Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Quotidian Quantifier: Fitness Tracking And The Mundanity Of Surveillance, Marianne Neal-Joyce

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation uses the rise of wearable fitness tracking as a lens through which to examine the predominance of quantification in everyday life. With over a third of U.S. adults owning a tracker, the increased use of body-surveilling technologies provides an opportunity to investigate some central sociological questions. In this project, I ask why individuals track their health behaviors with technology and how we may understand this behavior in the context of medical and corporate interests. I further ask how people think about the privacy implications of their use and what concerns they have about data collection and sharing. I …