Self-Monitoring for Health: Questions for an Emerging Field

Abstract

This paper aims to contribute to critical studies of self-monitoring by drawing together existing scholarship, emerging predominantly in digital sociology and media and communication studies journals, with scholarship from Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Sociology of Health and Illness (SHI) on other health technologies used away from the clinic. We take stock of existing work and suggest potential avenues for further exploration. We start by offering a critical summary of scholarship on self-monitoring, arguing that an important theme has concerned the meaning and value of data. An initial focus on media and commercial discourses, providing political economy and Foucauldian analyses, has been complemented and complicated by emerging ethnographic work, particularly on the Quantified Self movement, which suggest plural understandings and valuations of self-monitoring data, and limits to data flows. A key contribution of our argument is that there may be more to self-monitoring than data and data flows. We suggest that a technology-in-practice perspective might help to explore the diversity of monitoring practices, bringing into relief issues that are already central in SHI and STS. We draw on evidence from comparison cases of other health technologies used in domestic spaces (telecare and pharmaceuticals) to highlight three conceptual areas that have resonance for self-monitoring: (i) non-use, resistance and unexpected uses of technologies, (ii) the distributed work of self-monitoring within existing care infrastructures, and (iii) the emotional meaning of self-monitoring. We end with a series of questions that we propose could help orientate and further enrich future scholarship into self-monitoring.

Keywords: Self-Tracking; Infrastructure of Care; Technology-in-Practice; Quantified Self; Participatory Medicine