Self-tracking, datafication and the biopolitical prosumption of life

Abstract: The marketing literature has both celebrated and critically scrutinised the active engagement of consumers in value-creation processes. These opposing analyses share a focus on the mobilisation of consumers’ social and cognitive abilities for value creation. This thesis contributes to this discussion by exploring how diverse aspects of consumers’ lives become involved in value creation, leading the entirety of life to become a resource. In particular, the thesis focuses on the popular consumption phenomenon of self-tracking, which allows and enables consumers to track, quantify and datafy diverse facets of their lives. Drawing on data from two empirical studies, which were based on interviews and observational netnography, the thesis engages with the notion of biopolitical marketing to analyse the extraction and appropriation of value from consumers’ lives.The thesis contributes to the critical marketing literature by advancing the understanding of the biopolitical nature of marketing in extracting value from consumers’ lifestyles and subjectivities. The theoretical contributions include the notions of the “biopolitical prosumption of life”, the “prosumed self” and the “prosuming self”. The “biopolitical prosumption of life” entails the “creation of worlds” that allow and enable the development of market-aligned subjectivities, which can generate value for corporate interests. The notions of the “prosumed self” and the “prosuming self” are introduced to frame and elucidate these subjectivities. The empirical findings suggest that marketing interventions foster the development of marketing environments (“worlds”) that seek to contain consumers while allowing them to act freely, albeit in ways that augment the value that can be extracted and appropriated.