Sport Informatics and Analytics/Performance Monitoring/The Quantified Self/Quantified Self

The quantified self

The Wikipedia page on the Quantified Self provides a detailed overview of the emergence and development of the Quantified Self movement.

It includes references to Gary Wolf. His overview of the emergence of technologies to make self-tracking more accessible includes this observation:

In the past, the methods of quantitative assessment were laborious and arcane. You had to take measurements manually and record them in a log; you had to enter data into spreadsheets and perform operations using unfriendly software; you had to build graphs to tease understanding out of the numbers. Now much of the data-gathering can be automated, and the record-keeping and analysis can be delegated to a host of simple Web apps. The makes it possible to know oneself in a new way.

Kevin Kelly suggested in his preliminary discussion of the Quantified Self:

Unless something can be measured, it cannot be improved. So we are on a quest to collect as many personal tools that will assist us in quantifiable measurement of ourselves. We welcome tools that help us see and understand bodies and minds so that we can figure out what humans are here for.

Some contributors to the discussions about the Quantified Self have characterised self-tracking as Personal Informatics.

Deborah Lupton has explored the interface of critical social research and human-computer interaction (HCI) in personal informatics.

A body of literature has now been established of research that has sought to investigate the social, cultural and political dimensions of self-tracking, nearly all of which has come out in the last few years. This literature complements an established literature in human-computer interaction research (HCI), first into lifelogging and then into self-tracking (or personal informatics/analytics, as HCI researchers often call it).

Ben Williamson has used the term 'algorithmic skin' to discuss "the ways that health-tracking produces a body encased in an ‘algorithmic skin’, connected to a wider ‘networked cognitive system’".

Deborah Lupton and Ben Williamson are examples of a reflexive approach to "data-led and algorithmically mediated understandings of the body"

Technocratic engineers?

This course looks explicitly at ethical issues related to monitoring and surveillance. Andrew Manley and Shaun Williams observe

Coaches often voice a humanistic approach to their practice; however, with an increased reliance on surveillance and data capture, it may be that we are visibly witnessing the caricature of the elite coach morphing into the modern-day technocrat engineer. And while it can appear to drive performance, at such an unrelenting pace it may not be sustainable in the long run".

Do you share their concerns?