 Good. Thank you very much, both of you, for some very interesting papers, both in progress, but both with quite promising and interesting aspects as so far regarding the understanding of what this actually means. Because we can say so much about these practices and these technologies and these different media platforms. But what does it actually mean to people? And what strikes me when, and I think that the two papers have put very well together here, because in some respects they are contradictory. And in some respects, you can say that I believe you are actually both right. I believe you actually have caught some very important aspects of this, but also that the two papers put together illustrates that this is a very complex field. That it's a field where both can be true at the same time, maybe not for the same person, but maybe for the same person, but just at different parts of their lives and in different social relations and so on. So what I would actually like to start by asking is the two of you, what you think when you hear the other person giving their talk, and how these contradictories and how these ambiguities are also maybe present in some of your work. That on one hand, people are sharing, seeing themselves through the gaze of other people, maybe or maybe not being influenced by this. But on the other hand, people want to be alone with their data, and they just want to use them for quite private purposes. So how can this be? I don't know if you want to start. Yeah, I think it's an interesting question, and it kind of makes me think we talked about a little bit earlier, if tracking was just a phase. And I think what both of our presentations highlight is that, for example, from my point of view, the informants I talked or the participants I talked about today, they're in a very early stage of starting to exercise, and for them it's a very private thing. And what I didn't tell was that some of the other participants I have who have been exercising for their whole lives, they have other kinds of sharing practices. And they have also been through some sort of journey in which they started out with tracking as a very private thing, and the media used as a very private thing with a very limited social network on the tracking apps. And then this sort of, as they get more and more comfortable with their exercise practice, their usage also evolves, so they start to share. Mostly, yeah, in different kinds of ways. So I think you can see sort of when in the practice sort of evolves. Yeah, I think for my work, I think it depends on what kind of user you're looking at. And I'm not focusing on just exercise, I'm more interested in looking at health practice as a whole, and I'm interested in tying lifestyle into health and how different things are now becoming representative of health practice. So sharing an Instagram image or even talking on Facebook about how you're feeling one day if you're tired or stressed, to sharing data or improvements in your running, for example. So I think in that regard, it depends what kind of user you're looking at and what information they're sharing and why. And my participants that were trying to optimize or improve ones that were training for a marathon or trying to lose weight were only willing to share, were only willing to be public about that information once they'd hit a certain point of optimization, once they were able to feel that they represent this idea like self, that they were striving towards even though that's a constant cycle, that cycle never ends. So I think it just depends who you're looking at to do with the different levels of kind of exposure and self-censorship in terms of what people are sharing and what they're keeping private. What I also experienced during the interviews is that there's a certain sort of normativity regarding what is okay to share on social media. And many of the participants were quite, they all said that milestones are sort of the thing that you are allowed to share but you're not allowed to share every single run on, for example, Facebook or Twitter. So even though it might only be two kilometers or three kilometers, you are allowed to share this on Facebook if it's a sort of a milestone to you. And that strike me that they were all kind of agreeing on that, my participants, even though it was individual interviews so they didn't talk to each other and stuff. Yeah, there seems to be this real kind of etiquette that's evolving from over-sharing that is managing, that is pushing people, that's kind of pushing them to share or not share some information on how much they're sharing and why. Because there seems to be this real stigma now that's attached to over-sharing. I think we're entering this kind of new phase of social media where initially we all went on and we were sharing everything about our lives and thankfully that horrible memories thing that pops up all the time reminds you of all the over-sharing that everyone's done over the years. And now there's this kind of idea that, no, you have to be very careful about what you're sharing and why. And I think that, and that's what I meant about being conscious about what's public and private now is that people are aware of what information is going out there and why and the etiquettes that are associated with that as well I think. Well that was actually one of the questions I would like to ask you because of some of the examples that you had here. You had this very nice example about this guy, I just pictured a colleague coming up to him and saying, hey, why didn't you post your run yesterday? He weren't you out running yesterday? And you could, I don't know how the words fell at the time, but it could also be an ironic statement. Whoa, you forgot to post, you were just, but how did you see these changes? Because yes, I assume there is quite a change and yes, Facebook got definitely reminding us that there is quite a change in the way that we're using these social media and maybe it also has to do with different generations using different social media for different purposes and doing it in different ways. But did any of your informants talk about these issues also? Yeah, they kind of, as I kind of mentioned before, it was once you're reaching these milestones, that seems to kind of legitimate what you can share and