 Yr unig. Yn gyfnodd ar gyfer a fydd yn ymweld fyddiol yn gwybod i chi'n gweithio. Mae'n gweithio ar y tîm a bryd a ddych yn ysgrifennu ffobl yn unig yma. Mae'n gweithio ffobl yn gyfnodd yn ysgrifennu ei wneud. Mae'n gweithio'r ysgrifennu ymweld i'r ysgrifennu yn y ffobl yn ysgrifennu ei wneud. Yn gweithio, mae'r ysgrifennu erbyn i'ch ysgrifennu ymweld i'ch ysgrifennu of the capitalist mobilisation of productive bodies of the population. It would be my assertion that self-tracking functions as a means for enabling the mobilisation of the entire physical, symbolic and affective lives of the population through capital accumulation focusing on encouraging activity. So I've been seeing activity in really broad terms, in both physical terms and in the production of communicative symbols. But I'll start with just very briefly introducing what it is I'm talking about. So I'll talk about the use of self-tracking devices in workplace wellness programmes. So these are any devices really that are used to monitor activity. It could just be a pedometer, but in a lot of cases it's Fitbits or similar devices. This Virgin Pulse One is produced by one of the providers of these. And they're used in initiatives which are designed to improve the health and wellbeing of employees. So Virgin Pulse is one of the companies, I think they're mostly in the United States. GCC or Global Corporate Challenge is another. And this sort of feedback model is the suggested means in which this works, this functions. It suggests you get a little cue from your device which tracks your steps and sometimes other things. Which could just be that you see how many steps you've taken and you think I should be doing some more, should be running or walking more. Or it might give you a little notification saying that you have walked enough or you haven't walked enough. And then this spurs you on to go out for a run or a walk and then you get a little reward which could be a virtual trophy or it could be moving up to the league table or something like this. And they have various suggestions as to why these things are useful. And they're mostly focused around improving the health of the employees but also improving productivity of the company. And one thing which is the most thing I've focused on most really is this issue of engagement. And I think this is a stronger engagement in the middle there which I think is more significant than they suggest. So these are the kinds of initiatives that I'm discussing. But I'm going to focus on and draw on this quotation from the sociologist Boltanski and Keopello. And they suggest that activity has become what they call the general equivalent. So activity is the general equivalent. It's what the status of persons and things is measured by. It surmounts the oppositions between work and non-work, the stable and the unstable, wage earning and non-wage earning class, paid work and voluntary work, that which may be assessed in terms of productivity and that which not being measurable eludes calculable assessment. And they say that this is becoming increasingly the thing against which we're always judged. And I think we can kind of see this playing through in what some people have called the cult of busyness. Everyone needs to be busy all the time. Everyone has to have a project on the go. And an increasing preoccupation with individual and state level productivity. Productivity is a big problem for everyone apparently. So I place this valorisation of activity, which I think we can see in the context in which work is becoming increasingly central, I think, to all aspects of our lives, but at the same time that it seems to be declining in the social imaginary. And I think that this is occurring for the reasons which some Italian autonomist Marxists have suggested, is because actually work is just moving outside of the factory walls. Really we're kind of working all the time, not just when we would kind of clock in before we'd clock out. And so I'll try to articulate what all this means. And this is happening, I think, for certain due to certain developments within capitalist structure. And so Marx's concept of alienation doesn't really stand anymore. For Marx, he suggested that the capitalist production process wouldn't allow workers to be creative or emotionally engaged so they started to feel kind of like robots. So they were alienated. But in the contemporary economy is our emotional and social lives which capitalism needs to appropriate as well as our physical working bodies in order to generate profit. So emotional labour, social networks, the relationships between people are all central to the productive processes. And I think self-tracking is one means of enabling the appropriation of this, of all these different aspects for capitalism. So I'm going to suggest two ways in which activity has become valorised and then self-tracking enables and encourages activity. So the reproduction of productive bodies and the generation of symbolic value, data and network connections and various other things. So I've seen these both as types of activity, as physical movement and also the production of symbolic things. So first in terms of productive bodies. So I'll suggest that, well, actually no, I'll just put this quote up. So this is from Gray and Delay, my French pronunciation is not too good. This is kind of the mantra for this section. They suggest that the living machine must become as adapted as possible to the social mechanism into which it is in fact integrated. So that its productive act develops in optimal conditions and its gears don't grind too loudly. So they were talking about mid 20th century psychology and suggesting its place within enabling the integration of individuals into the productive processes of capitalism. They don't want their gears to grind too loudly, just want them to get on with being productive. And I think we can see the aspects of self-tracking I'm discussing as being part of a similar kind of process. So when I went to speak to some people who were involved in implementing these kinds of wellness programs to see why they wanted to do it. And they were all super enthusiastic about them and they thought they were great. But they acknowledged that they didn't really think that they actually really made anyone much healthier or improved their wellness