Fletcher, Olivia 
ORCID: 0000-0003-4436-5143
(2024)
Healthy lifestyles or ‘dangerous competition’? – self-tracking and the geographies of surveillance and materiality in the lives of young people.
PhD thesis, University of Liverpool.
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Abstract
Self-tracking technologies monitor and measure aspects of your body and life, such as your physical activity and diet, with a view to achieve a healthier lifestyle and self-optimisation. In recent years, there have been concerns around young people’s use of self-tracking technologies, particularly in relation to obsessive behaviours. Within academia, researchers have analysed how individuals undertake self-tracking to take responsibility for their health and research has also begun to recognise the sensory, embodied, affective experiences of self-tracking. However, there is limited scholarship on young people’s experiences of self-tracking technologies. In this research, I explore the factors that impact the relationship young people have with their self-tracking technologies. In doing so, I seek to better understand the different motivations for individuals to undertake self-tracking and the complex ways in which young people make sense of and relate to their data. Moreover, I seek to advance applications of feminist new materialism to self-tracking practices and synthesise this with Foucauldian theory, to explore the relationship between humans and nonhumans and the ways in which individuals engage in self-governance through self-tracking. I draw on 30 digital interviews (video, email, phone and instant messenger) with young people aged 18-26 in the UK, alongside an auto-netnography of my own self-tracking experiences. I focus on the ways in which self-tracking impacts experiences and understandings of health and body perceptions, the ways in which self-tracking technologies become a part of young people’s embodied, sensory and everyday experiences and the ways in which other people impact experiences of self-tracking and understandings of health. I argue that young people’s experiences of self-tracking are extremely individualistic and argue that the ways in which individuals engage in self-tracking and the reasons for doing so change over space and time due to the dynamic, fluid nature of the human-technology assemblage. I conclude this thesis with a discussion of the possibilities for future research. I argue that future research should focus on a more diverse range of experiences, whilst questioning who does not have access to self-tracking technologies. I also discuss the opportunities for future research to work collaboratively with participants to understand how self-tracking technologies can be designed in more qualitative, individualist ways that account for the diverse ways in which individuals may use them.
| Item Type: | Thesis (PhD) |
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| Divisions: | Faculty of Science & Engineering > School of Environmental Sciences |
| Depositing User: | Symplectic Admin |
| Date Deposited: | 16 Sep 2024 15:14 |
| Last Modified: | 08 Feb 2025 03:03 |
| DOI: | 10.17638/03181937 |
| Supervisors: |
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| URI: | https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3181937 |
| Disclaimer: | The University of Liverpool is not responsible for content contained on other websites from links within repository metadata. Please contact us if you notice anything that appears incorrect or inappropriate. |
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