why. But with that participant in particular, we wasn't even a colleague, he was actually like a acquaintance someone had met from a friend of a friend and had privately messaged him on Facebook. So it wasn't even like whether he was meeting face to face. No, no, no, he wasn't a passing comment in the hallway at work or anything like that. He actively went onto Facebook and sent him a private message and he hadn't spoken or heard from this friend, acquaintance for many, many years, which I found fascinating that he kind of had the guts to question why he hadn't done the run and he had, but he suddenly felt this weird sense of being, well, surveyed by the community, but the imagined community. So, yeah, I think it's, I think there is a generational divide, definitely. I think that the younger generations seem to be far more aware of the impact of the representation in terms of whether that's just internalized, they're kind of very hyper-conscious and concerned about how they're going to be perceived by the wider community. Whereas I found, and this is generalizations at this point, and it's very early on in the study, but the older generations were happy just to share this information and we're far more relaxed about the information that they were sharing. And then, and as you're saying, you're at an early phase in this study, but what you have been talking about was also how these practices may influence their lifestyle choices in their offline life. Do you have any ideas where this part of the analysis will take you or have you talked to people about that? Have you had any, also similar to the things that you've been talking about, about the more sensory experiences of making lifestyle choices in a broad sense? Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean, it was the nudges in the devices and that's coming particularly from the actual health applications itself, so things like Night Plus and Matt My Run. Those are the devices that were making the users feel that they should be, you know, the reminding they should be going for runs, that they should be calorie counting or, you know, if they have an input in their X amount of calories per day versus their kind of exercise expenditure, that they were being pushed by the device to manage that. But I also think that when you're talking about just the self-presentation on social media, so not necessarily the actual health technology itself, the perception from the wider community is it was an influence as well when they were seeing other people, you know, whether it was trying to lose weight or talking about going for a run or even just images of people posting, you know, salads or healthy dinners that they're having. I think that makes, it puts people within the space where it's a health community there. There's a consciousness where people are going, oh, well, I feel like I should be doing that too. And so there is that kind of underlying moralism that it seems to be occurring within the online communities. And not just my argument is not just within health communities and not just within the actual apps itself, but within social media, it's enabling these kind of new communities to evolve, but ones that aren't necessarily talked about, it's not a forum set up. So it can be quite internalized, these kind of pressures that the users are feeling. Yeah, and probably also because the community is bigger than the people who are actually posting things on social media and has influence on more people in different ways. I was thinking about, yeah, a little bit more about the most sensory and the more emotional aspects in both your presentations. You also said, Rachel, at one point that the devices can't capture the emotional status of a person. They do try to do so. I have a tracker in my phone who asks me how I'm doing. And if it measures my pulse, so in some way they say they measure my stress level and then they ask me how I'm feeling in relation to that. And also, of course, Facebook has this, how are you feeling? Are you frustrated? Are you happy? Are you whatever? So they do try to capture your emotional status. And you talk a lot about how emotions and ambiguities and frustrations are sort of being either suppressed or accentuated through the use of digital technologies. In your case, in the actual exercise practice and in your case, perhaps more on an overall everyday life level, but I don't know if any of you want to elaborate a little bit more on the things about. Yeah, what this, I'm starting to think about method when you say that, and that is because I've been struggling a bit with how to get at this experience. How do we research people's practices of media use? And especially when you're dealing with such a thing, such as smartphones and small wearables and stuff. Because a lot of the usage is sort of embedded in our bodily way of, it's not something that we think a lot about. We're just doing it. And how do we get people to reflect on what they're doing in this sense, it's very much, I'm not sure how to explain it but it's a very bodily way of using media that is maybe not that reflective or that people are not that reflective about compared to other kinds of usage, maybe. Because what I've experienced is that the interviews that I've made, they are de-contextualized from the practice itself. It's not, and it's very difficult to go on a run with someone and ask them, what are you feeling? Because then you're starting to ruin the practice that they are experiencing. So. Because you have trouble breathing yourself. So how do we research this experience? Because you can't do it while they're running but you can't really do it after either. And you can't go to the gym and stalk someone running on the treadmill because it's creepy. First of all, and second of all, because you can't see what is actually taking place on the screen. And third of all, because that doesn't say anything about what they are, the way they're relating to the device and the data that they are tracking. So that is kind of a methodological problem. Yeah, I completely agree. They're trying to engage the users to be reflexive about their practice is so hard because they, well, even a lot of the initial interviews I was doing were just trying to understand, trying to engage the users and just to talk about health practice, what