in particular. And this is because most people engaged with it. There were usually these, how these projects work is that people get together in teams and track their steps collectively for six weeks or so, compete against other teams in their organisation and elsewhere. To see who can walk the furthest distance over that time. So it's kind of like a group project. But they suggested that actually in most cases people didn't really keep that up for very long. Even for the six weeks most people kind of their interest dropped off after three or four weeks. And they only really benefited super competitive people who were already kind of running marathons and things like this anyway. So it's kind of an optimisation. But they thought it was great anyway. And it's for these kinds of reasons. This is a quote from one of my respondents. They said, as well as competing with other teams, they're also competing against themselves. Every day you'll try and work more steps. You'll try and build a healthier lifestyle and healthier habits. Someone else said, it's about yourself as an individual. You put your goal, it's about setting your goal and then trying to meet that. It's about this kind of internal process of pushing yourself on to be more active. Rather necessarily than actually achieving any greater healthiness or anything like that. So I suggest this is really actually part of building an entrepreneurial self. I won't go into too much detail about this because I think other people are going to talk about very similar things actually from reading other people's papers. But it's about making people more competitive, more driven, getting them to focus on being tenacious, adaptable, restless, always striving to be doing more all the time. But in order to build an entrepreneurial self, we need to construct a certain kind of subject. And there's a fantastic book by Ulrich Broklyn called The Entrepreneurial Self. And he says about how entrepreneurialism is inherently connected, is intimately connected with notions of empowerment. And we can see these devices and programmes as means of empowering workers within a certain kind of way. And he suggests, in order for empowerment specialists to promote people's potential to self-govern, they must first frame their problems as essentially caused by a lack of self-government. So this certainly involves individualising if not the causes of the problem, then the solution. So they need to encourage people to think that the way to being better, healthier, just to generally a better person is individual and is down to a lack of self-government. And I think we can see this in the ways in which many self-tracking devices are also effectively productivity devices, productivity measures. The withings health mate is a self-tracking iPhone up, but it's a steps tracker and life coach and the two go together. And life coaching is a big part of entrepreneurialism as well. You set your goal, log your food, you track your trends, you track and improve. And it's all about these kinds of ideas. And it's the same kind of thing I think that saw at the beginning with those. It's about individualising this kind of process of self-improvement by tracking yourself. And I think there's a big alignment between productivity and self-tracking here. But what I think this is kind of really about in specifically a workplace context is down to kind of changes in how we're managed at work. And we don't really allow ourselves to be submitted to authoritarian bureaucratic controls, or not everyone does, in the same way that we perhaps used to in the past. This is where, again, what Boltanski and Capello have suggested in their analyses of kind of management strategies, that today we're controlled by transferring constraints from external organisation of mechanisms to people's internal dispositions. So in order to get us to work and work harder and be productive at work, we won't just be told this. Our managers try to get us to internalise these ideas, internalise this kind of entrepreneurial self. So I think that this is very much connected to ideas around engagement at work. Because if we won't be submitted to these very authoritarian controls at work, we have to be encouraged to be productive at work by our employers. We have to be engaged. And in the management discourse around this, they make intimate connections between engagement and wellbeing. And the two go together for them. And what engagement here really is about encouraging people to work to align their own goals with those of the organisation, that's what they really mean. So when they talk about employee engagement, which I think is central to this, they define employee engagement as, this is in the kind of management literature, being positively present during the performance of work, by willingly contributing intellectual effort, experiencing positive emotions and meaningful connections to others. That's in regs I'll come back to that later. And they suggest that an employee is positive emotional attachment to their job and our colleagues and our organisation, which profoundly influences their willingness to learn and perform at work. This is kind of the holy grail of kind of work management is to get people to be engaged in this kind of way. So one of the key challenges for contemporary management is to enable workers to feel free and autonomous at work and to see workers a means to achieve their personal goals, but also to attract rather than direct them to aligning these goals with those of the organisation. And I suggest that self-tracking is one of the ways in which they do this. And I think we can see this play out if I look at some more of the interviews that I am conducted. Because the people I spoke to acknowledged that they were only really engaging some of their workers. As one person said, I'd like to think we target these events and activities to different groups that mean everyone at work, but the participation of ancillary roles was very poor. By that they mean kind of lower grade workers. So it would be more your sort of mid to higher grade positions. They, the lower grade people, just want to come into work, do their job, get paid and go home. So they're not interested in these kinds of activities apparently. Another said, maybe from a fitness point of view they, the lower