Searching for Community: Critical Re-evaluation of the Quantified Self as a Community

• In Event: Uncovering Emotional Labor and Care Work in Gig Economy Systems

Abstract

In this talk, I propose to analyze the organizing efforts of what has become known as the Quantified Self “community” as a lens onto the dynamics of flexible employment and emotional labor that characterize the contemporary digital economy. Observers and participants alike typically describe the Quantified Self as a community for enthusiasts of digital self-monitoring where people largely gather to discuss their mutual interests in technology and data. In this talk, rather than simply ask about the forms of solidarity the Quantified Self as a “community” has helped to create, I argue that the popular and critical considerations of the Quantified Self as a community for data enthusiasts misrepresents the locus of the Quantified Self as a social gathering as well as the significance the label “community” has taken on in the digital context. For example, despite being presented as a strictly hobbyist space, I examine how groups like the Quantified Self actually play a vital role in offering developers and device makers novel spaces for fellowship, collaboration, and reputation-building especially as corporations like Facebook and Google have made work-as-community both desirable and inaccessible to most knowledge workers. At the same time, I examine how the view of the Quantified Self as a hobbyist community supplies the affective register through which digital entrepreneurialism moves, particularly as it contributes to the construction of two key figures: the devoted entrepreneur and the authentic self-tracker for whom the technology industry innovates. Scholars of contemporary neoliberalism oftentimes conceive of community as an interstitial network, as that which forms in the spaces opened up by neoliberal policies, globalization, privatization, and the accompanying retreat from social welfare programs. In this presentation, I consider how contemporary forms of capital promote a particular idea of a community as both a social group and as an experimental site productive of the tech industry.

Author

• Yuliya Grinberg