Who am I without Apple Watch?
This blog is an incarnation of everyday annoyance: once I cycled 25 minutes to the tennis courts, only to discover I’d forgotten my Apple Watch and immediately turned around to fetch it. On the way I cycled to the tennis courts again, I suddenly realised it seems to me no longer doing sport because I like to or I believe certain benefits it brings me, but on the contrary, I want to record the fact that I move to close the three rings in my apple watch. Therefore, this blog was sketched to reflect my ongoing imagining of the relationship between self and technology.
This notion creates a kind of epistemology anxiety that is the very existing of myself is now relay on external verification. I start to reflect on multiple moments that happing in my life: I’ve been obsessed to record myself through technology, with one of the most important aspects is relate to health in weight, diet, exercise, sleeping. Well, as human there is nothing to blame for to want to know oneself better, however, is those numbers actually represent a better way to communicate with self? Or is it just a delusion that one has control over one’s body? Personally, I personal think that also contributes from my lack of knowledge of my own body, as I don’t have medical training on how to interpret the signal from my body, it is kind of a necessity to outsource this work to technology. But, I stopped myself there, does that means my own feelings, my emotions, my sense of myself is not valid – I have to believe a certain stander to tell me what to do. The obsession is going beyond self-tracking to the technology itself, as we always think that resentment is something objective, which is the synonym for truth.
Some answers
As technology more seamlessly and unobtrusively integrates into our lives, the very perception of autonomous subjectivity appears increasingly untenable. With the development of digital infrastructures capable of collecting, storing, and analysing data, the technology has come to constitute the environment itself in framing how we perceive, interpret, and act in the world (Aydin et al., 2019). For Merleau-Ponty (1962), the body is the medium between the self and the world. As this body is entangled with technologies, those mediations may extend into the formation of subjectivity itself. The popularisation of digital self-tracking devices demonstrates this shift, reorienting the body’s sensory experience toward recognisable information. The recorded number is often treated as measurable against metrics, which metrics generate a sense of responsibility to discipline oneself accordingly (Juchniewicz & Wieczorek, 2024). However, measurement renews the expectation to adjust, creating accountability that exceeds any single act of tracking.
Self-tracking converts imperceptible bodily and mental details into coherent streams of information, establishing “a direct relation between the body and the self, between biology and knowledge, between technology and truth” (Ajana, 2017, p. 4). As Aggerholm et al. (2025) note, it reconfigures embodied experience by reducing sensations into parameters, externalising bodily states as digital traces, and imposing an optimisation imperative, thereby displacing lived experience with quantified interpretation. Thus, the self comes to be known through technologically mediated interpretation, requiring individuals to learn to understand themselves as data subjects (Lupton, 2016). Yet such mediation is not passive, for it acts as normative referents through embedded assumptions about health, productivity, and well-being. As blended into the interfaces, self-worth becomes equated with the numerical progress and algorithmic validation, constructing the good self as one validated by algorithmic success (Krzemińska, 2024). Aligning with the neoliberalism optimisation that conceives individuals as projects demanding constant development, improvement, and investment, self-tracking has colonised life itself as a moral responsibility to shape and maintain one’s body in accordance with social norms of worth and adequacy (Krüger, 2019). Within this regime, the cultural imperative to produce productive subjects renders responsibility a labour of continuous self-surveillance and self-governance.
But there is more to it!
The discussion above has examined self-tracking as a technology mediating the relation between body and self, through which individuals internalise the necessity of governing themselves as digital labour to fulfil personal responsibilities within neoliberal self-optimisation requirements. Yet how such responsibility is persistent – as self-tracking is inherently a practice that must be continually performed, why do we feel the need to do it over and over again? It seems that responsibility comes to operate as a form of labour that is characterised not by production but by the ongoing work of maintaining visibility and validity. In there, I want to specifically reflect on what I mentioned before in how to prove the existing of oneself. If the subjectivity is record and exists partially with the data being record, then is this self can be truly autonomous? Maybe the whole ideal of autonomous self is human wishful thinking – I’m a traditional pessimist on such a topic. This concern can be track back to the question on freewill, however, the intention is not to write a book here so I’m not going deeper than that.
But luckily, we can still turn to Bernard Stiegler (1998) for some answers. He proposed concept of tertiary retention that subjectivity is constituted through exteriorised technical existence. As the closer relation between self and technology, the intervention of technology in the very temporal rhythms of everyday life, organising how practices unfold and how the self comes to understand its own activity. Therefore, the self becomes dependent on technological verification through its repeated inscription; the continuous upkeep of data, therefore, becomes a structural labour rather than a voluntary act. This labour is one of the characteristics that can be found in digital media in a world where everything seems subtle and unnoticeable but essentially the demand or restriction is stricter than ever that we could ever imagine.
Reference
Aggerholm, K., Ronkainen, N., & Schmidli, X. (2025). The digi-appearing body: bodily awareness when mediated by digital self-tracking technologies. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.
Ajana, B. (2017). Digital health and the biopolitics of the Quantified Self. DIGITAL HEALTH, 3, 1–18.
Aydin, C., González Woge, M., & Verbeek, P.-P. (2019). Technological Environmentality: Conceptualizing Technology as a Mediating Milieu. Philosophy & Technology, 32(2), 321–338.
Berg, M. (2022). Digital Technography: A Methodology for Interrogating Emerging Digital Technologies and Their Futures. Qualitative Inquiry, 28(7), 827–836.
Juchniewicz, N., & Wieczorek, M. W. (2024). Self-tracking, background(s) and hermeneutics. A qualitative approach to quantification and datafication of activity. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 23, 133–154.
Krüger, S. (2019). The Authoritarian Dimension in Digital Self-Tracking. In Lost in perfection: Impacts of Optimisation on Culture and Psyche. Routledge.
Krzeminska, A. (2024). Self-Optimisation and the Technologically Mediated Self. Historical Social Research, 49(3), 77–101.
Lupton, D. (2016). The Quantified Self: A Sociology of Self-Tracking. Polity Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of perception. Routledge & Degan Paul.
Stiegler, B. (1998). Technics and Time, 1: The fault of Epimetheus. Stanford University Press.
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