Rethinking Human Body between Lay and Expert Knowledge Suggested by Self-tracking Technologies

The use of digital technologies for monitoring movements, posting messages or following friends on social networks, rating restaurants, or an hotel, a film or a series, generates data tracks that offer new possibilities of visualizing and knowing behavioural characteristics. Particularly, digital technologies are even more used in order to self-track everyday practices and biometrics information, such as weight, calories intake, mood, body temperature, heart rate, blood glucose, etc. (Lupton, 2013; 2016; Bianchieri et al., in Corbasiero, Ruspini, 2016; Maturo, Setiffi, 2016; Pantzar, Ruckenstein, 2015). These technologies rise several questions. If, from one hand, they can contribute at the constitution of democratic spaces of non-formal learning (Benson, Harkavy, 2002; Starke-Meyerring, Wilson, 2008); from the other hand, they can be understood as neoliberal devices that shape ‘ideal citizens’ responsible of their own wellbeing aimed at constant self-improvement (Apple et al., 2012; Lupton, 2016; Selwyn, 2013). This paper draws on literature from self-tracking practices (Lupton, 2018), the field of Science and Technologies Studies (STS) (Latour, 2005; Law, 1994), and the principle of symmetry between social and material – sociomaterial (Landri, Viteritti, 2016; Sørensen, 2009) – in the reconfiguration of agency as a relational capacity realized through the intra-actions between human and nonhuman actors (Barad 2003-2007). The aim is to question the learning processes embedded in self-tracking practices contributing to the discussion on the turn to practice and embodied knowledge (Gherardi, 2017) that is back through the materiality of digital technologies used in everyday life.