We are the rats - blog post by Dr Fiona Spotswood

“As we set off for our run, a swarm of hi-viz sweeping down the pavement, most of the group were attempting to avoid tripping over the feet in front whilst peering and tapping at their wrists to start a heart rate watch or Garmin tracker. All you can hear is ‘beep beep beep’ and the panting of runners whose minds are not focused on avoiding the puddles but rather on their cosy post-run analysis of each kilometre; armchair, recovery drink and commentary on which bit was hard, where they improved and who they beat up which hill. It’s a new kind of running” (research field notes by the author).

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Self-tracking devices are popular for amateur ‘leisure time’ runners, and underpin a set of activities which include data analysis, social media sharing, comparison and goal-setting for improvement. ‘Wearable technology’ is a growing area of technological development, offers market potential and is ripe for research interest.

Working with Lukasz Piwek from Bath University, I am conducting a piece of research which examines wearable technology from an innovative perspective. Most research in this area – from a ‘behaviour change’ perspective - is about whether or not self-tracking devices ‘work’ as a mechanism for improving the self-regulation of physical activity or calorie intake. This fits the bio-medical paradigm and also the ‘New Public Health’ emphasis on individuals’ capacity to mitigate risk and take responsibility for their own health. Within a neo-liberal political environment which fiercely protects the market and supports individual responsibility above all else, this ‘healthist’ paradigm has supported a related burgeoning of consumerism, wherein the market is continuously producing new ‘solutions’ to consumers’ ‘problems’ in the form of wearable devices, technological platforms, social media, fitness apparel and so on.

There is considerable literature critiquing the current focus on self-responsibility in the public health and behaviour change arenas. One theoretical platform for criticism is Foucault’s notion of governmentality. Governmentality emphasises that striving for ‘perfect’ health involves intensive ‘work on the self’ or self-governance, and despite the language of empowerment and freedom, this striving actually entails compulsion, added responsibilities to others, and often punishment and social exclusion in the case of those who fail to conform. The ‘panopticon’, wherein prisoners are controlled both by the prison guards and the other prisoners, is a useful metaphor.

The Panopticon

Within the healthist paradigm, individuals are both self-governing but also controlled by greater forces; health has taken on a moral element, where those who fall short are in society’s spotlight. Individuals are ‘governed’ through the emphasis on self-responsibility, although not through coercion but through subtler measures. Through the repeated emphasis from political and corporate agendas, individual ‘desires’ are aligned with those of the powerful. The market and government collude to provide the structures to ‘help’ people maintain their health through self-discipline and responsible citizenship.

What I’m getting at is that we are the rats and the policymakers and corporations are the pied piper.

Taking responsibility for your own health is not a bad thing, per se. But an emphasis on responsibility means we assume a lack of criticality about the broader, bigger, bolder forces which shape society in which our apparent ‘decision making’ takes place.

Researching ‘behaviour’ in a different way is a starting point for sharing in a fairer way the focus of responsibility for ‘wicked problems’ between individuals and the corporate giants. Theories of Social Practice can help us do this. Social theory has been introduced as a potential way of avoiding the focus on individuals which is a characteristic of the predominant paradigm of behaviour change policy and research. Individualistic focus is unrealistic (how can an individual possibly seek to make decisions that are not influenced by Coca Cola’s multi-billion dollar marketing budget), can lead to victim blaming and leads to an avoidance of meaningful change (including regulation) on largescale societal forces.

Rather than focusing on the individual, the unit of analysis in theories of practice is the practice itself, often usefully conceptualised as comprising three elements – materials, meanings and competences. Practices are treated and research as ‘entities’ in which individuals act as carriers and crossing points of bundles of practices. Through their regular, routinized performance, practices are sustained and evolve.

By using social practice theory to explore empirical findings about how and why runners self-track using wearable technology, it is our intention to unpick the whole entity of self-tracking practice and its bundle of interrelating practices. Rather than thinking about self-tracking as a ‘health behaviour’, which is a limiting concept because it presumes all ‘health outcome’ variables lead to and come from individual responsibility and action, our research will consider the meanings, materials and competences involved in self-tracking, plus those of neighbouring practices such as club running, sharing, comparing and analysing run data, setting goals for future training and so on. We will attempt to conceptualise the practice as a whole, and use our findings to critique existing portrayals of self-tracking as a way of ‘taking responsibility for health’, a conceptualisation we suspect is too simplistic to do justice to the complexity of practitioners’ performances, which might not fit quite so neatly into traditional thinking about ‘health behaviours’ as the pied pipers would have us believe.