaningful for the individual. To account for this, we propose to conceptualize self-tracking as a communicative phenomenon along three dimensions: communication with the system, the self and social networks of peers. We develop the theoretical framework, drawing upon empirical findings from a qualitative study on how self-tracking is practiced and experienced in the context of exercise by different categories of empirical users. We demonstrate that the meanings of self-tracking practices are, at once, shaped by the motivation of an individual user who is situated in a broader web of everyday activities, and stimulated and augmented by communicative features provided by the technology.

Keywords:

• self-tracking
• mobile technology
• communication theory
• user studies
• communication studies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Stine Lomborg is associate professor in Communication and IT at the University of Copenhagen. Her research centers on social media users and methods. She is the author of Social media – social genres. Making sense of the ordinary (Routledge) and co-editor of The ubiquitous internet: User and industry perspectives (Routledge) (with Anja Bechmann). [email: [email protected]]

Kirsten Frandsen is associate professor in Media Studies at Aarhus University. Her research centers on sport and media and includes publications on business models, mediated sports aesthetics, and audiences of televised sports. [email: [email protected]]

Notes

1. Our focus is on digital media, but the communicative perspective we advance in principle includes all kinds of media used to keep log of the self, and often, new forms of self-tracking will have strong affinity with earlier, analogue, forms (as will be evident below).

2. http://quantifiedself.com.

3. This view, to a large extent, aligns with the tradition of Medium Theory (McLuhan, 1964; Meyrowitz, 1985), and phenomenological perspectives on media use (Scannel, 1995).

4. All participants are pseudonymized, whereas their real age is disclosed.

5. The concept of auto-communication, originally developed in cultural semiotics by Lotman (1990), suggests that all communication implies a relationship between the communicator and herself.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the projects Meaning Across Media and Mediatization of Culture: The Challenge of New Media, sponsored by Danish National Research Council.