Self-tracking And Health Promotion: Individual Versus Social Practices

Self-tracking by means of digital and other devices is a way to obtain information about one’s own body through measurement. There may be different incentives for self-tracking, but generally they are aiming at self-improvement and self-reflection (Lupton, 2016). One important incentive is to improve healthy living. As such self-tracking can be understood as a particular approach to practicing health promotion. Self-tracking is practiced in a number of different contexts from the purely individual self-monitoring and measuring among healthy people to self-monitoring in institutionalized settings in the healthcare sector, in private companies’ health promotion programs or on private data sharing platforms. However, common to all these different contexts and ways to practice self-tracking is an emphasis on individual responsibility and self-management. This seems to be in agreement with a prevailing tendency in health promotion to focus on individual responsibility. Even more social forms of data management through data sharing on social platforms is very often characterized by individualized features such as self-presentation and gamification or profit oriented data sharing on private platforms. Alternative forms of community orientation connected with a more social concept of health promotion seem to be much less common. This presentation will provide an analysis of prevailing forms of self-tracking, based on a number of case studies, and the extent to which they resonate with more social and community oriented approaches to health promotion and identify barriers and contradictions associated with the present individualising contexts for these activities.