The purpose of this paper is to report on the findings from the Digital Privacy Story Completion Project, which investigated Australian participants' understandings of and…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to report on the findings from the Digital Privacy Story Completion Project, which investigated Australian participants' understandings of and responses to digital privacy scenarios using a novel method and theoretical approach.
Design/methodology/approach
The story completion method was brought together with De Certeau's concept of tactics and more-than-human theoretical perspectives. Participants were presented with four story stems on an online platform. Each story stem introduced a fictional character confronted with a digital privacy dilemma. Participants were asked to complete the stories by typing in open text boxes, responding to the prompts “How does the character feel? What does she/he do? What happens next?”. A total of 29 participants completed the stories, resulting in a corpus of 116 narratives for a theory-driven thematic analysis.
Findings
The stories vividly demonstrate the ways in which tactics are entangled with relational connections and affective intensities. They highlight the micropolitical dimensions of human–nonhuman affordances when people are responding to third-party use of their personal information. The stories identified the tactics used and boundaries that are drawn in people's sense-making concerning how they define appropriate and inappropriate use of their data.
Originality/value
This paper demonstrates the value and insights of creatively attending to personal data privacy issues in ways that decentre the autonomous tactical and agential individual and instead consider the more-than-human relationality of privacy.
Peer review
The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-05-2020-0174
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Marianne Clark and Deborah Lupton
In this article, the authors aim to explore mobile apps as both mundane and extraordinary digital media artefacts, designed and promoted to improve or solve problems in people's…
Abstract
Purpose
In this article, the authors aim to explore mobile apps as both mundane and extraordinary digital media artefacts, designed and promoted to improve or solve problems in people's lives. Drawing on their “App Stories” project, the authors elaborate on how the efficiencies and affordances credited to technologies emerge and are performed through the specific embodied practices that constitute human–app relationships.
Design/methodology/approach
The project involved short written accounts in an online survey from 200 Australian adults about apps. Analysis was conducted from a sociomaterial perspective, surfacing the emotional and embodied responses to and engagements with the apps; the relational connections described between people and their apps or with other people or objects; and what the apps enabled or motivated people to do.
Findings
Findings point to three salient concerns about apps: (1) the need for efficiency; (2) the importance and complexity of human relationships and maintaining these connections; and (3) the complex relationships people have with their bodies. These concerns are expressed through themes that reflect how everyday efficiencies are produced through human–app entanglements; apps as relational agents; apps' ability to know and understand users; and future app imaginaries.
Originality/value
This project explores the affective and embodied dimensions of app use and thinks through the tensions between the extraordinary and mundane dimensions of contemporary techno-social landscapes, reflecting on how apps “matter” in everyday life. Our analysis surfaces the active role of the body and bodily performances in the production of app efficiencies and underlines the ways mobile apps are always situated in relation to other media and materialities.
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Deborah Lupton and Gavin J. D. Smith
In this chapter, we draw on our study involving interviews with Australians who identify as current self-trackers to discuss why and how they monitor themselves. Our approach for…
Abstract
In this chapter, we draw on our study involving interviews with Australians who identify as current self-trackers to discuss why and how they monitor themselves. Our approach for analysing self-tracking practices is based on a sociomaterial perspective, viewing enactments of voluntary self-tracking as shifting heterogeneous assemblages, bringing together diverse actors who are both human and non-human. We use vignettes to illustrate the ways in which our participants enacted self-tracking and to identify some of the diverse meanings and motivations that mediate decisions to self-track and resultant uses of the information thus generated. We found that a varied range of self-tracking practices were taken up by our interviewees, including not only digital devices and methods, but also recording their details using pen-and-paper, or simply maintaining mental awareness and using memory. We identified several agential capacities in our participants’ accounts of why and how they monitor themselves. These capacities are interrelated, but can be loosely grouped under the headings of ‘self-improvement’, ‘exerting control’ and ‘identifying patterns and achieving goals’. They are motivators and facilitators of monitoring practices. The broader sociocultural contexts in which monitoring of the body/self is undertaken were also revealed in the participants’ accounts. These include ideas about the moral virtues of self-responsibility and the individual management of life circumstances to avoid chaos and risk, and the notion that monitoring practices can successfully achieve these virtues.
