User:Patricia Arama/sandbox

Debates and criticism

The Quantified Self movement has faced some criticism related to the limitations it inherently contains or might pose to other domains. Within these debates, there are some discussions around the nature, responsibility and outcome of the Quantified Self movement and its derivative practices. Generally, most bodies of criticism tackle the issue of data exploitation and data privacy but also health literacy skills in the practice of self-tracking. While most of the users engaging in self tracking practices are using the gathered data for self-knowledge and self-improvement, in some cases, self-tracking is pushed and forced by employers over employees in certain workplace environments, health and life insurers or by substance addiction programs (drug and alcohol monitoring) in order to monitor the physical activity of the subject and analyze the data in order to gather conclusions. Usually the data gathered by this practice of self-tracking can be accessed by commercial, governmental, research and marketing agencies.

The data fetishist critique

Another recurrent line of debate revolves around „data fetishism”.  Data fetishism is referred to as the phenomenon evolving when active users of self-tracking devices become enticed by the satisfaction and sense of achievement and fulfillment that numerical data offers. Proponents of such line of criticism tend to claim that data in this sense becomes simplistic, where complex phenomenon become transcribed into reductionist data. This reductionist line of criticism generally incorporates fears and concerns with the ways in which ideas on health are redefined, as well as doctor-patient dynamics and the experience of self-hood among self-trackers. Because of such arguments, the Quantified Self movement has been criticized for providing predetermined ideals of health, well-being and self-awareness. Rather than increasing the personal skills for self-knowledge, it distances the user from the self by offering an inherently normative and reductionist framework.

An alternative line of criticism still linked to the reductionist discourse but still proposing a more hopeful solution is related the lack of health literacy among most of self-trackers. The European Health Literacy Survey Consortium Health defines health literacy as „[...] people’s knowledge, motivations, and competencies to access, understand, appraise, and apply health information in order to make judgements and take decisions in everyday life concerning healthcare, disease prevention and health promotion to maintain or improve quality of life during the life course". Generally, Vamos and Klein argue, people tend to focus mostly on the data collecting stage, while stages of data archiving, analysis and interpretation are often overlooked because of the skills necessary to conduct such processes, which explains the call for the improvement of health literacy skills among Self-Quantifiers.

 The health literacy critique is different from the data-fetishist critique in its approach to data influence on the human life, health and experience. While the data-fetishist critical discourse ascribes a crucial power of influence to numbers and data, the health literacy critique views gathered data as useless and powerless without the human context and the analysis and reflection skills of the user that are needed to act on the numbers. Data collection alone is not deterministic or normative, according to the health literacy critique. The „know thy numbers to know thyself” slogan of the Quantified Self movement is inconsistent, claim Vamos and Klein, in the sense that it does not fully acknowledge the need for auxiliary skills of health literacy to actually get to „know thyself”. The solution proposed by proponents of the health literacy critique in order to improve the practice of self-tracking and its results is a focus on addressing individual and systemic barriers. The individual barriers are faced by elderly citizens when having to deal with contemporary technology or in cases where there is a need for culturally-sound practices while systemic barriers could be overcome when involving the participation of more health literacy experts and the organization of health literacy education.