Abstract

The concept of self-tracking has emerged in discussions of digital technologies and mobile devices that collect, measure, and display one’s body and everyday life. By recording and monitoring one’s bodily movements, the contemporary self is observed through and understood as an assemblage of quantifiable data. Building on an increasing number of devices and apps that constantly read body metrics and automatically collect data on bodily functions, this paper examines how self-tracking become an individual health management technique that has been institutionalized. With a genealogy of ways in which health management techniques are socially constructed, this paper illustrates how health management systems are coupled with digital/algorithmic media and how subjects of self-tracking become dividual elements, which will be reassembled into observable patterns through algorithmic arrangements.