Rachael Kent

My name’s Rachael Kent, and I’m a teaching fellow in digital media and culture. I started looking at self-tracking technologies in my master’s dissertation, and I started using an a Nike running application to try and increase my health and fitness and also a nutritional app to follow some raw food juicing kind of diet trend that was quite popular at the time. I actually ended up overexercising my body and not providing my body with the nutrition it needed, and ended up with multiple organ failure in hospital very, very unwell for about a month.

I turned my phone on, and my phone was still nudging me to remind me to go for a run or, “Rachael look at what your friends have done,” and I still felt this really odd sense of guilt about the fact that I hadn't been able to run X amount of miles as my friends had. And I just thought in that moment that there’s just something quite mad about following the guidance of an application to essentially do damage to your body.

I was interested in looking at how uses of self-tracking technologies and social media use these technologies to self-represent their health identity online, and how that influenced health management offline. And then once they shared this content, how that influenced – under the gaze of the community – how they actually performed and managed health in their everyday life, in kind of consideration and comparison to others as well. I was working with users of self-tracking apps, people that were really health oriented. None of them really could even give me a very kind of concrete or solid answer about what health meant to them, even though their lifestyle was very oriented around health improvement. That really kind of resonated with me about, you know, thinking about my own health practices and thinking about health and more of a mental and physical health terms as opposed to just kind of physical health.

I was working with users of self-tracking apps, people that were really health oriented, people that were either dealing with illness and disease, working towards particular goals like a marathon or dieting, or just the everyday layperson who wanted just to improve health. Life writing really helped me look at these technologies in a different way, in kind of more of a diarizing, or autobiographical sense, in terms of how users would look back on this this data and this content that they’d created and shared. And they would kind of perceive the body as malleable based upon past behaviors, and they would feel that the future for them would be healthier and more optimal based upon this kind of construction of a life-log identity over time, which kind of gave them this idea of a very hopeful optimal healthy future.

So I kind of came up with this idea of the health self, because the health stuff was a continually improving, optimal being that was never quite attainable or achievable, but it was a goal. So I definitely want to explore more around this idea of kind of the health self, and looking at – maybe over a longer period of time or through different types of technologies – how this kind of embodiment of health stays or kind of dissipates with these types of users. Self-tracking is entering so many different areas of everyone’s everyday life if you’re kind of engaging with these devices. And I think it’s pretty limiting just to focus on one application in that respect. I think it would be a nice way to kind of look at broadening it out in terms of, say, the sleep apps as well as the dietary apps as well as the exercising apps. As well as applications that you’ve got on your phones that you can’t remove say on Apple, for example, on the iPhone the Apple Health.

Looking at it from a more kind of surveillant aspect as well. So, how over time we feel about our health when we’re constantly being surveilled by … we’re self-surveying, we’re being surveilled by the community of other users on social media, if we’re sharing this data, but also by the corporations and the state who you know capitalize and profit from this data, and looking at it from a critical perspective in that way.