The Complexities of Self-Tracking - An Inquiry into User Reactions and Goal Attainment

The activity of self-tracking is an emerging trend that often involves adopting wearable technology. Vendors promise new personal insights and opportunities to optimize health and lifestyle by adopting such devices. Spurred by these promises, users are also driven by curiosity and exploration to adopt and use the device with the aim of quantifying the self for the purpose of self-knowledge through numbers. We investigate the interplay of technology, data and the experience of self during the adoption and use of wearable technology as a pre-commitment device. The empirical focus lies on two self-tracking devices, which track moving and sleeping activities on a daily basis. 42 interviews were conducted with users of self-tracking devices. The findings suggest that self-tracking activity through wearable technology does not necessarily lead to behavioural change, but predominately works as a re-focusing device. In this light, the user experiences tensions between rational and emotional behaviours when reflecting on personal data. The results contribute to a more nuanced understanding of adoption of the emerging wearable technology in daily life and how users deal with the personal data by developing coping tactics, such as disregard, procrastination, selective attribution and neglect

Journal Analysis between 2011 and 2015

In 2011, at the Copenhagen Business School (CBS) in Denmark, the Department of Informatics and the Centre for Applied Information and Communication Technology (CAICT) merged to form the Department of Information Technology Management (ITM). In April 2017, this department changed its name to the Department of Digitalization (DIGI). This paper analyses the first five years’ 111 journal (five year is the departments strategic planning period). The purpose of the paper is to investigate to what extent these articles reflect the DIGI’s strategy. We compare previous expectations with present realities in the following areas: (1) articles published in leading journals, (2) organise articles around emergent themes and (3) focus on articles about information and technology. DIGI’s mission is to co-create knowledge with enduring consequences through the study of the interrelationships among people, information, and technology. DIGI’s strategy is to create a context where researchers can realize their potential in a supportive and conducive environment with a set of common values, aspirations, and directions. This can only be achieved by building a work environment founded on mutual trust and respect where the best academics can thrive. The ITM strategy, revised in 2012, outlines three areas that could be used to measure whether the department has achieved its goals or not. The first area relates to our goal “to increase the visibility and impact of our research”. Therefore, each department faculty member is responsible for publishing his/her work in journals that are the most and thereby obtain a high author h-index. The second area reflects our size and potential impact “as one of the largest information system departments in Europe”. Our goals are equally grand. The research should be organized in order to create opportunities for collaboration as well as to keep up with the fast and radical innovation typical for the IT field. One way of achieving this is to organize research around themes rather than traditional research groups. Themes are emergent, topical, popular, inter-disciplinary, and dynamic in nature. They are usually active for 3 – 7 years, after which they either transform into other themes or dissolve altogether. The third area relates to the ambition to focus on “the interaction of people, information, and technology in all of its manifestations” (ITM’s strategy. We study how individuals, groups, organizations, and society can grow and prosper by capitalizing on information technologies. IT should always play a central role in our research. We do not focus solely on technical aspects or on organizational aspects, but rather take a socio-technical perspective and a multidisciplinary approach to address a range of strategic, structural, and operational activities involved in gathering, processing, storing, distributing, and using information and its derivatives in organizations and society. Before presenting the methodology and the results of our literature review, a brief summary of the accumulated knowledge contribution found in Research@CBS. During the period 2011 to 2015, the department had 565 publications in total, of which 115 were journal publications. Later four were excluded (not classified), leaving 111 journal articles to be analysed