Olivia Fletcher

Healthy lifestyles or ‘dangerous competition’? – self-tracking and the geographies of surveillance in the lives of young people.

My research focuses on young people’s use of self-tracking technologies (such as Fitbits and health tracking apps). My research responds to the growing use of these technologies, along with the concerns over young people’s obsessive monitoring practices and negative self-image as increasing numbers of people rely on digital technologies to track their ‘health’ in their everyday life. My research therefore examines the quantification of health as it becomes increasingly entangled in everyday life through self-tracking technologies and their interaction with social media. Within this, I’m interested in how young people use and make sense of these technologies, the different modes of surveillance employed in self-tracking and how embodiment is reconstituted through the relationship between online and offline spaces. In examining this, I aim to recognise how understandings of ‘health’ and the ‘healthy self’ are being (re)formulated through the everyday personal use of online data and its associated surveillance for young people in a neoliberal context.

My research synthesises multiple theories to better understand how humans come together with digital technologies in everyday lives. Through combining a feminist new materialism approach with Foucauldian and social capital theory, my research will examine the body as a site of power intervention, aiming to better understand how the surveillant gaze relates to self-regulation of the ‘healthy’, ideal, neoliberal subject. In applying social capital theory, I will analyse how certain performances of health are reified over others in these digital spaces. My research will focus on people aged 16-25 and will comprise a netnography through participant observation of 2 online communities, digital semi-structured interviews and online content analysis.

My research aims to contribute to geographical knowledge through examining these technologies geographically with a focus on how bodies traverse online and offline spaces in performances of ‘health’ and how the digital and the material intersect in young people’s engagement with self-tracking technologies. In so doing, this research will help us better understand and negotiate what ‘health’ is and how it’s practiced in digital spaces. I also hope this research will contribute to emerging conversations amongst qualitative researchers about the new ways of knowing, through the lens of digital technologies.