The Politics and Possibilities of Self-Tracking Technology focuses on the dialectical relationship between users and designers of wearable technology to examine how datafication processes redefine the body, and explores what this means for the design, administration and study of self-tracking systems.

The Politics and Possibilities of Self-Tracking Technology focuses on the dialectical relationship between users and designers of wearable technology to examine how datafication processes redefine the body, and explores what this means for the design, administration and study of self-tracking systems.

Household Self-Tracking During a Global Health Crisis provides a comprehensive and straightforward account of deeper health narratives managed through data tracking within households formed during a global health crisis.

The De Gruyter Handbook of Artificial Intelligence, Identity and Technology Studies examines the relationship of the social sciences to artificial intelligence, surveying the various convergences and divergences between science and technology studies on the one hand and identity transformations on the other. It provides representative coverage of all aspects of the AI revolution, from employment to education to military warfare, impacts on public policy and governance and the future of ethics. How is AI currently transforming social, economic, cultural and psychological processes? This handbook answers these questions by looking at recent developments in supercomputing, deep learning and neural networks, including such topics as AI mobile technology, social robotics, big data and digital research. It focuses especially on mechanisms of identity by defining AI as a new context for self-exploration and social relations and analyzing phenomena such as race, ethnicity and gender politics in human-machine interfaces.

What happens when people turn their everyday experience into data: an introduction to the essential ideas and key challenges of self-tracking. People keep track. In the eighteenth century, Benjamin Franklin kept charts of time spent and virtues lived up to. Today, people use technology to self-track: hours slept, steps taken, calories consumed, medications administered. Ninety million wearable sensors were shipped in 2014 to help us gather data about our lives. This book examines how people record, analyze, and reflect on this data, looking at the tools they use and the communities they become part of. Gina Neff and Dawn Nafus describe what happens when people turn their everyday experience—in particular, health and wellness-related experience—into data, and offer an introduction to the essential ideas and key challenges of using these technologies. They consider self-tracking as a social and cultural phenomenon, describing not only the use of data as a kind of mirror of the self but also how this enables people to connect to, and learn from, others. Neff and Nafus consider what's at stake: who wants our data and why; the practices of serious self-tracking enthusiasts; the design of commercial self-tracking technology; and how self-tracking can fill gaps in the healthcare system. Today, no one can lead an entirely untracked life. Neff and Nafus show us how to use data in a way that empowers and educates.

With the advent of digital devices and software, self-tracking practices have gained new adherents and have spread into a wide array of social domains. The Quantified Self movement has emerged to promote 'self-knowledge through numbers'. In this groundbreaking book Deborah Lupton critically analyses the social, cultural and political dimensions of contemporary self-tracking and identifies the concepts of selfhood and human embodiment and the value of the data that underpin them. The book incorporates discussion of the consolations and frustrations of self-tracking, as well as about the proliferating ways in which people's personal data are now used beyond their private rationales. Lupton outlines how the information that is generated through self-tracking is taken up and repurposed for commercial, governmental, managerial and research purposes. In the relationship between personal data practices and big data politics, the implications of self-tracking are becoming ever more crucial.

Have you ever considered how mobile media change what we see, hear and pay attention to, or how they alter our movement through the city? Over the last decade, mobile media and communication technologies have become deeply integral to our perception and bodily experience of the world. In Bodies and Mobile Media, Ingrid Richardson and Rowan Wilken explore mobile media as a lens through which to understand how embodiment both shapes, and is shaped by, media experience. It offers a unique approach by focusing on specific sensory affordances and body parts – including the eyes, ears, face, hands and feet – to consider the uneven ratios of sensory perception at work in our engagement with mobile devices. Each chapter provides rich and accessible narratives of mobile media practices interwoven with current scholarship in media studies and phenomenology, with a concluding chapter that reflects on mobile media use as a synesthetic experience. By interpreting theoretical insights about the relationship between the body and technology, the book serves as an important work of knowledge translation. This work is crucial, the authors argue, if we are to critically understand how our perception and experience of the world are mediated by technology. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in media, communication and cultural studies.

The Quantification of Bodies in Health aims to deepen understanding of the quantification of the body and of the role of self-tracking practices in everyday life. It brings together authors working at the intersection of philosophy, sociology, history, psychology, and digital culture.

Self-tracking practices are part of many health and medical domains. The introduction of digital technologies such as smartphones, tablet computers, apps, social media platforms, dedicated patient support sites and wireless devices for medical monitoring has contributed to the expansion of opportunities for people to engage in self-tracking of their bodies and health and illness states. The contributors to this book cover a range of self-tracking techniques, contexts and geographical locations: fitness tracking using the wearable Fitbit device in the UK; English adolescent girls’ use of health and fitness apps; stress and recovery monitoring software and devices in a group of healthy Finns; self-monitoring by young Australian illicit drug users; an Italian diabetes self-care program using an app and web-based software; and ‘show-and-tell’ videos uploaded to the Quantified Self website about people’s experiences of self-tracking. Major themes running across the collection include the emphasis on self-responsibility and self-management on which self-tracking rationales and devices tend to rely; the biopedagogical function of self-tracking (teaching people about how to be both healthy and productive biocitizens); and the reproduction of social norms and moral meanings concerning health states and embodiment (good health can be achieved through self-tracking, while illness can be avoided or better managed). This book was originally published as a special issue of the Health Sociology Review.

Using the theological work of Karl Barth as a resource for present-day inquiry, the contributors in this volume discuss the complex interconnections between the religious and the political designated by the term theo-politics. Speaking from various political and cultural contexts (Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the People’s Republic of China) and different disciplinary perspectives (Protestant Theology, Political Sciences, and Sociology), the contributors address contemporary challenges in relating the religious and the political in Western and Asian societies. Topics analyzed include the impact of diverse cultural backgrounds on given theo-political arrangements, theological assessments of political power, the political significance of individual and communal Christian existence and the place of Christian communities in civil societies. In their nuanced discussions of these topics, the contributors neither advocate for a privatized, apolitical understanding of the Christian faith nor for a religious politics seeking to overcome modern processes of differentiation and secularization. Critically engaging Barth’s theology, they examine the Christian responsibility in and for the political sphere and reflect on the practice of such responsibility in Western and Asian contexts.