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

This ethnographic study of tech executives navigating the business environment of wearables reveals the ambiguity of digital knowledge.

Yuliya Grinberg (Author)

9781108832809, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 5 June 2025

230 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.4 cm, 0.488 kg

'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

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.

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.

Subject Areas: Ethical & social aspects of IT [UBJ]