grade people, are less important because they're less sedentary. So perhaps you don't need to worry so much that we don't engage them. I'm not sure there's much of an appetite for, but I don't want them to think this doesn't include them, whether they come or not. So the issue here is that those kind of lower grade people who just want to come to work and get paid and go home, they're not interested in this kind of thing. And it doesn't really speak to them. I think this is because these are different kinds of notions of engagement. And if you look at the management literature they talk about transactional engagement, it's where people are driven to meet expectations in order to earn a living and progress, or emotional engagement, which is a desire to do more for the organisation. And they're looking at that second kind of engagement, I think. It's the kind of people that higher grade the kind of more management positions, or possibly like all of us, who won't have this authoritarian kind of micro management. They have to seduce us into doing what they want. So what they acknowledge in these kind of quotations is that these initiatives are not really about improving people's well-being as the last, actually sorry, I'll come back to that. As I say in that second quote, not sure as much of an abstract for them but it doesn't matter, this doesn't include them, whether they come or not. This isn't about people taking part in stuff, it's people knowing that it's going on and feeling good about employer that does these things. So I'll come back to that point. It's about this emotional engagement with your employer. And again, from the management literature they say that employees will also need to be persuaded that engagement has something in it for them. So we need to show more clearly that engagement improves individual health stress and well-being. So workers need to be engaged in a way in which it seems to improve their well-being, improve their life for themselves. So that's one way, which I think these programmes, these self-tracking programmes, when they're inflated in the workplace context are about, I suggest, improving productivity but making people more engaged and more productive at work in this detached fashion. But I think they're also about producing symbolic value. This is the bit that I've maybe worked out the least, so I'm really interested to know what people think about this. It seems like a side product but it's actually I think more central than is acknowledged, is the production of symbolic value through these devices. And I contextualise this in the insight from Franco Baradi, he suggests that now we're in a state of semiocapitalism, which takes the mind, language and creativity as its primary tools for the production of value. In the sphere of digital production, exploitation is exerted essentially on the semiotic flux produced by human time at work. So all kinds of self-tracking, including the workplace ones I'm talking about, produce symbols, data, as people have already talked about, such as these kinds of things. They produce, you can maybe generate Strava badges like this and produces data on you. And what these do is they turn exercise activity into something obviously quantified, but also as Lomberg and Fransen have suggested in a great paper that should read into something communicational. Of course any kind of exercise activity or human activity could be meaningful and communicational in certain ways. If I go for a run as well as trying to exercise I might be portraying myself as this healthy virtuous person. But also in this context when my exercise activity is turned into a number it becomes directly communicational in a different kind of way. Because all the heterogeneous different kinds of exercise activities that lots of people engage in become standardised and then they can be combined together, they can be compared. We can compete with one another, we can communicate with one another in this kind of way. So that's just that digital tracking is productive of certain kinds of meaning. I'll come back to this, but that math is from a symbol of one of these projects that was set up by my organisation themselves and it was where we got into teams, we had to collectively try to walk from London to Rome over kind of six weeks period. That's another way in which I think it becomes communication. We all become this symbol on a map that we're kind of that we're moving across Europe. But I think that we need to understand this in the context in which as other people such as Gold Harbor and Christian Morazzi and Bernard Stiegl have suggested that we live in an attention economy. And in the kind of societies which like the ones that I think that we all live in, which are dominated by cultural and knowledge-based industries where cultural production is abundant, the scarce resources is actually attention. So I have more playlists saved on Spotify than I'm ever going to listen to, more PDFs saved on my Google Drive than I'll ever read, a longer Netflix list than I'll ever look at. The cultural products aren't scarce, but attention is. And in this context Bernard Stiegl suggests that we've seen an increasing significance of what he calls the programming industries by which he means kind of media and actually really this is spread out into virtual areas, which are engaged in a form of psychopolitics, which is that he suggests contemporary power technologies no longer mainly aim at disciplining bodies or regulating life processes, but controlling and modulating consciousness. And that media technologies such as these self-dragging devices are engaged in trying to modulate our consciousness to direct our attention in certain ways because it's our attention that is needed. And again this is related to that notion of engagement and engagement at work. We can't be kind of directly, strictly controlled by management. They have to direct our attention in certain ways, whether that's towards ourselves to kind of self-discipline ourselves or, as I'll suggest in a moment, outwards. So this is about, for me, about the kind of capital appropriation of our emotional, our effective lives, our symbolic lives. So just to return to this quotation, as I said that last point, this isn't about people taking part in stuff, it's people knowing that it's going on