How a fitness tracker changed my life - Data, technology and identity in personal blogs

Self-tracking is a phenomenon that is increasingly accessible and accepted in today’s digitized world. Smartphones and wearable devices allow us to capture quantitative self-representation in tables, graphs and numbers. Along with written and visual digital self-representations, they have come to shape an extension of the self. This research observes from the perspective of Foucault’s technologies of the self how both blogging and self-tracking practices are used to construct a digital extension of identity. The main research question answered is “how is self-quantification integrated into digital self-representations of personal bloggers?”. To answer this, a sample of 50 personal blog posts, in which bloggers describe their experience with self-tracking, was subjected to a qualitative content analysis using a grounded theory approach. Two primary overarching themes were found in the blog posts. The first is the presentation of the self, which shows that the digital representation of the self in personal blogs is like a bricolage made up of the bloggers’ self-disclosure, what is assumed of the reader and the commercial forces in the blogosphere. The second is reflexive self-analysis, which shows us the practice of self-tracking is grounded in a cultural idealization of self-improvement, but can lead to disembodiment. There is a tension between self-tracking devices being experienced as either a controlling structure that represents an alternate version of embodied reality, or as a tool to obtain empowering insights into lived reality. The human tendency to actively work on a construction of self long predates our digital era of blogs, social media and wearable self-tracking devices. However, the integration of these technologies into our everyday lives continue to change the dynamics of how we digitally construct identity. This research connects to the modern perspective of the self as a direct reflection of our moral decision-making, behavior and actions. If it seen as our moral responsibility to perfect the aspects of self that we have any control over, today that responsibility overarches both the physical body and the digital representation of the self. This is further amplified by the data doxa, the cultural belief that the data-driven technological tools such as self-tracking devices available to us are helpful or even necessary in our quest for self-actualization. With an increased cultural, moral, social and economic pressure to optimize the self, Foucault’s conceptualization of technologies of the self has become more relevant than ever.