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Paper short abstract:

I examine the social construction of ignorance that underpins the strategic framing of biosensing and tracking technologies. I describe how competing frames and practices coalesce to configure these tools as critical in producing both individual autonomy and the reform of institutionalized medicine.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the strategic framing of biosensing and tracking technologies as critical tools in producing both individual autonomy and the reform of institutionalized medicine. Drawing from my three-year ethnographic engagement with the self tracking group, Quantified Self (QS), and allied digital health movements in California, I describe how QS re-imagines age-old practices of self tracking and patient monitoring, and analyze the social mechanisms through which the new self tracking imaginary is presented and adopted. I then interrogate how health systems co-opt and build individualized practice towards larger, collective public health goals. There are two productive characteristics of QS that help explain how competing frames coalesce; first is its activism, a contestational move of independence from institutionalized medical expertise, second is the multiplicity of frames in its health focused sub-cultures with patients, technologists, and medical experts all engaged in biosignal-tracking. This entanglement, reveals how different stakeholders are invested in and further the promise of biosensing and tracking technologies. I draw from theories of agnotology to argue that what resolves these conflicting frames is the social construction of various absences in knowledge as critical forms of ignorance needing technological remedies. Important questions include: Where and with whom does ignorance lie? Where and to whom does it travel? What will happen when it is eliminated? It is this strategic suggestion of ignorance that authorizes the digital surveillance of private lives, and the sustenance of new markets.