and feeling good about an employer that does these things. It's about managing our attention, our emotional and our effective lives. And to take another, another quotation from one of my interviews, what someone said was, we call it employer brand. So in terms of us, in terms of return on investment, it's about improving our employer brand so that we attract people who want to work for the company. So this isn't about, again, it's not about making people healthier or fitter. It's about managing their, the perception, managing the attention of their workers, so their workers will think, this is a good place to work, this is good, and also they'll be able to attract other good, other good workers as well. And the, advertising for the Virgin Pulse initiative says some things and it says, show them some love, they'll love you back, support what gets your employees going, they'll care more about your business. It's about managing the relationship with your employees. And this is in the context in which I think there's been a, there's been a change in discipline and there's lots of people, Zygmunt Baumann for one suggested that the panoptic model of domination isn't really kind of, holds sway so much necessarily anymore, at least not for certain groups of people. So rather than being drilled and disciplined, we're managed, he suggests like swarms of bees. If you want to manage a swarm of bees, you can't, you can't train them in a training camp, you have to attract them to the nice pretty flowers and they do, they do the same kinds of things. And this is particularly the case I think with social media, which works off developing a buzz and virality and this kind of thing. And again to return to the kind of management literature on, on engagement, which I think is intimately connected with, with this, this is understood as the emergence of employee engagement as a, as an important thing was described as the realization that there was a huge potential reserve of energy and commitment in organizations which could be released by making meaning for people. And highlighted the fact that people desperately need meaning in their lives and will sacrifice a great deal to institutions that will provide this meaning for them. So this is kind of, this is latent energy in the, in the population of workers that needs to be harnessed, you harness it by generating meaning, us, and certain kinds of meaning, employer brand for instance. And again from the management literature, people are seeking something more meaningful and sustainable than engaging with a corporate strategy. Many employees want to engage with social missions beyond the organization. So this is partly the, the rationale for kind of corporate social responsibility, but also for these kinds of programs. And that, that social, that, that mission might actually be quite individualized, like with those Virgin Pulse kind of images. It's actually about developing yourself project, becoming happier, healthier, this kind of thing. But this is about another kind of engagement. This is the, the point about network connections I was making. So just again, just to return to these quotations where I've highlighted, it's about making meaningful connections to others and it's about an emotional attachment to your colleagues. So not just emotional attachment to your boss or your organization, but to those around you. And I think that these kind of programs are useful for this as well. So this is again from the, the program that was implemented at my, my university. We were very encouraged to be posting things on Twitter about how far we've walked and what we've been doing. We were, we were provided with a selfie stick, so we could take pictures of ourselves, as people have done here, all of their dog wearing sunglasses, things like this. And so this is about, I think, engaging people's attention towards this thing, managing the, the, the, the, the flows of attention towards these things. And so partly to think I should be doing that, I should be pushing myself more, but also to manage this emotional relationship. And again, to return to Bolton's Cepillo, Cepillo, they suggested that today, the ideal, ideal typical figure of contemporary capitalism is connectionist, someone who's connected to lots of networks, someone who is connected to lots of people and they know what connections to exploit and which ones to ignore. And as Dugay and Morgan, who were writing about Bolton's Cepillo, the network extender is the nodal point of various networks. That's the ideal person, the person who's connected to lots of people, who's got 5,000, 10,000, 1 million Twitter followers, whatever else. And I think that these, these are encouraging people to do that. It's encouraging people to connect with others in this kind of way. And again, some of the quotations from my research, one person said, that's why, why they thought it was good. They said it's the camaraderie, because actually most of the teams are in the same departments. They see, they, each day, they start bouncing off each other. Someone else said about why they wanted to do it. It's a healthy workforce, but it was engagement as well, the whole staff engagement thing. The feedback we got from people who did this, aside from some of the competitiveness, was it was more of a real team spirit. There was a buzz in the air around departments with people doing things as a team, speaking to people they wouldn't normally do. People making connections, becoming connectionist. And so I just did, I weren't going to much detail on this, but I did a very brief kind of basic Twitter analysis of the hashtag for this initiative, which is called Beckett Steps, Leeds Beckett University, to see who the most influential Twitter users of this hashtag were. It wasn't, there wasn't a vast amount of use of it, as you can see. But the two big ones, which have got their nose highlighted and ready, Beckett Steps, which is the official Twitter account, and then the second one at the top in the middle, the Dean of the Faculty of Health, who were the most prolific tweeters on this hashtag. And as you can see, just very briefly, what this formation, this particular formation, this style type formation, means is that they were very influential, they were central to the networks, and they were directing the meaning. They