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Self-tracking of/and time: from technological to biographical and political temporalities of work and sitting
Self-tracking devices have been observed to accelerate time, be used sporadically and busyness being a barrier to use at work. Drawing on notion of multiple temporalities, this article expands the focus on temporalities of users’ engagement with technologies to analysing them within broader biographical, institutional and political times. The argument is grounded in interviews with UK public sector office workers self-tracking sitting time that featured the following three themes: (1) the participants related their sitting to deteriorated work conditions after government austerity politics and redundancies, (2) the pressurised rhythm of work made it difficult to reduce sitting time and fostered a sense of discontent and powerlessness and (3) the workers did not self-track in their free time, defined as free from monitoring. We suggest that the analytical lens of multiple temporalities expands understanding of user experiences as well as illuminates lived contemporary political and institutional times, characterised by both discontent and powerlessness.
Funding
Loughborough University
History
School
- Social Sciences and Humanities
Department
- Criminology, Sociology and Social Policy
Published in
New Media & SocietyVolume
24Issue
8Pages
1813 - 1829Publisher
SAGE PublicationsVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Rights holder
© The AuthorsPublisher statement
This is an Open Access Article. It is published by SAGE under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY 4.0). Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Acceptance date
2020-12-03Publication date
2020-12-23Copyright date
2020ISSN
1461-4448eISSN
1461-7315Publisher version
Language
- en