Abstract
This chapter looks at the notion of engagement and its interpretation in the development and marketing of self-tracking wearable devices and in the literature on the Quantified Self and gamification. It concludes that the vision provided so far in these contexts imagines a scenario where events are impossible, and the quantification of the self is reduced to a collection of facts about the individual. It is precisely by investigating the polysemy of the term ‘engagement’ that alternative relationships with our quantified selves could be imagined. This is a necessary practice, in an age when engagement is no longer voluntarily but imposed on the user by invisible forms of tracking. The argument is supported by drawing on a personal, emotional, and ‘catastrophic’ experience with Nike+ FuelBand.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Ajana, Btihaj. 2017. Digital Health and the Biopolitics of the Quantified Self. Digital Health 3: 1–18. London: Sage Journals.
Beer, David. 2016. Metric Power. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Bergson, Henry. 2001. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications. Originally published in 1913. London: George Allen and Company Ltd.
Bergson, Henry. 2007. Creative Evolution. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Originally published in 1911. London: MacMillan.
Boellstorff, Tom. 2013. Making Big Data, in Theory. First Monday 18 (10). University of Illinois at Chicago. http://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4869/3750. Accessed 25 Feb 2017.
Bogost, Ian. 2015. Why Gamification Is Bullshit. In The Gameful World: Approaches, Issues, Applications, eds. Steffen P. Walz and Sebastian Deterding, 65–80. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Charara, Sophie. 2016. Fashion Tech: 20 Wearables That Are More Chic Than Geek. Wearable, August 16. https://www.wareable.com/fashion/wearable-tech-fashion-style. Accessed 25 Feb 2017.
Crogan, Patrick. 2011. Gameplay Mode: War, Simulation and Technoculture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Danter, Stefan, Ulfried Reichardt, and Regina Schober. 2016. Theorising the Quantified Self and Posthumanist Agency: Self-Knowledge and Posthumanist Agency in Contemporary US-American Literature. In Digital Culture and Society 2 (1): 53–67. Edited by Pablo Abend and Mathias Fuchs. Bielefeld: Transcript-Verlag.
Davidson, Donald. 1980. Essays on Actions and Events. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1991. Bergsonism. New York: Zone Books. Originally published in 1966. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Deterding, Sebastian, Dan Dixon, Rilla Khaled, and Lennart Nacke. 2011. From Game Design Elements to Gamefulness: Defining Gamification. In Proceedings of the 15th International Academic MindTrek Conference, 9–15. Tampere: Finland.
Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London: Penguin Books.
Fuchs, Mathias, Sonia Fizek, Paolo Ruffino, and Niklas Schrape. 2014. Rethinking Gamification. Lueneburg: Meson Press.
Goode, Lauren. 2016. Three CES Wearables That Actually Aren’t Ugly. The Verge, January 11. http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/11/10742956/ces-2016-wearables-best-smart-watches-fitness-trackers. Accessed 25 Feb 2017.
Haraway, Donna. 1988. Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism as a Site of Discourse on the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies 14 (3): 575–599. Feminist Studies, Inc.
Haraway, Donna. 1991. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. In Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, ed. Cyborgs Simians, 149–181. London: Free Association Books.
Haraway, Donna. 2003. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.
Ingraham, Nathan. 2016. Jawbone Is Reportedly Stopping Production on All of Its Fitness Trackers (update). Engadget, May 27. http://www.engadget.com; https://www.engadget.com/2016/05/27/jawbone-up-fitness-trackers-discontinued-rumor/. Accessed 25 Feb 2017.
Karanasiou, Argyro, and Sharanjit Kang. 2016. My Quantified Self, My FitBit and I: The Polymorphic Concept of Health Data and the Sharer’s Dilemma. Digital Culture and Society, 2 (1): 123–142, eds. Pablo Abend and Mathias Fuchs. Bielefeld: Transcript-Verlag.
Kember, Sarah. 2016. iMedia: The Gendering of Objects, Environments and Smart Materials. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Latour, Bruno. 2014. Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene. New Literary History 45 (1): 1–18. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Ledger, Dan, and Daniel McCaffrey. 2014. Inside Wearables: How the Science of Human Behavior Change Offers the Secret to Long-Term Engagement. Endeavour Partners LLC. https://endeavourpartners.net/assets/Endeavour-Partners-Wearables-and-the-Science-of-Human-Behavior-Change-Part-1-January-20141.pdf. Accessed 25 Feb 2017.
Lupton, Deborah. 2016. The Quantified Self: A Sociology of Self-Tracking. Malden, MA: Polity.
McLuhan, Marshall. 2003. Art as Survival in the Electric Age (1973). In Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews, eds. Stephanie McLuhan and David Staines, 206–224. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart.
Nafus, Dawn. 2016. Quantified: Biosensing Technologies in Everyday Life. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Neff, Gina, and Dawn Nafus. 2016. Self-Tracking. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Newton, Casey. 2014. Nike Reportedly Abandons the FuelBand and Lays Off Its Hardware Division (updated). The Verge, April 18. http://www.theverge.com/2014/4/18/5629544/. Accessed 25 Feb 2017.
Pressman, Aaron. 2017. Fitbit CEO Offers Turnaround Strategy After a Tough Year. Fortune, February 22. http://fortune.com/2017/02/22/fitbit-ceo-turnaround-strategy/. Accessed 25 Feb 2017.
Suchman, Lucy. 2007. Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Vendler Zeno. 1967. Facts and Events. Linguistics in Philosophy, 122–146. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Whitson, R. Jennifer. 2015. Foucault’s FitBit: Governance and Gamification. In The Gameful World: Approaches, Issues, Applications, eds. Steffen P. Walz and Sebastian Deterding, 339–358. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Wolf, Gary. 2010. The Data-Driven Life. The New York Times Magazine, April 28. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/magazine/02self-measurement-t.html. Accessed 25 Feb 2017.
Young, Nora. 2012. The Virtual Self: How Our Digital Lives Are Altering the World Around Us. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart.
Zichermann, Gabe, and Christopher Cunningham. 2011. Gamification by Design: Implementing Game Mechanics in Web and Mobile Apps. New York: O’Reilly Media.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Ruffino, P. (2018). Engagement and the Quantified Self: Uneventful Relationships with Ghostly Companions. In: Ajana, B. (eds) Self-Tracking. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65379-2_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65379-2_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-65378-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-65379-2
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)