2021/01/01 by Johannes Achatz, Achatz, Johannes, Stefan Selke +3
Health Professions · Social Sciences · #Health Literacy and Information Accessibility #Mobile Health and mHealth Applications #Pragmatism #Social Media in Health Education #contingency #conventions #digital self-tracking #health data #prevention #values #vulnerability
paper · doi:10.12759/hsr.46.2021.1.206-229
openalex publication_date 2021/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
The practice of digital self-tracking of health data addresses inter-related contingencies on the micro and macro level: on the micro level, digital self-tracking can be perceived as facilitation of lifeworld contingencies and the expression of the way contingency is dealt with in (socially) exhausted societies. Together, these can be understood as a strategy of the “privatization of contingency.” The attempt to reduce the individual’s contingency of action is accompanied by the increase of lifeworld contingency, resulting in a contingency dilemma in contemporary self-tracking which produces (new) dependencies and vulnerabilities with respect to the technology used. Through a multilevel analysis of digital self-tracking and an empirical study on vulnerable self-trackers, a number of those pathological effects of the contingency dilemma are examined using methods from pragmatism and theory of conventions, while highlighting a possible solution to this dilemma.