2 - Seeing Double in Digital Entrepreneurialism

Summary

Chapter 2 examines how the use of “quantified self” as a shorthand for personal data necessarily indexes only one end, rather than the full spectrum, of technologists’ understanding of digitization and their own roles within it. Looking closely at the way digital executives talk about data in forums such as QS, among others, in fact reveals the contradictions, professional obfuscations, and hyperbole that continue to shape the self-tracking sector. Digital professionals may occasionally enfold concepts such as the "quantified self” into promotional “pitch theater” to stage self-monitoring devices as gadgets that produce faithful and objective data. My interactions with practitioners in these settings, however, point to the more varied social, legal, and fiscal advantages professionals reap from representing digital self-tracking and the data these devices produce as both plastic and precise. This chapter argues that the surface impression that technologists relate to data and modes of self-monitoring in reductive terms has to be weighed against ways executives pursue both digital ambiguity and objectivity as a meaningful corporate strategy.