Abstract
This paper examines self-tracking as illustrative of the transition from Michel Foucault’s discipline society to the Gilles Deleuze’s control society. These two forms of societies both relate centrally to the organisation and (re)production of power relations, but they organise space and time in different ways. Self-tracking refers to data-driven practices of self-monitoring by digital devices, and the practice is here treated as an individual subjective activity, in which the self subjects itself with the help of a self-tracking device. Importantly, our claim is that this subjectivation takes place in the broader context of the control society and its increasingly data-driven character, in which traditional institutional discipline is being replaced by in principle unbounded regimes of (self-)control.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Berg, M.: Making sense with sensors: self-tracking and the temporalities of wellbeing. Digit. Health 3, 1–11 (2017)
Bergroth, H., Vuorinen, J.: Towards the ontology of becoming in self-tracking research. In: Kurosu, M. (ed.) HCII 2019. LNCS, vol. 11566, pp. 270–287. Springer, Cham (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22646-6_19
Bergroth, H., Helén, I.: The datafication of therapeutic life management: assembling the self in control society. In: Salmenniemi, S., Nurmi, J., Perheentupa, I., Bergroth, H. (eds.) Assembling Therapeutics: Cultures, Politics and Materiality, pp. 107–123 (2020)
Blanchette, J.F.: A material history of bits. J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci. Technol. 62(6), 1042–1057 (2011)
Canguilhem, G.: On the Normal and the Pathological, vol. 3. Springer, Heidelberg (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-9853-7
Carter, M., Grover, V.: Me, my self, and I(T) conceptualizing information technology identity and its implications. MIS Q. 39(4), 931–958 (2015)
Crawford, K., Lingel, J., Karppi, T.: Our metrics, ourselves: a hundred years of self-tracking from the weight scale to the wrist wearable device. Eur. J. Cult. Stud. 18(4–5), 479–496 (2015)
Deleuze, G.: Foucault. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis (1988)
Deleuze, G.: Postscript on the societies of control. October, 59, 3–7 (1992)
Foucault, M.: Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977. Harvester Press, London (1980)
Foucault, M.: The subject and power. Crit. Inq. 8(4), 777–795 (1982)
Foucault, M.: The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. 1. Vintage Books, New York (1990)
Foucault, M.: The Birth of the Clinic. Routledge, London (2002)
Foucault, M.: Madness and Civilization. Routledge, London (2003)
Foucault, M.: Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Vintage Books, New York (1995)
Foucault, M.: The History of Sexuality: The Use of Pleasure, vol. 2. Vintage Books, New York (2012a)
Foucault, M.: The History of Sexuality: The Care of the Self, vol. 3. Vintage Books, New York (2012b)
Foucault, M.: Archaeology of Knowledge. Routledge, London (2013)
Introna, L.D.: Algorithms, governance, and governmentality: on governing academic writing. Sci. Technol. Hum. Values 41(1), 17–49 (2016)
Latour, B.: Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford University Press, Oxford (2005)
Lupton, D.: The diverse domains of quantified selves: self-tracking modes and dataveillance. Econ. Soc. 45(1), 101–122 (2016)
Salmenniemi, S., Nurmi, J., Perheentupa, I., Bergroth, H. (eds.): Assembling Therapeutics: Cultures, Politics and Materiality. Routledge, London (2020)
Vuorinen, J., Koivula, A., Koiranen, I.: The Confidence in social media platforms and private messaging. In: Meiselwitz, G. (ed.) HCII 2020. LNCS, vol. 12194, pp. 669–682. Springer, Cham (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49570-1_48
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing
About this paper
Cite this paper
Vuorinen, J., Bergroth, H. (2020). Self-tracking, Power, and the Transition from Discipline to Control. In: Kreps, D., Komukai, T., Gopal, T.V., Ishii, K. (eds) Human-Centric Computing in a Data-Driven Society. HCC 2020. IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, vol 590. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62803-1_28
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62803-1_28
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-62802-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-62803-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)