they actually thought was health practice. And a lot of them didn't really, couldn't identify that in their own minds. And then I would ask them, well, why are you using these technologies, you know, just initially, what are you doing this for? What are you trying to get out of it? And not one single person could give me an answer to that question. So they're obviously getting something out of it and it's this kind of acquisition of data and they like seeing the fancy leaderboards and they like the feedback from the social media communities. So I guess it's a gratification of the evidence of data. But yeah, it's a methodological issue in terms of how do you actually get them to engage on a reflexive level? And so I've used Guided Reflexive Diaries before in my master's work with interviews to try and contextualize the interviews and getting them to do that on the days when they are practicing their health, whatever that may be, whether that's sharing content or going for a run. Just to try and understand from a self-representational point what they're sharing, why they're sharing it and how it's made with the community feedback, how that's then making them feel offline. But it seems so commonsensical and mundane for a lot of them, so it's trying to engage them in those practices that they're just doing anyway and they're not actually thinking why they're doing it. And you're actually only talking to people who are sharing stuff, who are using these signals. Not necessarily, no, because that would be another issue. How do you measure or how do you talk about the non-users or the followers? That's why I'm interested in looking at just how everyday person uses it. There's not people that are necessarily managing particular illness or trying to train for a marathon or lose weight. It's more about how the everyday person is using it because I think silences are interesting. We were discussing this briefly over lunch. When people aren't sharing, but they're still on these sites, they're still watching other people. Why are they doing that? But they're not publicly feeding back, obviously. And I think it's interesting, yeah, why certain people aren't sharing this information. I think that needs to be looked into. But then it's very hard to identify the silences and explore that in that way. But I don't know if this would be a good time to ask the audience a call a friend or something. Maybe some of you have some thoughts on these matters. Okay, I'm gonna start maybe with Tiffy. Actually, my question leads on very closely to what you were just talking about, Rachel, which has to do with your methodology. And I was very interested to see her using Faircloth and critical discourse analysis. I just was curious how you're putting that into practice. So yeah, that's my question. So with regards to critical discourse analysis, I'm just really interested in looking at the power relations. That's why I'm looking at it in that way. Sophocodian analysis. Trying to tease out what are a lot of mundane reflections, but trying to understand, there's a moralization of health that seems to be occurring. And it's the way that people talk about it is fascinating if you're looking at it with regards to power relations within on a state level, from the state, from like a socioeconomic and political level, but also within themselves. And the kind of contentions between what we want to do as a person and what we feel we should do in society. And also the way we talk about that as well. And often with health practice, what's really interesting is the way that people talk about their health and their body is it's very private. It's a very private practice. We operate in a very image conscious culture. We all know that we're a very visual culture now. And so the representation of our bodies and ourselves has become integral to our sense of self and well-being. So the way that we then talk about that, people I think struggle with, people struggle with talking about it because it's very personal. It's about the body, it's about themselves. And so you have to try and kind of like pull away all those kind of cultural assumptions of people wanting to, oh, I just wanna lose weight because I wanna look better. You wanna kind of pull it apart a little bit and see why they're doing it. And I had one interview actually for my master's work where I was speaking to a young woman in her late teens, early twenties about her health practice very generally. And I was just asking if she felt was responsible for her health, whether she felt it was herself or the state, or the NHS, as this was in the UK. And she said that she felt that she was responsible for health and she had to maintain it and manage it and look after herself. And I said, I kind of was teasing out this more and I was starting to think that there's a responsibility of a government to provide a healthcare system and that's a level of responsibility that should be available to you within the UK. And she said, oh, not really, but then I got really in and I went into hospital and it was a relief because I knew the doctors could just look after me. And so I think there you kind of see that kind of tension between there's this internal discourse, this internal way of pressure, this pressure, a privatised pressure, an individualised pressure that we're putting on ourselves and it's only when we get put into the hands of the medical profession and the authority that comes with that that we kind of let go of that responsibility. And I felt that that, what she said to me, the language she was using there was kind of providing that kind of contention and issue that I think is happening and I think is being kind of advocated by these devices, if that makes sense. Both papers are great, particularly in relation to how things become meaningful. I thought it really shined through and it was really good. This is a question for Jo and you talked at one stage about people having trust in the devices and then you finished up by saying that it matters less what the data actually says. And to me, there's a slight contradiction there but so what I'm wondering about is trust and how people think about trust. Do they trust the devices to get them out and running or do they not trust the accuracy of the data or what's the issue there? It's not really sort