Quantified Self Politics Link Round Up
I decided to use what I learned in my Queer Theory and Politics class this semester to draft an examination of the politics of self-tracking and Quantified Self (the group). It is still a work in progress (if you want to see it, contact me directly), but in the mean time I wanted to post a few links I found particularly helpful and/or interesting while writing.
- This One Does Not Go Up To Eleven: The Quantified Self Movement as an Alternative Big Data Practice - this piece by Dawn Nafus and Jamie Sherman suggests that not only is QS empowering for users, it is also a form of “soft” resistance against big data.
- Data Occupations - in which Whitney Erin Boesel critiques QS and compares it to Occupy. Both, she argues, aren’t political movements at all, but rather stores of potential energy for those movements.
- Living With Data: Personal Data Uses of the Quantified Self - Sara M. Watson’s Master’s thesis on how personal data is used by QSers.
- Return of the Quantrepeneurs - Whitney Erin Boesel lays out the QS landscape and distinguishes Quantified Self (the group) from quantified self (the practice, technologies, etc.)
- Forget the Quantified Self. We need to build Quantified Us. - Matthew Jordan and Nikki Pfarr call for us to move beyond self-quantification to aggregate self-tracking information.
- Organizing a System of 10 Billion People - Joerg Blumritt explores what QS might help achieve as it becomes more prevalent.
- You Are Your Data: And you should demand to use it. - This title says it all.
- Tracking for Health - A Pew Research project on self-tracking and tracking performed by caretakers for health purposes.
- Understanding Quantified-Selfers’ Practices in Collecting and Exploring Personal Data - this recent paper examines 50+ videos from the QS website and analyzes how QSers use, visualize and learn from self-tracking data.
- A New Algorithmic Identity: Soft Biopolitics and the Modulation of Control - This paper examines how identities online are created by algorithms, and suggests that this is creating “soft” biopolitics and biopower.
- Quantified Sex: A Critical Analysis of Sexual and Reproductive Self- tracking Apps - Deborah Lupton shows how sexual and reproductive self-tracking apps reinforce norms about male and female sexualities and calls for a “queering” of such apps.