ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how, via case studies taken from tracking technologies such as Fitbits, activity bands and various fitness tracking apps, we might think about the transmedia self as a “dividual” traversing—or transmediated—across mobile media technologies.
The choice of highlighting this argument using examples of tracking technologies is due to the potential comparisons against mobile media which can be made quite clearly via considering the placing of the self in space, time and action. The mobile self might be identified via an interconnection of the following three elements: a particular activity in a particular space in a particular time. In this trinomial nexus, the activity is unrepeatable and thereby non-reproductive. Recording media, such as cinema, thus document activity to the extent of rendering the self in a single space-time-action matrix. As Caveh Zahedi puts it in Richard Linklater’s film Waking Life (2001): “it’s about that guy, at that moment, in that space”.
However, I argue that activity trackers fundamentally change these aspects of the self, enabling the placing of a person in a specific space and time to be transposed into a different spatio-temporal framework that is constituted of digital data generated through sensors and algorithmic logic. In turn, activity tracking revises the concept of selfhood as a specificity in one particular space-time-action matrix—that-guy-that-moment-that-space – to one of multiplicities across digital data, computer processes and renderings of spatial-temporality intelligible only to computers. These multiplicities thus break down the transmediated mobile self into the “dividual” in its unique space-time-action matrix, rendered endlessly divisible and combinable. This gives rise to the chapter’s arguments to not only think through the parameters of the self in digital mobile media, but also offer ideas of where transmedia is – in short, where transmedia emerges in contemporary technoculture, and the limbo spaces of its crossings between media, through the fundamental paradigm of the dividuated self.
