Chapter 4 The Self of the Quantified Self

Author(s):  
Antonio Francesco Maturo ◽  
Veronica Moretti
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (10) ◽  
pp. 3624-3640 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dorthe Brogård Kristensen ◽  
Minna Ruckenstein

Seen in a longitudinal perspective, Quantified Self-inspired self-tracking sets up “a laboratory of the self,” where people co-evolve with technologies. By exploring ways in which self-tracking technologies energize everyday aims or are experienced as limiting, we demonstrate how some aspects of the self are amplified while others become reduced and restricted. We suggest that further developing the concept of the laboratory of the self renews the conversation about the role of metrics and technologies by facilitating comparison between different realms of the digital, and demonstrating how services and devices enlarge aspects of the self at the expense of others. The use of self-tracking technologies is inscribed in, but also runs counter to, the larger political-economy landscape. Personal laboratories can aid the exploration of how the techno-mediated selves fit into larger structures of the digital technology market and the role that metrics play in defining them.


2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 1470-1487 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabija Didžiokaitė ◽  
Paula Saukko ◽  
Christian Greiffenhagen

In this article, we build on the work of Ruckenstein and Pantzar, who have demonstrated how our understanding of self-tracking has been influenced by the metaphor of the Quantified Self (QS). To complicate this very selective picture of self-tracking, we shift the focus in understanding self-tracking from members of the QS community to the experiences of ‘ordinary man and woman’. Therefore, we interviewed ‘everyday calorie trackers’, people who had themselves started using MyFitnessPal calorie counting app but were not part of any tracking community. Our analysis identifies three main themes – goals, use and effect – which highlight the mundane side of self-tracking, where people pursuing everyday, limited goals engage in basic self-tracking and achieve temporary changes. These experiences contrast with the account of self-tracking in terms of long-term, experimental analysis of data on the self or ‘biohacking’, which dominates the QS metaphor in the academic literature.


2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 283-302 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie Robert

Temporary sobriety initiatives (TSIs), popular month-long campaigns in which people abstain from alcohol to raise money for charity, aim to change participants’ relationship with alcohol. Identifying the structural and practical mechanisms of TSIs that facilitate the desired changes is an important element in understanding their popularity and purported effectiveness as public health campaigns. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with 15 Australian FebFast participants, this article argues that TSI participants, often guided by campaign organizers, loosely adopt the self-tracking and self-experimentation practices of the Quantified Self (QS) movement, which open up aspects of oneself and of alcohol that are normally hidden in order to facilitate self-improvement via discovery. Drew Leder’s corporeal phenomenology of absence and presence underpins the analysis of how TSI participants contrast deliberate periods of sobriety and inattentive normal drinking to convert abstract knowledge about alcohol and its effects into personally salient information based on lived experience. In doing so, participants shift the valence of their ambivalence about drinking even at moderate levels and convert it from the less behaviorally impactful potential ambivalence to its more influential felt form. Through such experiments, TSI participants problematize their drinking; make real the physical, psychological, and social impacts of alcohol; and even redefine what they know it to be.


2014 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 243-254 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tyler Butler Reigeluth

As an alternative to the seemingly natural objectivity and self-evidence of “data,” this paper builds on recent francophone literature by developing a critical conceptualization of “digital traces.” Underlining the materiality and discursiveness of traces allows us to understand and articulate both the technical and sociopolitical implications of digital technology. The philosophies of Gilbert Simondon and Michel Foucault give strong ontological and epistemological groundings for interpreting the relationships between technology and processes of subjectification. In this light, digital traces are framed as objects and products of heteronomous interventions, the logics of which can be traced through the programs and algorithms deployed. Through the empirical examples of “Predictive Policing” and “Quantified Self” digital traces are contrasted with the premises and dreams of Big Data. While the later claims to algorithmically correlative, predict and preempt the future by reducing it to a “what-is-to-come,” the digital trace paradigm offers a new perspective on how forms of self-control and control of the self are interdependent facets of “algorithmic governmentality.”


