An Anxious Alliance

Forfattere

  • Kaiton Williams Cornell University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7146/aahcc.v1i1.21146

Nøgleord:

self-tracking, autoethnography, experience, quantified-self

Resumé

This essay presents a multi-year autoethnographic perspective on the use of personal fitness and self-tracking technologies to lose weight. In doing so, it examines the rich and contradictory relationships with ourselves and our world that are generated around these systems, and argues that the efforts to gain control and understanding of one's self through them need not be read as a capitulation to rationalizing forces, or the embrace of utopian ideals, but as an ongoing negotiation of the boundaries and meanings of self within an anxious alliance of knowledge, bodies, devices, and data. I discuss how my widening inquiry into these tools and practices took me from a solitary practice and into a community of fellow travellers, and from the pursuit of a single body goal into a continually renewing project of personal possibility.

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Publiceret

2015-10-05

Citation/Eksport

Williams, K. (2015). An Anxious Alliance. Aarhus Series on Human Centered Computing, 1(1), 11. https://doi.org/10.7146/aahcc.v1i1.21146

Nummer

Sektion

Critical subjects and subjectivities