Everyday Digital Self-Tracking Practices in China: Variations, Feelings, and Sharing

This thesis explores what diverse digital self-tracking practices mean to people in their everyday lives in the Chinese context. It identifies some consistencies with the findings of Western self-tracking studies, and it also contributes to new empirical detail about Chinese digital self-tracking. Drawing on mixed qualitative and quantitative methods approach with semi-structured interviews (n=21) and semantic network analysis of 5,583 posts published on Sina Weibo, the analysis focuses on three main themes relating to tracking: variations; feelings; and sharing and communicating. I found that Chinese people are driven by different motivations and selectively use functions of diverse self-tracking technologies to track physical activities and bodily metrics. Ways of self-tracking are shaped by variations in people’s everyday lives, as well as Chinese medical, working, and food cultures, and the seasons and fluctuating environmental conditions across the year. As a result, an individual can track the same thing differently in these different contexts and different people track activities in different ways. My participants had stronger feelings about weight and menstrual cycle data, and less strong feelings about heart rate and sleep data, and little feeling about physical exercise data. Not everyone expresses feelings about self-tracking, and the absence of feelings relates to some of the contextual factors mentioned above, as well as gender. I also found that people share and communicate about self-tracking data both online and offline. On social media, sharing focuses on self-documentation of mundane life rather than on sharing data. Communication through sharing is used to maintain various types of guanxi – initiating and building relationships between people (e.g. family members, friends, colleagues). However, this can be connected to intimate surveillance, sometimes leading self-trackers to be reluctant to share. These original empirical findings enrich debates about self-tracking and advance academic understanding of everyday engagement with digital self-tracking as a phenomenon beyond the Western context. They contribute to digital sociology, science and technology studies, and media and communication studies.