@inproceedings{NageleEtAl22CHI,
author = {Nagele, Anna Nolda and Hough, Julian and Dinnen, Zara},
title = {The Subjectivities of Wearable Sleep-Trackers - A Discourse Analysis},
year = {2022},
isbn = {9781450391566},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3491101.3519677},
doi = {10.1145/3491101.3519677},
abstract = {Self-reported quality and duration of sleep in Western populations is declining. The interest in wearable sleep-trackers that are promising better sleep is growing. By wearing a device day and night the sleeper is continuously connected to a more-than-human network. The mass-adoption of sleep-tracking devices has an impact on the personal, social and cultural meaning of sleep. This study looks at the discourse forming around wearable sleep-trackers. This extended abstract presents how non-human subjectivities are accounted for in this discourse. Through a posthuman discourse analysis of textual and visual artefacts from interviews, academic research and popular media, six distinct roles for these non-human social agents were identified: ‘Teacher’, ‘Informant’, ‘Companion’, ‘Therapist’, ‘Coach’ and ‘Mediator’. This characterisation is a first step to understanding sleep-trackers as social agents, reorganising personal and contextual relationships with the sleeping self.},
booktitle = {Extended Abstracts of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems},
articleno = {385},
numpages = {8},
keywords = {wearable technology, subjectivity, posthumanism, discourse analysis, sleep-tracking, personal informatics, agency},
location = {New Orleans, LA, USA},
series = {CHI EA '22}
}