Self-Tracking

The MIT Press Essential Knowledge

by Gina Neff, Dawn Nafus

People keep track. In the eighteenth century, Benjamin Franklin kept charts of time spent and virtues lived up to. Today, people use technology to self-track: hours slept, steps taken, calories consumed, medications administered. Ninety "million" wearable sensors were shipped in 2014 to help us gather data about our lives. The term " quantified self" (popularized by journalist Gary Wolf) refers to how people record, analyze, and reflect on this data, as well as to the tools they use and the communities they become part of. This book describes what happens when people turn their everyday experience -- in particular, health and wellness-related experience -- into data, and offers an introduction to the essential ideas and key challenges of the quantified self. Gina Neff and Dawn Nafus consider the quantified self as a social and cultural phenomenon, describing not only the use of data as a kind of mirror of the self but also how the quantified self enables users to connect to, and learn from, others.

Neff and Nafus consider what's at stake when we quantify ourselves -- who wants our data and why; the practices of serious self-tracking enthusiasts; the design of commercial self-tracking technology; and how self-tracking can fill gaps in the healthcare system. Today, no one can lead an entirely unquantified life. Neff and Nafus show us how to use data in a way that empowers and educates.

Genres: Nonfiction, Technology, Science, Sociology, Psychology, Audiobook, Research

246 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2016

About the author

Gina Neff is Director of the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy at the University of Cambridge and Professor of Technology and Society at the Oxford Internet Institute and the Department of Sociology at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Venture Labor: Work and the Burden of Risk in Innovative Industries and coauthor of Self-Tracking and Human-Centered Data Science (both published by the MIT Press).

Reviews

[Adi · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's quite insightful, but after reading it I don't feel like I've learned anything new. That being said there were parts that made me think about long term effects of taking technologies becoming ubiquitous.

[Iliiaz Akhmedov · Rating 4 out of 5]

To self-track, or not to self-track, that is the question. Moderately to self-track it is! 😁

To better understand yourself you can talk to people, trust your intuition, or simply start measuring. Among these options, however, questions remain the same: how much can you trust this source of information? how much action do you want to take? how much of the decision do you want to own?

I find moderate self-discovery tracking to be quite enjoyable and effective. For example, tracking sleep quality not only allowed me to retrospect, but also learn and develop good habits.

The book is relatively okay: could have better structure and be less dry (maybe, this is because there are two authors). The topic selection, however, is excellent.

[Jay French · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Self-Tracking” discusses the uses of self-tracking, focusing on medical uses and the technology that is making tracking easier. Think Fitbits and emotion journals and Instragrammed meal pictures. Much of the discussion centers around the ownership and legalities of the data created by tracking. The book describes current state and weighs in on the future. This was a deeper dive into the topic than, say, a Scientific American article. I found it met my expectations on an interesting topic and I learned a few things, but I found the organization of the book seemed too outline-centric, making it harder to follow in the audio version. This short book might be better read than listened to if looking for retention and organizational cues.

[Bhanna · Rating 2 out of 5]

Compared to the rest of the MIT Essential Knowledge series, this book was a bit of a let down. I think the more accurate title for this book would have been "Data ethics for self tracking", it left a lot to be desired when it comes to the world of self-tracking. Given that the book was published in 2016, it is possible that the information is just outdated, but it wasn't as informative as it could have been.

[Teo · Rating 3 out of 5]

2021.01.04–2021.01.08

Contents

Neff G & Nafus D (2016) (04:36) Self-Tracking

Series Foreword
Acknowledgments

1. An Introduction to Self-Tracking
• Why We Wrote This Book
• At stake are the very lenses we use to see ourselves and others.
• We Have Always Been Quantified
• Biomedicalization carves a groove in our collective imagination that makes close measurement of the body both conceiv­able and desirable.
• The Practices
• Table 1.1. Examples of self-tracking projects and motivations from QS
• The Tools
• The Communities

2. What Is at Stake? The Personal Gets Political
• Am I Normal?
• Who Asks the Questions?
• Sensors on every phone open up the possibility for people who are not professional researchers to collect data and ask questions about it.
• Public Health Outcomes
• The promise of individuals “taking control” may very well be a burden disguised as empowerment.
• Who Has Access to Data?
• Who Profits?
• Privacy Is a Moving Target

