 Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you, Tiharj, and all the organisers for inviting me. I'm Rachel Kent, I'm a PhD student at King's College, and my research interests are situated around digital health technologies and self-representation via social media. So, I'm going to talk today mainly about, oh, thank you, about my project, but I'm working within a wider project called media, so I'm going to give a little bit of an overview of what that is, and then provide a bit of context around the kind of main theories and my research interests around mobile lives, how that influences self-representation by politics and influence on digital health practice. And then a brief overview of my methodology as it stands at the moment, it's still very much a work in progress, so I'm really, really interested in getting feedback from everybody and their ideas around that. And then just some initial discussion around my pilot interviews and my initial findings. So, I'm working as part of a European Research Council funded project called EgoMedia, and this is looking at how the impact of new media informs and practices of self-presentation. It's a very interdisciplinary project. It's exploring very widely the influence of autobiography via social media and life-writing. The group in itself is from many different disciplinary backgrounds, including English literature, medical and digital humanities, media and communication studies. And we're asking lots of questions around how social media is influencing communication practices and the effect the digital world is actually having on our feelings, our sense of being and well-being. So, where my project sits within that, I'm really interested in looking at how users' life worlds are actually being contributed to, the autobiographical narratives from a health perspective on and offline identity construction. So, I'm not actually interested in exploring how patients with chronic illnesses or those trying to lose weight or train for a marathon are actually presenting their health practices, my interest lie in the everyday person, and how lay people are using social media to present their health practice with consideration to this idea of a real or a modern community, and how with consideration to that community if that actually affects health practice offline. So, to provide a little bit more context, I'm very much interested in looking at this idea of mobile lives and social media and how that's influencing how we're presenting ourselves, so existing within this flexible and fluid membrane between the real and the virtual. We understand how network technologies mediate privatised and public social and communicative interactions and constructions of the self and are increasingly mediated through these digital forms and obviously the participatory and sharing affordances of social media and online communities. And as we've heard this morning, the mobile technologies that we're using mediate these emotional and social interactions and this is constantly changing and will continue to change the relationship between humans and their technical devices as well as altering modes of how we're actually communicating and interacting with one another. Elliot and Yuri argue that the rise of an intensely mobile society reshapes the self, its everyday activities and interpersonal relations, as well as connections with the wider world. And so we understand how identity formation now and conceptualisations of the self are being reformed through these digital modes and through these paradigms of mobility. So, alongside the rise of mobile technology, we've seen the uptake of digital health technology and social media as we've discussed this morning and these converged platforms are enabling different forms of health self-representation and they're also extending self-monitoring and surveillance into digitally quantifiable formats. And much of the literature, the current literature which surrounds digital health technologies really celebrates these practices as being very much patriot with the ability to revolutionise healthcare through self-knowledge. And whereas lifestyle used to be concerned with these traditional identities, conceptualisations of the self are now identifiable by signs and self-representations of consumption and so in neoliberal societies, as we've discussed this morning, consumption is a reflexive one whereby it's equated with participation. And so my interest is looking at health as not on opposite to ill health as being in good or ill health but being representative of lifestyle choice and involvement to rate the right consumption of choice positions the citizen as a consumer as actively making right ethical decisions, moral decisions, for the management of their individual health self-care. So I'm very much conceptualising and identifying health practice as evolving from health promotion strategies post the birth of the National Health Service, the public welfare state, the inclusive and support state, towards today's neoliberal practices of individualised and self-responsabilising health care. As we know users gathering a huge amount of data about their body and their health and this raises a lot of questions about how helpful that is in terms of individual self-surveillance and health management and so my questions that I'm asking is how do social media and digital health technology actually influence health misinformation, information and on and offline health practice. We understand that digital health practices and affordances of self-quantifying devices have dimensions of both self-surveillance and wider surveillance and the quantified self-movement is a key demonstration of this neoliberal self-management and self-surveillance practice and so my research is identifying with biopolitics as a regulatory ideology in which individuals are incited and encouraged to become new active consumers of health care taking personal responsibility and education to maintain individual self-care. The new active consumer of health is expected to take personal responsibility and educate themselves to maintain