In the first two chapters of Self-Tracking, Gina Neff and Dawn Nafus explore the interesting social phenomenon of self tracking or recording and how this impacts people’s daily lives. The authors help answer what self tracking is and how its definition varies under certain circumstances.
Self tracking, while seriously enhanced with modern technology, is not a new concept if we are not talking in the strict sense of digital self tracking. Journaling, as pointed out by Neff and Nafus, has been around for centuries and is a way for people to manually collect data and to act or reflect on said data with what he/she is trying to accomplish. What is interesting is how self tracking relates to self discovery and operates under one the underlying principles of Western scientific thinking. That is, learning through observation. Neff and Nafus also talk about how these newer self tracking technologies assist in people forming a quantified self, which is how a person can be assessed through a collection of data that exists about he/she. Even though this concept is explained, and the people that exemplify this concept are notorious for questioning experts and want to interject their own data into professional analysis, is this a state that people should be in? The authors do not seem to make a specific push towards this idea, even though they also state that this behavior is largely associated with cultural values of self improvisation (p. 19).
This concept of self tracking turns into, in many ways, self discovery. This new age may also significantly help professionals improve their own practices with their patients by allowing their patients to record data on their own time. However, in a previous blog, I talked about the future of sensory data technology and how that may revolutionize the healthcare industry in that regard. So with the technology to use sensory data improving rapidly, is this trend of self recording data likely to become part of the future of medicine and health or will automation take over this field?
Neff, Gina, and Dawn Nafus. Self-Tracking. Cambridge: MIT, 2016. Print.
Rhetoric, Technology, and the Internet 