Healthy lifestyles or dangerous competition? Self-tracking and the geographies of surveillance in the lives of young people

This research will examine how understandings of 'health' and the 'healthy self' are being (re)formulated through the everyday personal use of online data and its associated surveillance for young people (16-25). Increasing numbers of people rely on digital technologies to track their 'health' in their everyday life (Enrique and Erickson, 2020). Recent media reports have highlighted growing concern about the implications of these technologies in relation to negative self-image and obsessive monitoring practices particularly for young people (Carey-Campbell, 2019). Such concerns are accompanied by academic research which has started to examine the nature and the extent of the quantified-self movement, which considers how numeric data is increasingly becoming enfolded in everyday practices (Lupton, 2016). Such technologies enable multiple forms of surveillance practices in young people's everyday lives: self-surveillance (Rich and Miah, 2014), social surveillance through the interaction between self-tracking and social media platforms (Lupton, 2016) and external surveillance through data gathering by companies hosting these technologies (Baracena et al, 2014). There is, however, little understanding of how young people understand these different forms of surveillance in relation to their uses of such technology and the proposed research will offer the first detailed investigation of this.