Forming Persona Through Metrics: Can We Think Freely in the Shadow of Our Data?

The use of biosensors in wearable activity tracking devices to measure, record and share many aspects of life has been received with great enthusiasm for their potential to enhance conceptions of self through measuring variables relating to an individual’s health and productivity. In 2012, readers of the Economist were introduced to the idea of using numbers on oneself in the same way that charting progress towards a goal is commonplace in business. A new culture of self-improvement termed ‘self-tracking’ was beginning to gain currency. At the time that self-tracking was becoming mainstream it was estimated that the mobile health and diagnostics market was worth approximately US$640 million, which would grow to US$8.03 billion by 2019. In popular culture (news items and blogs), people who track their activity using technology are seen as heroic figures who are insightful, actualised, virtuous, and in control. Experimentation (trial and error), active intervention (a health kick, diet or detox), preventative self monitoring (blood pressure, glucose levels, heart rate) or the conscious foregrounding of habits (hydration, caffeine intake, counting steps) are constructed as rewarding. This can be seen as a manifestation of applying management principles to personal healthcare, and by extension the practice of applying an exacting science to the management of everyday life. Focusing on three current consumer technologies: Fitbit, Jawbone UP and Apple’s HealthKit application and developer platform, we argue that using such devices fixes individuals to symbolic discourses, permissions, limits, and thresholds, which prefigure and enclose energies directed towards the formation of self-knowledge and conception of selfhood