Ethnography of an Interface: Self-Tracking, Quantified Self, and the Work of Digital Connections

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Yuliya Grinberg

Ethnography of an Interface

Self-Tracking, Quantified Self, and the Work of Digital Connections

Yuliya Grinberg

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English

Cambridge University Press
05 June 2025

Communication studies; Media studies; Social & cultural anthropology; Human-computer interaction

Technologists frequently promote self-tracking devices as objective tools. This book argues that such glib and often worrying assertions must be placed in the context of precarious industry dynamics. The author draws on several years of ethnographic fieldwork with developers of self-tracking applications and wearable devices in New York City's Silicon Alley and with technologists who participate in the international forum called the Quantified Self to illuminate the professional compromises that shape digital technology and the gap between the tech sector's public claims and its interior processes. By reconciling the business conventions, compromises, shifting labor practices, and growing employment insecurity that power the self-tracking market with device makers' often simplistic promotional claims, the book offers an understanding of the impact that technologists exert on digital discourse, on the tools they make, and on the data that these gadgets put out into the world.

By: Yuliya Grinberg
Imprint: Cambridge University Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
ISBN: 9781108832809
ISBN 10: 1108832806
Pages: 230
Publication Date: 05 June 2025
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Preface; Introduction; 1. QS and the culture of personal data; 2. Seeing double in digital entrepreneurialism; 3. Acting like members, thinking like vendors; 4. Hustling with a passion; 5. The new normal; 6. The promises and failures of digital connections; Conclusion: community at a crossroads; Bibliography; Index.

Yuliya Grinberg holds a PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from Columbia University, New York, and specializes in digital culture. Her teaching addresses the social impact of technological innovation, automation, big data, and the future of work. Her writing has been published in top academic journals such as 'Anthropological Quarterly' as well as in popular forums including the Committee for the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing (CASTAC) and the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference (EPIC) blogs.

Reviews for Ethnography of an Interface: Self-Tracking, Quantified Self, and the Work of Digital Connections

'Grinberg's masterful ethnography brings a new perspective to quantified self technologies, exploring how the technology designers' fissured and unstable working conditions inform what designers think should matter when quantifiying. Brimming with new insights, she connects the dots between the designable and the personal in this imminently teachable book.' Ilana Gershon, Rice University 'QS, the translation of self into quantifiable data, is a model for technological optimism. Wearable and sensor-enabled devices promise to optimize humans. Silicon Valley has long pursued this dream. Enthusiasts imagined these objects as the ideal interface between the body and the wider world. Grinberg thoughtfully documents how this nascent social movement morphed into the self-tracking market more than a decade later. She tracks people, practices, and metaphors to reveal a darker story. Unkept promises, entrepreneurial precarity, and emotional labor mark this sector's present reality of this technological sector.' Jan English-Lueck, San José State University 'An incisive look into the making of self-tracking technologies. Grinberg unearths all the hopes, desires, networks, and labor that go into building the tools and startups of the Quantified Self movement. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in metrics, tracking, and digital capitalism.' Angèle Christin, Author of Metrics at Work, Stanford University 'Ethnography of an Interface offers a fresh take on the pressures and contradictions of Quantified Self entrepreneurialism. It insightfully analyzes how digital professionals end up creating the very behaviors and communities they think they are discovering in the world. The book's well-grounded approach and vital findings will be of wide appeal to readers interested in learning how industry-led dynamics perpetuate structural inequities in tech.' Patricia G. Lange, California College of the Arts