Self-Tracking by Gina Neff

Self-Tracking by Gina Neff

Author:Gina Neff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 2016-06-23T16:00:00+00:00


The Luxury Line

Self-tracking tools also sit at an intersection of luxury accessory and mass-market consumer items. From the Apple Watch to the designer cuff, many self-tracking consumer devices attempt to appeal as luxury goods. They are designed to help relatively wealthy people have more fashionable bodies, flaunt a technology insider’s knowledge, or show the world a status symbol. These markets work because exclusivity is balanced with a large enough customer base for profitability. Luxury marketing communicates the idea that self-tracking tools are optional, exclusive, and about the presentation of personal style to others who also value conspicuous consumption. Luxury goods also handle potentially medically useful data sets. The promise of Apple’s HealthKit, the development package for creating apps compliant with HIPAA (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), the regulation that governs US healthcare data, is that it allows one device to link social uses with health uses with fashionable ones.

Again, we see a market being made at social intersections, where the industry wrestles with how to handle social distinctions like class. For the wealthy, what appears as a choice to wear this or that consumer product might feel like necessity—a pressure to be seen to be consuming in the right way. How will tracking technologies intersect with what one sociologist calls the “glamour labor” needed to make and maintain fashionable bodies? Indeed, the work involved might be quite real for many. “Huge sections of the populace don activity trackers . . . download health-enhancement apps, track their sleep habits, and log their nutrition practices and goals, ostensibly in pursuit of the body beautiful, while blogging, Facebooking, and tweeting about their accomplishments and watching their Klout scores all the while.”20 Just reading the list can be exhausting enough. Fashionable luxury tools may further set up unattainable measures for bodies—an unattainability that has historically affected women more seriously, but might affect men in new ways, too.

The “healthy lifestyle” that is sold with the Apple Watch is only available for those who can afford to buy it. According to Carl Cederström and André Spicer, conspicuous wellness, or what they call the “wellness syndrome,” casts a new light on people who cannot afford to consume their way to wellness, or who otherwise do not buy into it. They argue that society increasingly sees them as a kind of weak-willed degenerate class in a social system already too prepared to see poor people as lazy. They write, “Where does our preoccupation with our own wellness leave the rest of the population, who have an acute shortage of organic smoothies, diet apps and yoga instructors?”21 Most connected wearable devices already on the market, even those outside the luxury line, come with the presumption that their owners also have both a smartphone and a computer, which is not necessarily the case for the elderly, poor, and sick. Forty percent of adults in the United States report that they foresee buying some kind of wearable device. This indicates that wearables extend well beyond a luxury market, but



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