Self-Tracking

The MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series

By: Gina Neff, Dawn Nafus

Narrated by: Karen Saltus

People keep track. In the 18th century, Benjamin Franklin kept charts of time spent and virtues lived up to. Today people use technology to self-track: hours slept, steps taken, calories consumed, medications administered. Ninety million wearable sensors were shipped in 2014 to help us gather data about our lives. This audiobook examines how people record, analyze, and reflect on this data, looking at the tools they use and the communities they become parts of.

Gina Neff and Dawn Nafus describe what happens when people turn their everyday experiences - in particular, health and wellness-related experiences - into data and offer an introduction to the essential ideas and key challenges of using these technologies. They consider self-tracking as a social and cultural phenomenon, describing not only the use of data as a kind of mirror of the self but also how this enables people to connect to and learn from others.

Neff and Nafus consider what's at stake: who wants our data and why; the practices of serious self-tracking enthusiasts; the design of commercial self-tracking technology; and how self-tracking can fill gaps in the health-care system. Today no one can lead an entirely untracked life. Neff and Nafus show us how to use data in a way that empowers and educates.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your Library section along with the audio.

©2016 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (P)2016 Gildan Media LLC

Very Hard To Listen To This Book

What would have made Self-Tracking better?

The narrator sounds like the women from my car GPS. She reads this book in a monotone fashion that makes listening to the content difficult. This book sounds like one long paragraph. I think the narration could have been done better.

Would you ever listen to anything by Gina Neff and Dawn Nafus again?

This book is not what I was expecting.

Would you be willing to try another one of Karen Saltus’s performances?

Possibly.

Entirely academic and not what I expected

I really struggled to finish this Audiobook. Even though it's only four or five hours long, it took me about as many months to get to the end. The piece is on par with everything else I've read in an academic framework. That is, it sacrifices comprehensibility for the sake of generalization. The authors are concerned with the effects of self-tracking and the social issues that come along with the data that is created thereby. I was hoping that the book would focus more on best practices and practical tips. There is a brief section that touches on this theme, but it's not the main focus of the text.