Selftracking Neff Gina Dawn Nafus by Neff, Gina & Dawn Nafus. 9780262529129, 0262529122 instant download after payment.

This book examines self-tracking—how and why people record, analyze, and reflect on data about themselves. We share some of the emerging research on this area of social life, looking at what people actually do with data about themselves, the tools they use, and the communities they become part of in the process. We show how data can be useful, powerful, tedious, pleasurable, underwhelming, wrong, or just beside the point in a variety of everyday contexts. We also explore what happens when data gets caught up in institutional relationships. Firms, universities, governments, and other types of organizations are all involved in producing or handling data. We focus on self-tracking primarily as it relates to wellness and health, for that is the sort of data that people tend to care most deeply about, and where the debates about the social implications are the most intense. We aim to explain why there is so much enthusiasm for the power of data in people’s hands, and consider critics’ important cautions about how it can also go very wrong.