Technologies for Sharing: lessons from Quantified Self about the political economy of platforms

ABSTRACT

Quantified Self (QS) is a group that coordinates a global set of in-person meetings for sharing personal experiences and experiments with self-tracking behaviours, moods, and activities. Through participation in US-based QS events and watching online QS presentations from around the globe, we identify a function of ambiguous valuation for supporting sharing communities. Drawing on Stark's (2011) theory of heterarchy, we argue that the social and technical platforms supporting sharing within the QS community allow for multiple, sometimes conflicting, sets of community and commercial values. Community cohesion benefits from ambiguity over which values set is most important to QS members. Ambiguity is promoted by sharing practices through at least two means, the narrative structure of members' presentations, and what counts as tracking. By encouraging members to adhere to a three-question outline, the community ensures that multiple values are always present. Thus, it becomes a question of which values this sharing community emphasizes, not which value sets members present, at any given time. By leaving the tools and methods of tracking open − from sophisticated wearables and data analysis to pen-and-paper and storytelling − the community creates space for and embraces self-trackers with a broad spectrum of technological proficiency and interest. QS as a group capitalizes on circulation of knowledge valued somewhat ambiguously to sustain and grow the community, both encouraging and supporting the commercialization of self-tracking technologies while keeping technology developer interests from overwhelming community-building interests. This, we argue, has implications for researchers hoping to understand online communities and the ‘sharing economy' more generally.

KEYWORDS:

• Quantified Self
• self-tracking
• heterarchy
• ambiguity
• sharing
• theory

Acknowledgments

Support from a gift from the Intel Foundation and support of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Central European University is gratefully acknowledged. Brittany Fiore-Gartland's field research on QS was instrumental in helping us to generate these ideas and we are grateful to the community for sharing their wisdom with us. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2014 ICA pre-conference on Sharing. We are grateful to the participants there for helping to push our paper forward. We especially thank Nik John and Wolfgang Sützl for organizing an excellent conversation around these themes and for their input in shaping this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Kristen Barta is a doctoral student in Communication at the University of Washington. Her research focuses on the affordances of digital spaces in fostering social support for survivors of trauma. Previous work examined journalism conventions of reporting on intimate partner violence and how service networks might be strengthened to reduce victim-blaming attitudes and misrepresentations of domestic and sexual violence in journalism. [email: [email protected]]

Gina Neff, Ph.D., is associate professor of communication at the University of Washington and a senior data science fellow in the eScience Institute. She wrote Venture Labor (MIT Press 2012) and Self-Tracking with Dawn Nafus (MIT Press 2016). She studies how people work with data in teams and groups and the changing responses of work to emerging information communication technologies. With Carrie Sturts Dossick, she co-directs the Collaboration, Technology and Organizational Practices research group on how construction teams use data for better buildings. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, Intel, and Microsoft Research. [email: [email protected]]

Notes on contributors

Kristen Barta is a doctoral student in Communication at the University of Washington. Her research focuses on the affordances of digital spaces in fostering social support for survivors of trauma. Previous work examined journalism conventions of reporting on intimate partner violence and how service networks might be strengthened to reduce victim-blaming attitudes and misrepresentations of domestic and sexual violence in journalism. [email: [email protected]]

Gina Neff, Ph.D., is associate professor of communication at the University of Washington and a senior data science fellow in the eScience Institute. She wrote Venture Labor (MIT Press 2012) and Self-Tracking with Dawn Nafus (MIT Press 2016). She studies how people work with data in teams and groups and the changing responses of work to emerging information communication technologies. With Carrie Sturts Dossick, she co-directs the Collaboration, Technology and Organizational Practices research group on how construction teams use data for better buildings. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, Intel, and Microsoft Research. [email: [email protected]]