The digi-appearing body: bodily awareness when mediated by digital self-tracking technologies

With the growing popularity of self-tracking devices, it has been established that these technologies shape the experiences and meanings of the moving body. Despite the growing critical literature on self-tracking, few philosophical works focus on capturing the underlying experiential structures involved in the technologically mediated body. Taking our starting point in Leder’s (1990) account of bodily awareness and employing a combination of phenomenology and postphenomenology, our analysis outlines a new concept of the digi-appearing body. It describes how the body appears when mediated by digital self-tracking technology, and we identify three experiential dimensions of this digi-appearing body: reduction, externalisation and optimisation. We analyse these as possible variations of the digitally mediated bodily appearance, and informed by postphenomenological modes of questioning, we explore what is revealed and concealed when engaging in self-tracking and how digital devices transform the bodily awareness in non-neutral ways. Developing a deeper understanding of the digi-appearing body can be a step towards a reflective use of self-tracking technology.