of trusting the data output. It's sort of a trust, a general trust placed in the device as something that is able to help you to run because there's been a lot of effort put into these apps. There's been engineers and some exercise people, physical trainers have been in on this process and of course it also relates to many of the participants that talk about use these training apps that tells you you're going to run now for the next minute or the next 30 seconds. And actually that was also on my slide but I didn't talk about it. Then they sort of, they trust that because someone with the skills, with skills has kind of, what do you say? There's someone, because there's been a physical trainer saying that I can do this, then I will be able to do this. So that is kind of where the trust lies concerning, for example, training apps and stuff. I don't know if that was sort of an answer or if you... Yeah. So I thought that was a really fascinating question and because that ties your two things to what you just said because maybe it's like we used to have trust in, well we do have trust in the doctors, right? But it's become more individualized and then we don't maybe have access to the doctors as much, I don't know. And then the app comes in and obviously that's a really interesting possible parallel maybe. That wasn't actually the question I was going to ask though. Can I ask another one too? Okay, so that's one question. Is there actually a parallel there between you trust the doctors, you trust the app because it's like got authority of some sense? That's one question. And then another question was really for Rachel because you say you're writing about you're interested in health apps and stuff but your example so far anyway are the running apps and the sort of the healthy body who doesn't need a doctor, right? Yeah, and I was wondering about all the, I mean there's so many other forms of self representation and health online. Like I mean there's all the sickness blogs, community sites like where you track fertility together or you patients like me where you write about your what medicines you're taking and all this stuff and or the experience of a diabetic person who has to track, I mean they do very detailed health tracking, right? So there's so many other kinds of health and quantified self and digital media you could have looked at. Will you be looking at those other things as well or are you focusing on this sort of healthy lifestyle? Initially I was just really interested in looking at running applications and at digital health technology and the applications in itself but my interest has increasingly moved away from that and it's more about how not necessarily looking at patients or people that are trying to manage particular illnesses or issues or different aspects of their life it's more just about how a lay person is health is becoming more and more integrated into their lifestyle practices and how that's influencing their self representation because I feel that health is shifting so much it's becoming so representative of different ways of being in the world. When I'm looking at representation on social media I'm thinking about things like Instagram images or talking about health or talking about feeling unwell or tired or overworked or I'm looking at health in a very broad, very very broad sense and I'm interested to see how the everyday person understands health, what does health mean to them now because it seems that it's kind of creeping and encroaching on lots of different areas of our lives where it wasn't before. Before we simply health was good or bad health to an extent you had an illness or you didn't whereas now I feel that there's lots of different ways that we can understand health practice and that health practices are coming as I've touched on before about this moralisation of health about becoming an active citizen and an active consumer about making sure you're having that for example in the UK you're five a day and those different kind of policies that are encouraging you to behave in certain ways and it's making the everyday person become a lay expert to an extent and through the devices we can kind of adopt to an extent this kind of medical gaze we can see our body in ways that we've never been able to see it before that only was able to buy doctors and people with access to certain technologies or expertise and so I do think people I think there is still a status and an authority that in the UK certainly that people ascribe to the medical profession definitely but I feel that but that's now the last resort whereas it used to be your first resort used to be going to the GP I think that it's shifting now that before there's this mass kind of misinformation and information we're kind of taught to self-diagnose and acquire all this information before we get to that point and I think it's that issue that I'm kind of interested in exploring is how are people trying to understand whether they are in good or bad health what does that mean to individual people? Regarding the trust issue I guess it's not only about trust in the individual lab it's also about that a lot of people have this fascination of technology in general so we have kind of a general feeling that if there is a new exercise technology we have the trust that it would help us in some way and a lot of the participants that I interviewed they all talks about it's funny to pay attention to the verbs that they use when talking about technology in general because they talk about a stumbled upon this app in Danish it would be fall directly to have fell upon this app so it was like they use these verbs that it's almost like walking in the forest and picking up a stick because they are so available all of these kinds of apps and we have a general fascination of technology and trust in technology but on an individual app level I guess that in the case of many of the training programs there's like you have these pictures of fit people and fit physical trainers who are quoting this and that and I guess that is sort of the way that they sort of make us trust them on an individual level they felt like the world is a professional trainer and Australia looks pretty buff so I trust the app because he'll help me and I was like does anyone use Headspace it's like this meditation app