this health care and this operates through a social control and a deep anxiety of becoming increasingly articulated through responsibility and an othering so this othering of oneself is the differentiation of one body type one citizen from another and this is a dominant discourse within biopolitics and within the competitive and comparative strategies enabled by self-tracking and social media as well and so to adhere to citizenship responsibilities of good health and good morality is so not to be a burden to the state to deliver oneself as a belonging citizen and this manifests through risk calculation of socio-economic groups but is actually problematized often at an individual level through this identity maintenance and acted through attribution attribution sorry of citizen rights and obligations so we understand by media as tools enabling the body visible through biotechnological information but the ethical implications of the choice architecture of actually these different by media and digital health technologies needs interrogation in consideration to the influence of the regulatory and self-policing of the body I'm identifying with both the technology and the individual user as agents co-existing and in some cases co-evolving together so in this regard we understand biopolitics as being enacted and operating on two levels within practices of governmentality individual and state and much warmer where my research is hoping to step in to try and understand these two levels the mediation between the relationship between personal usage and practices as well as recognizing the technology and the state as a as an agent and a choice architect of biopolitical rationalities so I'm just gonna briefly cover my methodology as it stands at the moment I'm going to be doing a selection of online data capture and this is going to be screenshots from people's Facebook and Instagram usage and then using reflexive guided diaries to tease out the kind of mundane and common sensual reflections that users are getting from their online content sharing and then try and contextualize that with interviews so to discuss a little bit more in detail about my kind of initial findings from my pilot interviews I've been looking at self-representation and community practice and community surveillance and how that's influencing health presentation and we understand that social media enables tools for self-presentation and identity management which includes issues of identity and identification and so the functions and affordability of social media and digital health technology enables both the self-presentation and performance of the self as outlined by Goffman I'm interested in how people are presented themselves posing as a performance and so when we're exploring the increased uptake and usage of participatory media it's important to understand how this shift with users communicating one another is affecting the audience feedback and then the information they are then sharing we understand that historically representations are made by a set of people for example curators or filmmakers and with social media we are the curator and the subject we are subjectifying ourselves and I like in this construction of online personas as the construction of personal brands promoting and branding of the self has become a normalized accepted phenomena in everyday people's lives and so we can understand this new shift towards interactions online as a form of self-branding and commodification of social ties so my research is interested in how platform features and affordances sculpt and shape personal identity for example facebook makes explicit links between memory and emotion through these narrative biographical socio-technological affordances and these fragmented data representation of representations of the self construct not only an online identity for the user but also a health self a construction of a health identity which they design others within the community to perceive so how much does surveillance of others actually influence consideration to our own self presentation users the perception of management of their own visibility online is tied to shifting and shifting understandings of what we consider public and private information and online communities as Daniel Trottier speaks about in his work on surveillance and social media it's reorganizing relations between peers and peer relations becoming ever more surveillance in nature so when we're considering the process and implications behind this we need to look at surveillance and data and privacy within these online networks and how that's also influencing and mediates these self-representational practices we understand now that the context collapse that's occurring online and how audiences of this self-representational data is including friends and family colleagues past present potentially future and we need to recognize that role of context collapse and how that's affecting what we're sharing online and I think it's arguable that social media users are actually increasingly conscious and aware of what is public and private online and when we're conceptualizing self-surveillance through self-representation we can understand it with consideration to the participatory audiences and alongside this performance and presentation of the self so we understand self-presentation in near liberal age as being achieved through individualizing practices and sharing of those facts and statistics and the fastest growing segment of that is human biology related data and when I spoke to one of my participants I questioned what information they were sharing online they responded by saying the trend of sharing is growing I guess it's the social thing that I don't have any close friends running a marathon anytime soon but there's a large community of people out there that are doing it and respond to what I've done so it's a nice feeling when somebody else comments and says oh I've run 60 miles this weekend too so immediately here we can identify how other people's accounts is affecting your own health practice and how community surveillance evolves