Abstract
Self-tracking devices have been observed to accelerate time, be used sporadically and busyness being a barrier to use at work. Drawing on notion of multiple temporalities, this article expands the focus on temporalities of users’ engagement with technologies to analysing them within broader biographical, institutional and political times. The argument is grounded in interviews with UK public sector office workers self-tracking sitting time that featured the following three themes: (1) the participants related their sitting to deteriorated work conditions after government austerity politics and redundancies, (2) the pressurised rhythm of work made it difficult to reduce sitting time and fostered a sense of discontent and powerlessness and (3) the workers did not self-track in their free time, defined as free from monitoring. We suggest that the analytical lens of multiple temporalities expands understanding of user experiences as well as illuminates lived contemporary political and institutional times, characterised by both discontent and powerlessness.
Highlights
Critical conceptual research on self-tracking and temporality has argued that the devices accelerate time, as they encourage individuals to continuously track to improve their performance and health (Agger, 2011; Berg, 2017; Moore, 2018; Till, 2014)
We suggest broadening the focus to include biographical, institutional and historical temporalities within which self-tracking happens to open up new perspectives on user experiences as well as on historical and political times within which such experiences take place
When discussing their work and sitting in first the interviews most participants brought up the past and on-going budget cuts, which had increased workloads: I do enjoy, ehm, working for the council . . . in a way lots of positives and lots of negatives . . . obviously with the difficult economic times it is really, really hard. (Betty, interview 1). This excerpt illustrates that the anticipated self-tracking was nested in the biographical, personal as well as wider historical, economic times, which shape the experience (Adam, 1995)
Summary
Critical conceptual research on self-tracking and temporality has argued that the devices accelerate time, as they encourage individuals to continuously track to improve their performance and health (Agger, 2011; Berg, 2017; Moore, 2018; Till, 2014). Drawing on notions of multiple temporalities (Adam, 1995; Sharma, 2014) and Raymond Williams’ work on intersection between history, culture and technology (Coleman, 2018; Williams, 1977, 2003), we contribute to this research by analysing how users’ experiences of self-tracking are shaped by the broader biographical, contextual and historical times. This approach offers new perspectives on broader temporalities shaping user experiences and on their connections with historical-political developments
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