Purpose
The project seeks to investigate the entanglements of material bodies and digital technologies. How do self-tracking practices affect the identities of ageing individuals?
Project Description
29 men and women above the age of 60 have participated in the study. Data has been generated through individual, semi-structured interviews, participant observations and document analyses.
Results
Preliminary findings suggest that neoliberal ideals of "self-optimization" persist into old age. The use of smartwatches contributes to intensifying this effort. Smartwatches provide information on sleep, heart rate, and the number of steps taken, among other things. Biometric data invite the self-tracking subject to understand themselves in the light of medical expert knowledge about the body, thereby creating new connections between the aging body and the self.
Self-tracking appears to reproduce traditional ways of performing gender. For example, self-tracking may play a role in maintaining forms of masculinity associated with physical strength, performance, and competition. The male participants also associate these values with youthfulness and paid work.
Self-tracking practices reinforce truth claims about the possibility of achieving control over one's health through the "correct use of the body." Self-tracking devices tend to promote narrow definitions of what types of bodies that can be considered "correct." Through interactions between data and humans, unexpected dynamics can arise when the body "deviates" from the norm.
"Successful aging" is a dominant notion of what it means to age in the "right" ways. This ideal is based on the premise that it is both possible and desirable to maintain freedom and autonomy into old age. Freedom presupposes good function, both cognitively and physically. Self-tracking devices reproduce the ideal of successful aging, and the metric data become part of the negotiations and boundary work aging subjects do to keep deep old age at bay.