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Purpose – In North America today, we are witnessing an unprecedented preoccupation with “excess” weight, with millions of people perceived to be part of the epidemic of obesity…
Abstract
Purpose – In North America today, we are witnessing an unprecedented preoccupation with “excess” weight, with millions of people perceived to be part of the epidemic of obesity. While this chapter does not seek to contest medical evidence that average weights of North Americans have risen in recent years, nor deny the potential development of associated health problems, it offers a critique of the terminology invoked in these discussions and especially challenges the characterization of increased weight among the population as an “epidemic.” This chapter suggests that what we are witnessing is more appropriately understood as a moral regulation project premised on ideas of risk, contagion, and neoliberal discourses of health.
Methodology/approach – In arguing that the concern about obesity may be understood as an example of moral regulation, this chapter employs the work of Alan Hunt, as well as Deborah Lupton's insights on governmentality and health.
Findings – In reviewing the scholarly literature on obesity as well as Canadian public health initiatives, a discourse of risk and contagion is evident. The overweight and obese (and these are commonly conflated) are presented as dangerous to themselves and others.
Contribution to the field – In suggesting an alternative understanding of the obesity “epidemic” as a socially constructed and morally regulated phenomenon, this chapter aims to further discuss and reassess how those who are considered fat are understood and treated in North America.
Abstract
This chapter discusses the control of women's bodies and minds through the daily practices of menstrual control apps. Based on Michel Foucault's concepts (2003, 2006, 2013), the research is based on women's relationship with their own bodies. Still, it is wider than the body per se since the central theme is the construction of subjectivities. This paper embraces power modalities and explores disciplinary and discursive practices and regimes of truth, biopower, biopolitics and governance. The paper frames the fundamental points of Michel Foucault's analysis of power and how they are associated with strategies used for menstrual tracking apps. It looks at how apps act on the subjectivity of being a woman, shaping ways of thinking and acting. It looks at how disciplinary practices, knowledge–power and surveillance, as Foucault tells us, relate to themselves and medicine. The text highlights that monitoring data and corporate surveillance by menstrual apps poses unprecedented challenges to feminist politics. Therefore, we argue that the technology of menstrual tracking apps acts subtly and uninterruptedly to docilise female bodies and make them useful. Trying to find new paths and solutions from a feminist and critical perspective, we offer suggestions for further research on the topic, disregarding liberal approaches which rely on media literacy exclusively rather than a holistic comprehension of technology and women's rights.
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Self-tracking is becoming a prominent and ubiquitous feature in contemporary practices of health and wellness management. Over the last few years, we have witnessed a rapid…
Abstract
Self-tracking is becoming a prominent and ubiquitous feature in contemporary practices of health and wellness management. Over the last few years, we have witnessed a rapid development in digital tracking devices, apps and platforms, together with the emergence of health movements such as the Quantified Self. As the world is becoming increasingly ruled by metrics and data, we are becoming ever more reliant on technologies of tracking and measurement to manage and evaluate various spheres of our lives including work, leisure, performance, and health. This chapter begins with a brief outline of some of the key theoretical approaches that have been informing the scholarly debates on the rise of self-tracking. The chapter then moves on to discuss at length the findings of an international survey study conducted by the author with users of self-tracking technologies to discuss the ways in which they perceive and experience these practices, and the various rationales behind their adoption of self-tracking in the first place. The chapter also addresses participants’ attitudes towards issues of privacy and data sharing and protection which seem to be dominated by a lack of concern regarding the use and sharing of self-tracking data with third parties. Some of the overarching sentiments vis-à-vis these issues can be roughly categorised according to feelings of ‘trust’ towards companies and how they handle data, a sense of ‘resignation’ in the face of what is perceived as an all-encompassing and ubiquitous data use, feelings of ‘self-insignificance’ which translates into the belief that one’s data is of no value to others, and the familiar expression of ‘the innocent have nothing to hide’. Overall, this chapter highlights the benefits and risks of self-tracking practices as experienced and articulated by the participants, while providing a critical reflection on the rise of personal metrics and the culture of measurement and quantification.
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Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to explore a particular conception of youth deviance and some of its practical implications. This conception is evident in the way that…
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to explore a particular conception of youth deviance and some of its practical implications. This conception is evident in the way that the media and human services construe phenomena like teen violence and “risky” sex in epidemiological terms: as contagious and spreading rapidly through a population.
Methodology/approach – This chapter broaches these questions through review and analysis of human services research and literature as well as their practical recommendations.
Findings – This chapter argues that the concern over transmission of deviant behaviors or characteristics is linked to anxiety over youth sociality and the spaces it occupies. While historically contingent in their manifestations, causal logics using sociality to explain youth deviance (peer pressure, e.g.) continue to resonate with a medicalized viewpoint of the very category of youth.
Contribution to the field – This chapter has contributed to the field through exploring changing conceptions of youth and the sociological question of the medicalization of social problems.