The Quantified Self

With the advent of digital devices and software, self-tracking practices have gained new adherents and have spread into a wide array of social domains. The Quantified Self movement has emerged to promote ‘self knowledge through numbers’.

In this ground-breaking book, Deborah Lupton critically analyses the social, cultural and political dimensions of contemporary self-tracking and identifies the concepts of selfhood, human embodiment and the value of data that underpin them.

The book incorporates discussion of the consolations and frustrations of self-tracking as well as the proliferating ways in which people’s personal data are now used beyond their private rationales. Lupton outlines the ways in which the information that is generated by self-tracking now taken up and repurposed for commercial, governmental, managerial and research purposes. Self-tracking has broader implications, therefore, for the ways in which personal data practices are intertwined with big data politics.

Deborah Lupton is Centenary Research Professor of Communication at the University of Canberra