Measuring the self through numbers: An ethnographical study of technology-based quantifications of the body

The research project explores how people make use of technical equipment and algorithms to quantify their bodies. Smartphone apps and other gadgets increasingly provide users with health-related data in their everyday life. Data on, for example, the heart and lung functions, the quality of sleep, the skin resistance as well as numerical representations of mental dispositions allow users to permanently monitor their bodies. Practices of tracking body data are embedded in social frameworks such as emerging online networks in which people exchange experiences and get advice on how to analyze their collected data. These practices enable people to gain objectified self-knowledge and to optimize their bodies based on such knowledge.

Similar practices of constructing bodily realities through (reading) numbers also occur in medical contexts. The self-referring everyday activity of a diabetic, for example, is generally accompanied by technology-based body monitoring. These demands are met by a growing market offering of a range of new technological solutions.

The project's main question is how these technologically mediated practices of permanent body-tracking and self-care inform (and transform) images of the body and the self and how these images , in turn, are negotiated in so-called „bio-social communities“ (Rabinow) online. The ethnographic study builds on both current STS research on biomedicine and the Foucauldian framework of body, power and subjectivation. It draws on data from ethnographic fieldwork.