with self-representation and the construction enabled through the different technological affordances that are available but also in consideration to this imagined or real peer surveillance and so the motivation here is the sense of accomplishment from this user and this may be returned by the wider community but only once that information is shared and so the representation of that data and the sharing of that content has a weight and a significance in addition to that personal self-gratification which is then reinforced through the surveillance and feedback from the community so I think we need to explore social media's impact upon sociality and communication practices in how it affects our sense of self is there an over reliance on virtual support and how much do other people's accounts affect your own health practice when questioned on the excuse me when questioned on the influence of community feedback another participant responded by saying I had a situation where I was with someone at the weekend and I went for a run they came back and didn't post anything and somebody asked me didn't you go for a run this weekend so that was interesting because I just forgot to post it and when I spoke to this participant as we continue the interview I asked him did this person feed back to the information they were always sharing were they liking were they commenting and they just responded by saying that they had never fed back publicly towards this participant this was something that they had just obviously been privately viewing but not publicly feeding back and had actually gone onto Facebook and sent him a private message to ask him whether he'd been for a run which I found quite interesting an interesting practice in terms of how we're viewing other people but privately viewing and not publicly feeding back so I then questioned this participant and I asked how is then this then going to make him feel more inclined to share your house practice for the future now that you know you have an imagined community who aren't publicly giving you the feedback but you know we're actually viewing it there and so this raises a lot of questions in terms of how does imagined peer surveillance and community feedback influence or encourage active privatised self-censoring or exposure of certain health information in this construction and self-representation of health and the idealised self so from here we can see how that the gaze of others may increase pressures to respond to the choice architecture and nudges within the design of these applications this user the following week and might feel that he should go for a run because he knows that person wants to view it online and it's arguable that having increased self-knowledge through these applications then increases this individual reflexivity which is embedded with these kind of normative framings of choice so self-surveillance and self-management and the presentation online becomes this kind of individualised pressured cycle of standardized meritocracy where we're further enhancing the need for self-knowledge but also the need for the feedback and the perception of the real or imagined community so on an individual level I'm really interested in looking at how people are self-representing but for themselves and we understand that users are engaging with these platforms and devices unwillingly giving up all this personal data and information but we I'm interested in understanding why why why are we sharing this information what are we getting back from the community but what are we actually also just doing for our sense of self what's all this acquisition acquisition of data doing for us and we understand there's a very seductive nature of these technologies the promise of connectivity health optimization community support and advice and this leads us to consider what is actually important about self-tracking and this acquisition of data is how is actually transforming how we understand the world how is it providing information and misinformation to the corporations or state who resell or remarket this information back to us or to third parties and who then use this contact content towards us but how this cycle is influencing how we're practicing health management and self-representation and the choice architecture of these design of these devices so there's two kind of ways of looking at this that we've touched on earlier this morning but firstly the kind of more utopian side if you like that beta argues about being able to individually monitor we are liberating ourselves we are gaining control over our over our lives similarly Hayes argues that we are through this in through this empowerment and acquisition of data and self-tracking we're able to do this without becoming a projected unified subject of of regimes of states and corporations but this is quite a limited view and doesn't actually take into consideration this governance of the soul and the extension of neoliberal controlling rationalities and the moralization of health what you've heard about and shame and blamed discourses that are being kind of perpetuated through the gamification of these devices so this leads to a very problematic but fascinating area of digital health practice and it's the mediation of persuasive or coercive computing and the governance of the emotional self so these devices are capturing lots of different bits of information but they can't actually capture the emotional activity or well-being stress trauma or lack of context of a situation within within these data capture devices it's completely omitted so all human activity physical mental and emotional can't be fully reducible to data vacation and so we're limiting our definition of what needs scientific grounding and explanation if we're only able to do that with data that we are actually able to capture furthermore a lot of these devices are not actually rooted in a lot of scientific rationalities it raises a lot of questions about misinformation and what's being captured so I would argue that these devices are not just about enlightenment through data but that it's about