3. Making Sense of Data
• Tracking to Monitor and Evaluate
• Practical Considerations When Tracking to Evaluate
• Self-Tracking to Elicit Sensations
• The data becomes a “prosthetic of feeling,” something to help us sense our bodies or the world around us.
• Practices for Tracking to Elicit Sensations
• Aesthetic Curiosity
• Practical Considerations for Aesthetic Projects
• Debugging a Problem
• Practical Considerations for Debugging
• Cultivating a Habit
• Many self-trackers use data to support “habit hacking,” or creating new habits and changing old ones.
• Practical Considerations for New Habits
• What Makes Good Self-Tracking Practice?
• Further Practical Considerations

4. Self-Tracking and the Technology Industry
• What We Mean by “the Industry”
• How Industrial Actors See Their Markets
• In Silicon Valley, data is seen as a valuable general-purpose resource to stockpile—“the new oil” that might one day serve multiple, potential purposes.
• The Economic Role of Data
• Making Markets in Self-Tracking
• Self-tracking tools are emerging at the intersections of key social arenas—between health and wellness, between work and life, and between accessibility and luxury.
• The Health Line
• The Luxury Line
• The Work Line
• The Regulatory Patchwork

5. Self-Tracking and Medicine
• Empowering Patients
• Bridging Home and Clinic
• With greater power for patients to use data on their own, it has become less clear who will take legal and ethical responsibility for the interpretations and follow-up actions suggested by such data.
• Data-Driven Health Innovation and Discovery
• What Makes Data Clinical?
• Does Data Change Compliance?
• Do Medical Apps Address the Wrong People?
• Does Data Lower Costs?

6. Future Directions for Self-Tracking
• The Fight for Data Access
• For Campos, data ownership was not about an obscure legal theory. The data was the stuff of his body, and he wanted it back.
• The Fight for Data Privacy and Security
• The Legal and Regulatory Questions about Data
• Data collected in doctors’ offices are afforded one type of protection, but we do not have in place the legal frameworks that offer protections to similar data gathered from our smartphones, web searches, and digital devices.
• Future Directions for Technology Innovation
• Debates about Health and Equity
• The Fights over Meaning
• The line between ourselves and our data is where we choose to draw it.
• Future Directions for You

Notes
Glossary
Additional Resources
Index

[Lette Hass · Rating 3 out of 5]

Este pequeño libro, de la serie 'The MIT Press Essential Knowledge", nos deja una gran pregunta, ¿qué tanto dedicas tu tiempo en "SELF-TRACKING"?

"Hoy en día, la gente utiliza la tecnología para auto/seguimiento/control: horas dormidas, horas leídas, horas de ejercicio, calorías consumidas, medicamentos administrados, remite a un fenómeno actual: cuando convertimos nuestra experiencia cotidiana en información. Y lo hacemos nosotros mismos!! Nos "damos seguimiento", "nos seguimos la pista" ....

Este libro es un buen compañero de pequeños viajes. Cosas que ya no percibimos, se nos presentan como recordatorios... y de repente, una sensación extraña surge: es cierto, lo hago... pero ¿hasta dónde voy a llegar con ello sin "darme cuenta"?

[Petr · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is in my view a good overview of the self-tracking community and ideas. It does, sometimes, feel like an advertisement for the Quantified Self community, but that makes sense. The content tries to explore the whole breadth of self-tracking without going too deep into the specifics, probably to keep the book accessible and relevant even after a few years. This is, I think, the reason why the whole book feels more like just an introduction the whole time you are reading. I would prefer more lists and explicit, well-formatted tips in the book, but the content was solid. Yet, for s quick reference and overview I can fully recommend the book and I am looking forward to the other books of this series.

[John · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a good primer about conflicts between personal creativity with self-tracking data (e.g., iPhone sensors that collect data for the health app) and institutional/corporate assumptions: The trouble is that the book is unfortunately dated and needs to be updated for 2020 and beyond. A second problem is that the most important analyses here are data are essentially about data protection generally: There is from my reading little that special about personal data collected by self-tracking software/hardware. It is THE example that makes people the most nervous because it is the most personal: But it's not so different from the privacy issues around, say, tax data. (IMHO of course.)

