‘You can’t really control life’: dis/assembling self-knowledge with self-tracking technologies

ABSTRACT

This article investigates everyday self-tracking as a practice of self-related knowledge production. Self-tracking activities are commonly narrated and imagined as productive of self-related knowledge and insight into one’s life and bodily functions. However, by drawing from qualitative interviews with Finnish self-trackers, the article argues that in practice self-tracking also appears as prescriptive of uncertainty. The article shows how everyday self-tracking systems actively produce their functionality as systems of knowledge production in practice, as selves are extended in time and potentialized via the measurement-related affordances of self-tracking technologies. Thus, self-tracking often prescribes and animates repetitive behaviour of keeping track; of attaining experiences of self-knowledge and control which nevertheless remain elusive and flow away. The paper engages with Bernard Stiegler’s discussions on temporal flux and cinematic time in order to theorize self-tracking as a practice in and through which the self is produced and lived as perpetually ‘unfolding’.

KEYWORDS:

• Self-tracking
• technology
• self
• knowledge
• time
• temporality

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the Academy of Finland for supporting the research project ‘Tracking the Therapeutic’; this article is a part of the project. I also wish to thank the editors of Distinktion and the two anonymous reviewers whose comments and criticisms helped to improve and clarify the arguments presented here.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on the contributor

Harley Bergroth is a doctoral candidate in sociology at the Department of Social Research, University of Turku, Finland. His research interests revolve around cultural studies of technology, science and embodiment. In recent years his research has focused on therapeutic technologies of self-care and especially on data-driven everyday life management practices. He serves as a board member of the Finnish Society for Science and Technology Studies.

Notes

1. Reminiscent of what Adams, Murphy, and Clarke (2009) refer to as a ‘anticipation’. For them, anticipation is a modality of being and an instantiation of modernity. ‘[P]redictable uncertainty leads to anticipation as an affective state, an excited forward looking subjective condition characterized as much by nervous anxiety as a continual refreshing of yearning, of ‘needing to know’ (ibid., 247).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Academy of Finland [grant number 289004].