An Anxious Alliance

This essay presents a multi-year autoethnographic perspective on the use of personal fitness and self-tracking technologies to lose weight. In doing so, it examines the rich and contradictory relationships with ourselves and our world that are generated around these systems, and argues that the efforts to gain control and understanding of one's self through them need not be read as a capitulation to rationalizing forces, or the embrace of utopian ideals, but as an ongoing negotiation of the boundaries and meanings of self within an anxious alliance of knowledge, bodies, devices, and data. I discuss how my widening inquiry into these tools and practices took me from a solitary practice and into a community of fellow travellers, and from the pursuit of a single body goal into a continually renewing project of personal possibility

Making Things Together: The Island & The Valley, Selves & Software, Here & There

This dissertation explores the work of startup tech entrepreneurs in Jamaica, and how, through intertwined strategies, they craft software and self using design and development methods, understood as emerging from Silicon Valley's successes. These approaches have become attractive globally as routes for securing economically successful products and businesses. They also shape action and identity, producing new ways of being in the world and drawing adherents into an ever renewing process of imagining, building, and becoming. While the entanglement of self and labour is central to the neoliberal entrepreneurial ethos, tech entrepreneurship and startups offer their own forms and entanglements that are informed by the materials, opportunities, and often utopian ideologies of technology development. In Jamaica, these are further shaped by, and give new expression to, existing technical practices and industrial histories, traditions of self-making, and the subjectivities of race, class, and gender that are unfolding within the island's transnationally-informed culture. I attend to the superpositions that result, paying particular attention to how questions of what, and who has value are expressed and shaped within and across the island's borders. In Jamaica, as across the globe, there are now hubs of entrepreneurial activity modelled after images the Valley projects. I follow the moves of entrepreneurs as they search for collaboration, funding, and legitimisation through these programs, moving in transnational circuits that cut through Silicon Valley. While Jamaica is known in these circles, it is not understood as a site from which technology can be developed. I show how entrepreneurs work to cast themselves and the nation as capable, and how the island's understood culture operates as both blessing and burden within this effort. Despite the emancipatory rhetoric invested in today's tech entrepreneurialism, the largely black Jamaican entrepreneurs are faced with prejudices at home and abroad. I demonstrate how decisions about who counts as a valid tech entrepreneur and which methods they can employ are arbitrated along lines of colour and class. Finally, I argue against a reading of their work as a tropicalisation of things designed in more temperate climes. Jamaica has been interwoven into global capitalism since its discovery, and its resulting heterogeneity and ability to incorporate disparate and often incoherent forms destabilises notions of the indigenous or the authentic. Rather than drawing a line that unproblematically connects The Valley's ideas and The Island's actions — California as metropole and Jamaica as the colony — I argue that a shift in perspective might allow us to see the their work as inherently and always modern, globally informed and future-focused in a way that the Valley has always claimed to be

Fit4life: the design of a persuasive technology promoting healthy behavior and ideal weight," CHI'11,

ABSTRACT This is a critical design paper offering a possible scenario of use intended to provoke reflection about values and politics of design in persuasive computing. We describe the design of a system-Fit4Life-that encourages individuals to address the larger goal of reducing obesity in society by promoting individual healthy behaviors. Using the Persuasive Systems Design Mode

Limiting, Leaving, and (re)Lapsing: An Exploration of Facebook Non-Use Practices and Experiences

Despite the abundance of research on social networking sites, relatively little research has studied those who choose not to use such sites. This paper presents results from a questionnaire of over 400 Internet users, focusing specifically on Facebook and those users who have left the service. Results show the lack of a clear, binary distinction between use and non-use, that various practices enable diverse ways and degrees of engagement with and disengagement from Facebook. Furthermore, qualitative analysis reveals numerous complex and interrelated motivations and justifications, both for leaving and for maintaining some type of connection. These motivations include: privacy, data misuse, productivity, banality, addiction, and external pressures. These results not only contribute to our understanding of online sociality by examining this under-explored area, but they also build on previous work to help advance how we conceptually account for the sociological processes of non-use