information what we need to examine is the information produced to change the way that uses behavior and understanding of the body is shifting because of these practices so we understand that these technologies are challenging and shaping social values and meanings and our understanding of how we interpret the environment and in this context it's shifting these distinctions between the physical body the data and the mind it's constantly being renegotiated and it's shifting these normative definitions and understanding is what we consider a body and what we consider a person and this shifts definitions of what we deem healthy as individuals and patients as well as sufferers of ill health in which of a capacity that might actually be determined with these devices and one of my participants when I questioned about the acquisition of this data and any influence that they actually had upon their health practice one of my participants responded by saying it's interesting that something has forced me to take a look on my life I don't know if it'll stick because my attitude is sort of I eat and I drink what I want I do exercise to sort of balance it out and so within this self-quantification we're capturing and sharing content based on what we deem what the corporations or what the state deem falls within these above categories of importance and so from this respondent we're reminded that data isn't neutral and it is selective about what is it is not captured and data scientists are storytellers they are interpreters and they're taking slices of information from the data sphere and translating it into something for us to consume that's meaningful however we interpret that is is another thing and so when we're visualizing our data through these different graphic design interfaces is problematic and that we're seeing it through this semiotic layer of representation that the data story is revealed to us but obviously in a simplistic and sense sensationalist way and so this digitalized reproduction may impact how biometrics are perceived for the user but also in turn how this information is then internalized and acted upon as Duffy articulates here how do you summarize and symbolize without oversimplification and distortion and if our behavior changes as a direct result of being nudged by a design driver what does that actually mean for how we're responding to that device and if we look at it within a kind of wider socio-cultural and political context it leaves a lot of ethical implications in terms of the motivations behind the design of these of these devices so we understand we've spoken we've heard briefly this morning about health gamification and this is a helpful way to kind of understand the the game we're playing with this data I suppose how we're acting upon what we're doing with it you know we're incorporating all these health practices into play by numbers on leadership boards and badges and comparative charts and it's all becoming a form of health strategization where users of digital health technology and social media platforms are gaming to self-survey health behavior but the game we're actually playing is about our body and it's play by numbers so we're playing these constant games about our human capability and understanding it as a form of self-governance through the feedback loops that are actually being held within within these devices and it's a management and an enactment of self-governance to manage the health potential health risks that we may be encountering we do escape into games as witson argues but we also exercise our hyper-rationalized mind into managing actuarial risk in this regard we understand health is something that needs to be managed and maintained through consideration to risk of ill health disease and ultimately death but the gamification of health can be understood as both tools of play and health management but also these kind of considerations towards extending mortality and preventing death and when I questioned one of my participants about the role of data and gameplay in motivating health decisions they responded by saying it is very measurable so you feel like you're achieving things and it doesn't make you feel better I guess being able to track stuff does help because you can look back and see what you've done and know that you'll be able to do it again and what we understand from this is that this user knows this runner knows that she's able to go and do that health practice again and again if she so wishes but it's the acquisition of that data that kind of legitimates it for her and her mind and makes her feel that she's able to actually then go back and do this again and so we can understand through Olivia Banner arguments around this organizing of identity through discipline and regulation of the body how it can be very self-empowering in this regard but it exemplifies the status we're placing on data over human sense and intuition sociality is often felt through sorry self achievement is felt through the self-evidence of data like sociality is often felt through the representations enabled through social media so just as to kind of sum up that my lasting kind of questions and thoughts at this stage are does acquisition of data mean better health outcomes or health optimization and what is all this data doing for our health practice and self knowledge we understand that it's a hugely important area and arguably problematic aspects of digital health devices which does need addressing but if our behavior is changing as a direct result of being nudged by a design driver in response to wider socio-cultural economic and political priorities and pressures this leaves a lot of this is great ethical implications in terms of the motivations behind the design and lastly this idea of personal discovery and natural revelation only being enabled through self-sustained devices and self-representational digital modes and in this regard it's data acquisition and the sharing of that data what is this actually telling us about our health is it telling us anything more about our body and our health than we already know thank you