[Sándor Szabó · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you're interested in the topic it's definitely worth a read (listen). However, to me it did not manage to hit that sweet spot between going into too much or too technical details or being so general about some parts that it doesn't give you more information than what you already know if you have ever seen some wearables yourself.

[Clau · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very comprehensive analysis on what it means to track data , most of the focus is on medical devices but it still covers several of the main topics : who controls your data? What are the implications of a new economy where data is the currency.
It met my expectations , and even as someone who has dabbled a lot in data I learned new things.

[Joe · Rating 3 out of 5]

Meh. It did raise one question: who should own the data collected by wearable devices? Perhaps we need laws asserting the data is owned by the person who it is collected from. Device companies should be required to make all the data collected by the device available to the owner (in a format understandable by the users -- ie standard units).

[OutSideTheBoxox · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting read with a lot of information. It gives some good ideas as well as goes into the ethics and things to watch out for when it comes to self-tracking. Worth a read if you are interested in self-tracking.

[Jorun Bork · Rating 3 out of 5]

Contains a lot of interesting insights, but I've come across more interesting books about self-tracking. Would recommend to check out Rettberg's and Lupton's books.

[BossWalker · Rating 3 out of 5]

For someone interested in self tracking, great read; otherwise it's just facts and ideas.

[Emil Syundyukov · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an Informative book on data monitoring.
Underlined several quotes and facts for the future use

[Ghassan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good introduction on the Subject. Happy to learn of Self Tracking communities. Missing more examples and tools. Also quite technical and can be boring.

[Dana Safian]

Easy read.

[Israel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I received this book from a colleague at work, and once I started reading it, I found it to be very insightful. The authors provide a series of case studies and explain how self-tracking data can be beneficial on an individual level. The case studies mainly refer to healthcare scenarios, where clients and patients use self-monitoring data to check their ongoing health, then report the data to their healthcare provider.

Neff makes the observation how more younger people (I didn't see an age range, so I'm guessing 25-45) are incentivized to use health apps and other technology to monitor their daily health, and she would like to see more of that trend occurring with older citizens who may not use the same technology for a variety of different reasons. One of the goals of having patients maintain self-tracking data on their personal health is to raise patient empowerment. While being an improvement for self-aware patients, Neff does not lose sight of how healthcare data can change the relationship and power between patient and doctor.

She also provides information on certain issues that may occur with self-tracking (health) data, such as potential legal complications and issues of data privacy. Another issue is in creating new forms of discrimination, which Neff brings up in another example of civil rights cases, where data is used in what she refers to as "high-tech profiling".

Overall, Neff gives a thorough look at how self-tracking data and individual's possession of such data can impact our daily lives. My fourth-year thesis in college was on the impact and improvements of telemedicine, so this book was definitely up my alley. I'm glad to see that this matter and (hopefully) benefit of self-tracking data is gaining more attention, and I hope it continues to do so in the near future.

[A Ter · Rating 4 out of 5]

At times this book felt overly academic and artificial in some of the distinctions and classifications it made; elsewhere it felt detached from the real world in a dystopian Silicon Valley bubble. That said, the authors are clearly grounded in real experiences and raise powerful examples (anecdotes). On balance, the book raises important and thought-provoking questions about data and our lives, particularly as it pertains to health and medicine.

[Jim Lyons · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating and timely topic, with more to it than I realized when I started the book. As I head on my way to being a true QS (Quantified Self) I was pleased to get some of the insights offered by the authors.

[Dirk · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book that provides a critical discussion of tracking devices, technologies and practices.

[Mikey Sklar · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best book on QS and Self-Tracking that I have come across to date. Gets into the details around tracking including technical, legal and data management.

[Andrew Galbraith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting discussion on self-tracking data and the inherent positive and negative aspects therein. A bit long winded at moments, but otherwise intriguing.

[Jericho Eames · Rating 4 out of 5]

Turns out, there are a lot of stuff that can and will go wrong when collecting data. Not all the data that you collect belong to you!!

[Gabi Paturzo · Rating 2 out of 5]

read for school, might be biased and take a point off because i was bored and did not want to read it