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 545-552
Author(s):  
Yujian Sun ◽  
Yongcao Zhang ◽  
Yuxin Li ◽  
Yilin Li

Luminescent solar concentrators (LSCs) are considered promising in their application as building-integrated photovoltaics (BIPVs). However, they suffer from low performance, especially in large-area devices. One of the key issues is the self-absorption of the luminophores. In this report, we focus on the study of self-absorption in perovskite-based LSCs. Perovskite nanocrystals (NCs) are emerging luminophores for LSCs. Studying the self-absorption of perovskite NCs is beneficial to understanding fundamental photon transport properties in perovskite-based LSCs. We analyzed and quantified self-absorption properties of perovskite NCs in an LSC with the dimensions of 6 in × 6 in × 1/4 in (152.4 mm × 152.4 mm × 6.35 mm) using three approaches (i.e., limited illumination, laser excitation, and regional measurements). The results showed that a significant number of self-absorption events occurred within a distance of 2 in (50.8 mm), and the photo surface escape due to the repeated self-absorption was the dominant energy loss mechanism.


2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katleen Gabriels ◽  
Mark Coeckelbergh

Purpose This paper aims to fill this gap (infra, originality) by providing a conceptual framework for discussing “technologies of the self and other,” by showing that, in most cases, self-tracking also involves other-tracking. Design/methodology/approach In so doing, we draw upon Foucault’s “technologies of the self” and present-day literature on self-tracking technologies. We elaborate on two cases and practical domains to illustrate and discuss this mutual process: first, the quantified workplace; and second, quantification by wearables in a non-clinical and self-initiated context. Findings The main conclusion is that these shapings are never (morally) neutral and have ethical implications, such as regarding “quantified otherness,” a notion we propose to point at the risk that the other could become an object of examination and competition. Originality/value Although there is ample literature on the quantified self, considerably less attention is given to how the relation with the other is being shaped by self-tracking technologies that allow data sharing (e.g. wearables or apps such as Strava or RunKeeper).


2019 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucio Tonello ◽  
Luca Giacobbi ◽  
Alberto Pettenon ◽  
Alessandro Scuotto ◽  
Massimo Cocchi ◽  
...  

AbstractAutism spectrum disorder (ASD) subjects can present temporary behaviors of acute agitation and aggressiveness, named problem behaviors. They have been shown to be consistent with the self-organized criticality (SOC), a model wherein occasionally occurring “catastrophic events” are necessary in order to maintain a self-organized “critical equilibrium.” The SOC can represent the psychopathology network structures and additionally suggests that they can be considered as self-organized systems.


Author(s):  
M. Kessel ◽  
R. MacColl

The major protein of the blue-green algae is the biliprotein, C-phycocyanin (Amax = 620 nm), which is presumed to exist in the cell in the form of distinct aggregates called phycobilisomes. The self-assembly of C-phycocyanin from monomer to hexamer has been extensively studied, but the proposed next step in the assembly of a phycobilisome, the formation of 19s subunits, is completely unknown. We have used electron microscopy and analytical ultracentrifugation in combination with a method for rapid and gentle extraction of phycocyanin to study its subunit structure and assembly.To establish the existence of phycobilisomes, cells of P. boryanum in the log phase of growth, growing at a light intensity of 200 foot candles, were fixed in 2% glutaraldehyde in 0.1M cacodylate buffer, pH 7.0, for 3 hours at 4°C. The cells were post-fixed in 1% OsO4 in the same buffer overnight. Material was stained for 1 hour in uranyl acetate (1%), dehydrated and embedded in araldite and examined in thin sections.


Author(s):  
Xiaorong Zhu ◽  
Richard McVeigh ◽  
Bijan K. Ghosh

A mutant of Bacillus licheniformis 749/C, NM 105 exhibits some notable properties, e.g., arrest of alkaline phosphatase secretion and overexpression and hypersecretion of RS protein. Although RS is known to be widely distributed in many microbes, it is rarely found, with a few exceptions, in laboratory cultures of microorganisms. RS protein is a structural protein and has the unusual properties to form aggregate. This characteristic may have been responsible for the self assembly of RS into regular tetragonal structures. Another uncommon characteristic of RS is that enhanced synthesis and secretion which occurs when the cells cease to grow. Assembled RS protein with a tetragonal structure is not seen inside cells at any stage of cell growth including cells in the stationary phase of growth. Gel electrophoresis of the culture supernatant shows a very large amount of RS protein in the stationary culture of the B. licheniformis. It seems, Therefore, that the RS protein is cotranslationally secreted and self assembled on the envelope surface.


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