Original title: How do data come to matter? Living and becoming with personal data
Phones and other digital tools create information about people and their bodies. This essay asks how that information becomes part of people’s lives, rather than treating it as separate from them. It uses ideas about growth, making, and change to describe how people meet, interpret, and incorporate their data. The main point is that data and bodily experience can shape each other.
Imagine checking a note you keep about how much you slept. At first it is just a record, but over time it may affect what you notice about your energy and how you describe your day. In this paper, the note stands for personal data, while the changing way you understand your energy stands for data becoming part of bodily experience.
Digital tools create information about people’s bodies and daily lives, but that information does not stay separate from them. Thinking about how data become part of everyday experience can help researchers examine how technology shapes what people notice, know, and feel about themselves.
The abstract presents a theoretical argument and does not report tests of a specific technology or measurements of effects on people. It does not establish how often data become part of bodily experience, or whether that process has the same effects for different people.
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How do data come to matter? Living and becoming with personal data — Deborah A. Lupton — Big Data & Society — doi:10.1177/2053951718786314
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.