Literature Review
Introduction
The topic of the research is “The subject during the pandemic: From personal health to public health, How People's health is being redefined.” A new method of communication that needs to be noted when looking at this topic is datafication. Before that, it is significant to apply a concept of “datafied body”. It is an act of datafication, when it is closely linked to the individual body, our bodies become part of the data. As Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier (2013) consider that datafication is to put the research object in a quantified format so it can be charted and analysed. van Dijck (2014) proposes a more specific relationship between individuals and data that datafication refers to “access, understand and monitor” people’s behaviour. The process of datafication can therefore be divided into two steps, firstly transforming the research object into data which we consider as raw data, and then interpreting and analysing the raw data in order to apply value to data. In this research, the KEEP application, as a representation of the datafication body in the pre-pandemic period, and the Health Code, as a representation of the datafication body in the post-pandemic period, are the main subjects of the study. This study focuses on investigating the differences between the two and looking for changes brought about by the pandemic period from the differences.
KEEP application
KEEP application is a very popular fitness life application. It is a good example of digital tracking.First, we need to know how the algorithm basically works.In the context of “self-tracking” application, from the biopedagogy, as Fotopoulou and O’Riordan (2017) suggest, the records of your body data such as steps, heart rate, calories, etc., are pathologizing and disciplining your body. The aim is to turn your body into data, to visualise it and to bring your body closer to a concept of "healthy body". (Fotopoulou and O’Riordan ,2017) During the registration phase of the Keep Trainer, users are asked to fill in gender, date of birth, height, weight, exercise status and exercise goals. When the user submits this information, which is difficult to obtain with biosensing technology, the app will recommend training programs to them based on this data. Keep Trainer offers a wide range of sports. More detailed requirements from individual users can also be realised based on this comprehensiveness. As Cheney-Lippold (2011) explains, the algorithm classifies and defines the user's behaviour through the real-time data generated by the user's actions on the platforms or interactions with them.( Cheney-Lippold ,2011) This means that the algorithm has two important features, one is the categorization of the data and the other is that the classification and definitions are constantly changing depending on the changes of data. That is, from the point of view of advantage, the algorithm is highly flexible, and it can react instantly to changes.
The system's feedback often encourages users to exercise in some way through recommendation. If I put my phone on someone else's body, for example, the data it collects is not mine, but the result "healthy" will appear on my home page. So, the definition of “healthy” is not actually representative of my body. That is, according to Nafus (2016), “problem closure” (Nafus, 2016, p.51). It means that a specific action can lead to a specific result, that is, lack of diversity. This result is only related to your actions and will not be related to whether or not it is the action of you.
Health Code
In the post-pandemic era, Health Code emerged to authenticate the health of people's bodies in a mobile environment as a tool. The health code originated in China as an electronic credential for personal passage to control the epidemic and to regulate the flow of the epidemic. Health Code is mainly operated on WeChat and Alipay. Users can fill in their name, ID number, travel path and other personal information online to independently declare and obtain a QR code. The emergence of health codes facilitates epidemic management and control.
Hu Ling (2021) mentioned that the essence of the health code is to track and process the behaviour of the citizens in real time, and to process and analyse the collected data. (Hu, 2021) Through the colour of the Health Code, it is possible to identify in time whether a person has passed through provinces and cities with high epidemic incidence, and has directly or indirectly contacted infected patients. In this way, the health information of the population across the country is collected, and the epidemic prevention inspectors in various places can track and accurately obtain the health information of the personnel, so as to avoid mistakes in the epidemic prevention work. This saves time, reduces the risk of spread of people gathering and the difficulty of investigation by staff afterwards, and can protect personal health to the greatest extent.
However, other critics have different opinions, and this article also goes into expounding the drawbacks of defining health by Health Codes. First, according to Wu (2021):“Smartphones are used as extensions of body organs, an inseparable part of the body.” (Wu, 2021) For users who do not use mobile phones or even do not have mobile phones, it will cause trouble and pressure to their daily travel, because during the epidemic period, people need to scan the Health Code when entering and leaving public places. This indirectly leads to the problem of class-based inequality. In Wu Jing’s (2021) article, it was mentioned that an elderly person was refused a ride because she did not have a health code, and she proposed the concept of "data gap" (Wu, 2021). That is, due to the gap in individual ability, the service gap that people obtain in the big data society is formed. It highlights the powerlessness of digital identity over subject identity and strengthens the division between different groups in society. The second is that the collected data is not transparent, which may cause the leakage of many privacy issues. Digital tracking devices are a biopolitical tool that is destined to be supervised by authorities, and ordinary people are not clear about the review mechanism behind the Health Code. Under the comprehensive digital epidemic prevention, because the Internet industry occupies user resources and platforms, in the control of the epidemic, the government decentralizes the power to give enterprise platforms (such as Alibaba and Tencent) the right to public management and obtains national biological data. As Yan and Fang (2020) said, Internet platform companies, as private companies, have invested in manpower and technology to assist the government. In this way, the online operation of the Health Code is realized. (Yan and Fang, 2020). But, How businesses and governments handle and protect vast amounts of data is a tricky one. Finally, if the user fills in falsely or the health code update information is not timely, it is still impossible to accurately prevent or control the development of the pandemic.
Conclusion
This project uses the theories of quantitative self and self-tracking to analyse the technology and collected data of the two cases and explore their relationship. It concludes a gap between individual experiences and tracking data, suggesting that human-technology interactions are not always controllable, and that data does not accurately define how healthy our bodies are.
People voluntarily use data to express and perceive their lives and manage their bodies digitally before the pandemic. The applications like Keep Trainer believe that the body needs personal recording and management, and quantified numbers are more likely to guide individuals' exercise and lifestyle over the long term. However, the full coverage of the health code in China means that tracking people's bodies has changed from voluntary to mandatory as a result of the pandemic. As a result, the visualised data from the body becomes a regulatory tool for governments to safeguard the health of their citizens during pandemics.