Self-Tracking Mobile Apps as a Tool for Personal and Social Identity Formation

Quantification of human’s performance in everyday life has become a common practice. Earlier, people used paper diaries or their memory to track data related to their bodies, minds or environment. Nowadays, a significant range of various mobile applications for self-tracking is presented on the digital market. Thus, quantification practices have become much more convenient as well as more complicated. We assume that in the contemporary world self-tracking technologies have a meaningful impact on their users’ identities. Data becomes a source for humans’ self-perception and their interaction with others. However, neutrality of the platforms is questionable along with unclear motivation and activities of users. Therefore, our purpose is to study the role of the self-tracking mobile applications in the process of a user’s personal and social identity formation. In order to examine this phenomenon, we conduct several in-depth interviews with a further comparative analysis, use a functional analysis of the applications for self-tracking and a discourse-analysis of their advertising campaigns. In addition, we observe QS communities in social networks and provide their typological analysis. In this study we expect to find a correlation between self-trackers’ identity formation, political and social influence on it in terms of neoliberalism and usage of the related mobile applications. The anticipated results can be valuable for further critical discussion of self-tracking and users’ self-reflection.