were very powerful in constructing the meaning around what was going on here. And everyone else was relatively not influential. And again, just at this point that it's about generating meaning in certain kinds of ways, and actually that health isn't really a very big part of it. I asked them about how they measure well-being, or what it kind of means to them. And one of them said, trying to quantify the benefits of wellness programmes is a challenge. How you quantify it really is on feedback. So we use a couple of different feedback systems, but the feedback for this was overwhelming positive for this GCC programme. So that's, they thought it was good. The feedback was good, so they thought it was successful. Someone else said, one really good indicator at the moment is if you look at our staff survey last year, the question was, the organisation is interested in my wellbeing. We got 72%. So 72% of our staffs think that we're interested in their wellbeing. And as they're going to say, the national survey for that sector, that they averaged was 52.6. So they were doing well. So they're managing that emotional relationship. That was a good outcome, not improving health. So just to kind of end up, what I suggest is kind of going on here is it's a particular kind of control. So encouraging and stimulating activity, both a physical activity, movement and also of engagement under the generation of symbolic value on social networks and things like this. What is occurring is a form of what Richard Lazzarrotto drawing on Felix Gattari suggests is a form of diagrammatic control. She says it's something which circumvents representation, consciousness and language and initiates a process exploits the difference between subjection and enslavement. And what he means by this is that we're engaged on the level of what he calls a signifying semiotics. So signifying semiotics is kind of normal kind of language that we find in a book or something. A signifying semiotics are things like data and algorithms and codes and tables and things like this. These are not aimed at subject constitution but at capturing and activating presubjective and pre-individual elements affects emotions, perceptions to make them function like components or cogs in the semiotic machine of capital. And so what he means here is that when we're being engaged on, not on the subjective level but on the presubjective level what Delers will call the divisual below the level of the subject. And so just to kind of highlight how this, I think this kind of works is really that in a basic level this is being entered into a spreadsheet. So this is just a fairly basic spreadsheet for my program I engaged in at work. You have to enter your data into the spreadsheet. There was also a kind of a knockout competition sort of like a Euro 2016 kind of knockout running alongside it. And if you're encouraged to think about yourself on that level you can't really argue with it on a subjective level. You are just that piece of data. I mean you can argue in a broader sense but on that basic level you are just that bit of data. Or in terms of like with this map. You can't engage with this in any other way. You're either moving towards Rome or you're not. And as with this network this is the kind of form of diagrammatic control I'm part of this network and I'm getting these kind of flows of data coming at me and controlled in a diagrammatic way the meaning is being controlled outside of my level of consciousness in a sense. I also did just another very basic kind of network diagram of the hashtag around the GCC the kind of global corporate challenge hashtag and basically really all this is showing is that the most influential nodes in this were the official GCC Twitter feed Richard Branson who owns Virgin Pulse and merged with that company and then a few big employers a few big banks and kind of councils and things like this. There is them that are generating the meaning and the kind of control in the network as we know kind of control today doesn't function through hierarchies it functions through networks but it's kind of more hidden. And this is what I'm out of time I'll just be two minutes what Richard Latserato calls machinic enslavement that we're engaged not on the conscious level but on the kind of pre-conscious level. So again it's this kind of feedback loop of developing a habit and it's also notions of nudge and gamification which other people have talked about but just very briefly I like this explanation of how nudge works nudge works if you want to get a mouse from one side of the table to the other you lift up the table with gamification you put a piece of cheese at the other end so with nudge you make it you manipulate the choice architecture to make it easier to run to the other side the other UM put some cheese there but a lot of reward but that's kind of engaging on that pre-subjective level it's not engaging you as a kind of discursive subject it's engaging you just on this kind of automatic level this nudging that's just pushing the habitual level so as Latserato says machinic enslavement takes over human beings from the inside on the pre-personal level as well as from the outside on the super personal level kind of the network if you like by signing on certain modes of perception and sensibility and manufacturing an unconscious so it kind of manipulates us on on a kind of an almost pre-conscious level pushes us and nudges us into being more entrepreneurial more productive and more engaged in those networks and that's the kind of the quote I started with this is about integrating the living machine as much as possible into the productive into kind of the capitalist machinery so the gears don't ground too loudly so we're smoothly integrated with systems of capitalist production and I won't go through that baroddi quote but it's kind of saying a very similar thing but the last one from Guru and Delay they say that capitalism tries to appropriate not the means of production but the means of productivity or the inner springs of production which is our kind of as I said our physical bodies but also our emotional and our affective lives are kind of appropriated for the means of capital appropriation in order to keep the kind of wheels of productivity going and that's it thank you sorry I run over him slightly