About the project

Datafied Living concerns the study of self-tracking and other forms of person-based tracking across personal, work and institutional contexts of everyday life.

As human beings, we lead our everyday lives in and out of these three prototypical contexts, and digital media assist in a myriad of ways of getting things done, navigating the demands, needs and structural constraints of each of these. In all cases, lines between voluntary, pushed, coerced and imposed forms of self-tracking are potentially blurring in the mundane fueling of personal data into digital infrastructures.

Understanding infrastructure, experience and agency in relation to specific contexts is crucial for developing and debating societal norms of appropriate data flows from individual citizens into public and commercial domains and facilitating safe and meaningful datafied living for all.

The project studies contemporary digital infrastructures and experiences of self-tracking and other forms of person-based tracking across key contexts of everyday life to understand how datafication shapes possibilities for human flourishing and what it means to live a good and meaningful datafied life.

The research team conducts a range of empirical studies of the uses of tracking in personal life, in work and organizational life, and in the institutions of the welfare state to better understand the social implications of the pervasive datafication of daily living.

Read about our core research questions and methods.