Ethnography of an interface : self-tracking, quantified self, and the work of digital connections / Yuliya Grinberg.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Grinberg, Yuliya, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Wearable technology.

Wearable technology--Moral and ethical aspects.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xiii, 215 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2025.

Summary:

Technologists frequently promote self-tracking devices as objective tools. This book argues that such glib and often worrying assertions must be placed in the context of precarious industry dynamics. The author draws on several years of ethnographic fieldwork with developers of self-tracking applications and wearable devices in New York City's Silicon Alley and with technologists who participate in the international forum called the Quantified Self to illuminate the professional compromises that shape digital technology and the gap between the tech sector's public claims and its interior processes. By reconciling the business conventions, compromises, shifting labor practices, and growing employment insecurity that power the self-tracking market with device makers' often simplistic promotional claims, the book offers an understanding of the impact that technologists exert on digital discourse, on the tools they make, and on the data that these gadgets put out into the world.

Contents:

Cover

Half-title

Reviews

Title page

Imprints page

Epigraph

Table of Contents

Preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Interfacing with Digital Entrepreneurialism

Establishing New Connections

Negotiating the Interface

Has Digital Critique Run Out of Steam?

Structure of the Work

1 Quantified Self and the Culture of Personal Data

Branding QS

The Culture of Personal Data

Vendors and Members

2 Seeing Double in Digital Entrepreneurialism

Data as Travel

Emotional Sweat

Vaporware

Digital Equivocations

3 Acting Like Members, Thinking Like Vendors

Acting Like Creators, Thinking Like Marketers

QS and Consumer Centricity

Corporate Camouflage and Its Discontents

Mingling Members with Vendors

QS as a Consumer ''Trend''

4 Hustling with a Passion

Hustling with a Passion

The Safe-for-Work Hobby

From ''Obsolete Tech Guy'' to ''Most Quantified Man''

QS as a Template

The Home Office Conundrum

More Work for Members

5 The New Normal

Efficiency Engineers and Their Legacy

The Frictionless Life

Leaning In

Community of Flexible Workers

6 The Promises and Failures of Digital Connections

Difference and Simulacra

Gender and Self-Tracking

QS and the Gendered Politics of Affective Labor

Conclusion: Community at a Crossroads

Notes

Bibliography

Index.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 16 May 2025).

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

1-108-96709-4

1-108-96730-2

1-108-96604-7

OCLC:

1521270397