yeah so that's exactly what that apps about I mean it's like this calm English voice and he'll look after it he can make me meditate I'm sure if I just use the app and look back at my history I mean so there's a very personified thing I mean I can't remember his name but he's got that voice you know Andy something right right but is it the Apple I mean is it the data or the person question I guess or maybe it's a combination it depends on which app you use I guess kind of because yeah no but it must be some kind of combination because the app is sort of personified but again in the case of my participants it's also very important that there's not another physical person present right so it needs to be a device but simultaneously it also needs to have some sort of human like status so combination would be the answer I guess actually maybe the reason it works is I know Andy doesn't actually see me so it's like he's actually there's a Kate Crawford's done this interesting work on lurkers and like it's listening and it's an active kind of labor and actually maybe we like the apps because they don't hear us but they're personal I don't know yeah I think I think that's the key thing I think that it's quite hard as I mentioned talking about your body and your health so it's hard when you go to a GP and you have to explain all that information whereas I think we're far more comfortable in searching online self diagnosis I think we see it far comfortably in that space where we can explore all of these opportunities for ill health or good health and and yeah that's it I think and there is there is trust issues there I think and to kind of go back to your trust point I think that my my worry my what I kind of find really problematic is that that people are really trusting a lot of these applications and they're not accurate and they're not as you mentioned earlier obviously with like plus I feel sorry and and that's my contention is that when you're putting all of your or your trust and belief into a device and you're quantifying aspects of your being and you're pushing yourself perhaps to run further or faster or eat less because the apps told you that you've gone over your calorie consumption for X amount of days like my fitness pal does for example that no human body can be fully quantified and there's no one one size fit all model for each for individual users and that's the issue I think is that a lot of people are just using these apps and they are trusting them and that's potentially quite worrying I think in the long term in terms of yeah not everybody's the same and the apps treat everybody as though they are the same I just have just one comment in relation to that because I don't think that's necessarily all always the case that people are blindly trusting these apps they are I don't know if any of you have ever tried to to use like my fitness pal or any kind of food tracker because there is a constant negotiation going on between you and the app because you know that you are not accurate yourself you just say well it was about this amount of this and that and and sometimes you scale up or you scale down and different issues and stuff so that it's a much more complex relationship between you and that kind of persona or whatever it might be some sort of persona understanding of somebody in the on the other end of that line and that of course also relates to to whether or not you want to share with actual people because they would they might come back to you and say no you didn't run or why didn't you track or whatever the idea of cheating that we were saying earlier yeah so yeah there's a lot of self-censorship that occurs within the app so not putting in all the food that you've done or I've heard stories of people competing not actually together physically but all groups of friends trying to run a certain amount of miles a week and some people put in trying to be on a leaderboards and some people just putting on their car or their bike or something so yeah I mean of course there is aspects of it it is a contention it is not lack of wine no definitely not I really enjoyed both talks and I was just thinking about actually kind of on that point to analytical points you both made which sort of came together and Rachel uses Fraser the healthy self which is presented online and Europe uses for hanging out with a data-fied self you know kind of waiting for the bus and looking at the data and it kind of seemed to me almost like the data-fied self is like Goffman's backstage kind of performance and the healthy self is the filtered version possibly literally with an Instagram filter maybe I don't know that's the front-stage performance and it seemed like there was that kind of what you thought about that if that's a kind of a workable way of thinking about that distinction I think because I yeah I can't see the data as totally behind the scenes because obviously the self-representation aspects what really really interests me and how when people interpret that and how they and how they also present it because obviously you know with all the applications you can screenshot certain bits of it you don't have to show everything and I think that's quite an interesting tool again that kind of ties into not cheating necessarily but just the way it's carefully constructed yeah I think the way that you can very carefully construct that idealised self yeah I think you can talk about the the tracking data is some sort of of backstage performance but it's it's still really not backstage because it's still available of course the hanging out is a backstage performance oh yeah that was what you're meaning but it just came to think about because one of my participants talks about sharing practices she's not one of the ones who struggle but she's one who exercises fairly much actually but and she has started to track her runs and she's become fun of doing this but now she's actually in her dilemma because she's also a mother of a baby boy and she is friends with on the tracking app with a lot of the people from her maternal group maternal community and suddenly she needs to she feels the need to exercise less because it becomes visible how much she is exercising so that is that is actually tracking it's not only a positive thing I guess yeah okay I think it's time for some coffee