Making sense with numbers. Unravelling ethico‐psychological subjects in practices of self‐quantification

Prevention enthusiasts show great optimism about the potential of health apps to modify peoples’ lifestyles through the tracking and quantification of behaviours and bodily signs. Critical sociologists warn for the disciplining effects of self‐tracking. In this paper we use an empirical ethics appro...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Sociology of health & illness 2019-10, Vol.41 (S1), p.98-115
Main Authors: Pols, Jeannette, Willems, Dick, Aanestad, Margunn
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
(Re)configuring knowledge
Chapter 7
Chronic Disease - prevention & control
Diabetes
Diabetics
Enthusiasts
Ethics
ethics/bioethics
Ethnography
Health Knowledge, Attitudes, Practice
Humans
Life Style
Measurement
Mobile Applications
Motivation
Optimism
Prevention
quantification
self help/care, self‐measurement
Sociologists
Tracking
Wearable Electronic Devices - psychology
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Prevention enthusiasts show great optimism about the potential of health apps to modify peoples’ lifestyles through the tracking and quantification of behaviours and bodily signs. Critical sociologists warn for the disciplining effects of self‐tracking. In this paper we use an empirical ethics approach to study the characteristics and strivings of the various types of ‘ethico‐psychological subjects’ that emerge in practices of self‐quantification by analysing how people and numbers relate in three cases of self‐quantification: in prevention discourse, in testimonies from the quantified self (QS) movement and in empirical work we did with people with Diabetes type I and with ‘every day self‐trackers’. We show that a free subject that needs support to enact its will is crucial to understand the optimism about prevention. In the QS‐movement the concern is with a lack of objective and personalised knowledge about imperceptible processes in the body. These subjects are decentered and multiplied when we trace how numbers in their turn act to make sense of people in our empirical study. We conclude that there are many different types of ethico‐psychological subjects in practices of self‐tracking that need to be explored in order to establish what good these practices of self‐quantification might do.
ISSN:0141-9889
1467-9566
DOI:10.1111/1467-9566.12894