The Metric Society by Steffen Mau

Author:Steffen Mau
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2019-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

The collective body

The boundary separating fitness or wellbeing apps from more sophisticated health apps that measure vital data and make them available for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes is a fluid one, just as there is, in effect, no clear-cut, categorical distinction between illness and health. The treatment of ailments or complaints and the practice of self-optimization to the point of total body control merely constitute opposite poles of the imagined better/worse continuum. At the same time, personal data are subject to norming and standardization processes: they do not stand alone, but are placed in a variety of comparative contexts which in turn inform our judgements of what is normal or desirable. Such data have a multitude of purposes: recursive self-programming, perceived damage prevention, behavioural optimization, the improvement of performance parameters or comparative perspectives. Whereas wellness and wellbeing are purely subjective states which only the individuals concerned can tell us about, body data are different: they make transparent that which is hidden, and collective that which is intimate and personal. This visibilization of vital parameters can be ascribed to a general trend of self-direction and ‘self-reification’ which is associated with, and lends further impetus to, the present sustained wave of rationalization and scientification. Thus, the human being becomes a ‘quantitative body’, to be mastered with self-governance techniques:

In this way, discipline-oriented technologies establish predefined norms based on distinctions such as fat/thin, suitable/unsuitable or healthy/unhealthy, leading individuals to model their body styling on a field-specific optimum. Digital self-tracking apps can be described as technologies of this kind since – thanks to norms such as body mass index or calorie count – these technological artefacts are imbued with behavioural expectations or even requirements.

(Zillien et al. 2015: 88f.)

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