Datafied living: pursuing human flourishing through mundane self-tracking across personal, work and institutional contexts in the welfare state.

ended

Datafied living develops a communication-centric conceptual and empirical research agenda on the relationship between infrastructures for tracking of the self and forms of agency and meaning in datafied living. It focuses on the mundane experiences and implications of voluntary, pushed, coerced and imposed forms of self-tracking that unfold as we practice ourselves and pursue the good life through digital media. Despite a general, growing scholarly and public concern about the power that big tech companies have amassed in shaping societal developments and individual life possibilities through datafication, we lack knowledge about how exactly datafication is experienced, what it means to ordinary people, and how it shapes diverse contexts of everyday life. Such knowledge is crucial to intervene in tech development and its regulation in support for human flourishing: in facilitating good, safe and meaningful datafied living for all. Datafied Living is groundbreaking in five respects: 1) by framing datafication as conditioned on communication, I develop a novel communicative framework that cuts across domains of application and significantly advances both communication theory and datafication research; 2) I cover uncharted empirical territory of “datafication as viewed from below”, unifying data-driven and classic methods in an ambitious, context-sensitive methodology to study infrastructures and experiences of self-tracking and tracking of the self by others across personal, work and institutional life in the welfare state of Denmark, one of the most digitized and datafied countries in the world; 3) I unify and synthesize infrastructural analyses and experiential perspectives to elicit agentic potentials of mundane self-tracking across contexts; 4) I bring a much needed European, and context-sensitive perspective to an otherwise US-dominated debate; 5) I offer a well-tested methodology, and software, to scale the study of datafied living to cross-national comparison.