Further Reading — Chapter 20

Foundational Quantified Self Scholarship

1. Wolf, Gary. "Know Thyself: Tracking Every Facet of Life, from Sleep to Mood to Pain, 24/7/365." Wired, June 2009.

Wolf's foundational article articulating the Quantified Self movement's philosophy and practice. Reading the original framing — self-knowledge, individual agency, open sharing — in contrast to the commercial ecosystem that developed around these ideas provides important perspective on the gap between founding ideals and commercial reality. Available through Wired's archive.

2. Lupton, Deborah. The Quantified Self: A Sociology of Self-Tracking. Polity Press, 2016.

The most rigorous sociological analysis of the Quantified Self movement. Lupton examines self-tracking across multiple domains (health, productivity, emotion, social life), analyzes its social and cultural implications, and develops a critical framework for understanding the relationship between voluntary self-monitoring and institutional power. Essential academic reading on this topic. Accessible for undergraduate readers who engage seriously with the material.

Foucault and Self-Surveillance

3. Foucault, Michel. Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. Edited by Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton. University of Massachusetts Press, 1988.

The primary source for Foucault's analysis of "technologies of the self" — practices through which individuals act on themselves to achieve states defined by social norms. The introductory chapter and Foucault's own contribution are most directly relevant to this chapter's analysis. The seminar format makes it more accessible than Foucault's more formal academic writing.

Wearables and Health Data

4. Guzman, Monica. "The Wearable That Knows You Better Than You Know Yourself." New York Times, 2022.

A nuanced feature-length examination of how consumers experience continuous health monitoring through wearables — what they find valuable, what concerns them, and how they navigate the tension between self-knowledge and data sharing. Useful for understanding the subjective experience of self-surveillance that structural analyses can miss. Available through NYT archive.

5. Cohen, I. Glenn. The Future of Medical Privacy. (Various academic publications, 2020–present.)

Cohen, a Harvard Law professor specializing in health law and bioethics, has written extensively on the legal and ethical questions raised by consumer health data. His work provides the most rigorous legal framework for analyzing the gap between HIPAA's protections and the commercial health data ecosystem. Available through Harvard Law School publications and law review databases.

Employer Wellness Programs

6. Sammer, Joyce. "How to Build a Successful Wellness Program." SHRM (Society for Human Resource Management), 2020.

Reading a document from the employer's perspective — one produced by the leading HR professional organization — provides important context for understanding how wellness programs are designed, justified, and implemented. This is not a critical source; it is a practitioner resource whose framing reveals the institutional logic of wellness surveillance. Free at shrm.org.

7. Kessler, Ronald C., et al. "The World Health Organization Health and Work Performance Questionnaire." Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 2003.

A foundational academic instrument used in wellness program research and in HR analytics to quantify the relationship between employee health and productivity. Understanding this research provides context for the employer's analytical interest in employee health data. Available through medical databases.

The Aggregation Problem

8. Ruser, Nathan. "Strava Released a Global Heatmap." Twitter thread, January 2018; and subsequent reporting by The Guardian, Washington Post, and others.

The primary sources documenting the Strava heat map revelation examined in Case Study 20.2. Ruser's original thread is short and accessible; the subsequent news reporting provides context and analysis. Together they constitute a remarkable case study in the aggregation problem and in how social self-tracking creates collective surveillance artifacts. Available through social media archives and news databases.

Political Economy of Self-Tracking

9. Zuboff, Shoshana. "You Are Now Remotely Controlled." New York Times, January 2020.

Zuboff's condensed argument (from her book-length Age of Surveillance Capitalism) focused specifically on how the technology of continuous behavioral monitoring — including wearables and self-tracking — operates as an instrument of corporate control. Accessible, argued, and directly relevant. Free at nytimes.com (subscription or library access).

10. Nafus, Dawn, ed. Quantified: Biosensing Technologies in Everyday Life. MIT Press, 2016.

An interdisciplinary collection of academic essays examining self-tracking from perspectives including sociology, science and technology studies, anthropology, and engineering. The collection provides a range of critical and constructive analyses of self-tracking that goes beyond the individual/structural binary. Chapter essays by Nafus and others on "data selves" and the cultural meanings of quantification are particularly relevant. MIT Press academic libraries; also available through Project MUSE for many university libraries.