IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Winter 2013 - 26

over 130 quantified self groups in 34 countries around
the world, many of which hold regular meetings involving "show-and-tell" discussions of how members have
been engaging in self-tracking activities.
The term "quantified self" has now entered the cultural lexicon, and research suggests that its frequency of
use has been increasing and gathering momentum annually. A study of the use of the term "quantified self" that
I conducted using the Factiva global newspaper database
between September 2008 (its first appearance) and July
2013 found that it was increasingly prevalent in news articles over this period, with a dramatic increase in 2012 and
2013. In 2009 only two news articles appeared mentioning the quantified self: one in the American Life Science
Weekly that reported a study on the relevance to healthcare of self-tracking, and the other in the Canadian Globe
and Mail that discussed the Quantified Self movement
and people involved in it. However the number of articles
rose to 21 in 2010 and 33 in 2011, and by 2012 148 articles had been published that used the term. The year 2013
has witnessed even greater interest: by the end of July
2013, 188 news articles discussing the quantified self had
already been published. while these are not particularly
high numbers relative to the thousands of topics that were
reported in the news outlets included in Factiva, they do
demonstrate evidence of growing and continuing interest in the quantified self concept and use of this specific
term since 2010. The gathering momentum of the term is
also evidenced by a Google Trends analysis I carried out,
which demonstrated that "quantified self" was searched
for more often during this same time period, beginning in
early 2009 and reaching a peak in April 2013 [2].
Both news coverage of the quantified self and interest on the part of Google Search users therefore, have
steadily grown since 2009. Terms such as "the quantified patient," "the quantified doctor," "the quantified
body," "the quantified mind," "the quantified baby,"
and even "the quantified pet" are also beginning to
appear in popular culture, demonstrating the taking up
of the term "quantified self" and its application to more
specific topics. It is also evident from news coverage
that the tenor of news reporting on the quantified self
has changed over time. The term "quantified self" is
now frequently used not only in relation to members of
the Quantified Self movement itself, but more generally
to refer to the practices of self-tracking or lifelogging,
terms used to denote collecting and recording data on
one's everyday life practices.
Early news reports focused on the innovative
aspects of quantifying the self, and debated whether
such close attention to the details of one's life and
bodily functions would extend beyond "uber geeks"
or those "weirdly narcissistic" few who are interested
in "extreme naval gazing," to the general population,
as Forbes magazine (U.S.A) put it [36]. By 2012, news
articles represented the quantified self as growing in
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popularity and becoming not only an important feature of health promotion but part of everyday life, as a
way of maximizing productivity and happiness as well
as health. As the British Sunday Telegraph Magazine
[37] contended: "It began with a small group of digital obsessives recording their every heartbeat. Today
the 'quantified self' movement is a gadget-filled fitness craze." By June 2013, The Guardian (U.K.) was
asserting that "the "Quantified Self" movement (is)
all the rage for people tracking their physical activity, food intake, vital signs and even their personal
genome through digital services" [39].
while anecdotal accounts of how people are using
self-tracking technologies are common on the Quantified Self website and in other blogs and news reports,
little detailed academic research has yet been published
on how people are engaging in this practice and how
common it is. A recently published Pew research Center study [3] found that the majority of Americans (69
per cent) engage in tracking practices of themselves or
others for health reasons. However only one in five use
digital technologies to do so. The others prefer to use
older technologies such as pen-and-paper or simply
to commit details to memory. Most of the academic
papers to be published thus far discuss the quantified
self in relation to promoting patient engagement and
health promotion using self-tracking technologies.
with the exception of one sociological analysis [4],
these articles present the quantified self in laudatory
terms as an integral aspect of new approaches in digital health [5]-[9]. One other article has taken a cultural
studies approach to analyzing the use of gamification in
relation to quantifying the self [10].
There is much still to be explored in terms of social
and cultural analyses of the quantified self concept and
its related movement. How do the discourses and practices of quantifying the self represent the self and the
body? what assumptions, beliefs and values are drawn
upon to portray both the Quantified Self movement's
own descriptions and commentaries and in popular culture more generally?

Body-Machine Metaphor
According to the wikipedia definition, "The Quantified Self is a movement to incorporate technology into
data acquisition on aspects of a person's daily life in
terms of inputs (e.g., food consumed, quality of surrounding air), states (e.g., mood, arousal, blood oxygen
levels), and performance (mental and physical)" [11].
This definition immediately begins to construct a view
of the body/self as a machine-like entity, with "inputs"
and "outputs" (glossed as "performance" in the definition) that can readily be measured and quantified. News
reports and blogs similarly tend to use this kind of metaphor when discussing the quantified self. Self-tracking devices, for example, are described as providing
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https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/technologysociety_september2023
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https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/technologysociety_december2022
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/technologysociety_september2022
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/technologysociety_june2022
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https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/technologysociety_december2021
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/technologysociety_september2021
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/technologysociety_june2021
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https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/technologysociety_december2020
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/technologysociety_september2020
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/technologysociety_june2020
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https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/technologysociety_december2019
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/technologysociety_september2019
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/technologysociety_june2019
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https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/technologysociety_september2018
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/technologysociety_june2018
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/technologysociety_march2018
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/technologysociety_winter2017
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/technologysociety_fall2017
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