Introduction

This chapter explores in great detail how self-tracking technologies and social media enable the management and representation of specific ‘health(y)’ lifestyles and identities. Through presentation of the empirical analysis (interviews, reflexive diaries and online content), it examines how the collaborative information produced within these data-sharing cultures changes user behaviours, understandings of the body and what is deemed as ‘healthy’, often in relation to others. The chapter identifies the many purposes and ‘share-ability’ of different digital representations of health on social media (van Dijck, 2013b; Tifentale and Manovich, 2015). Whether sharing for support, motivation or appearing authentic or avoiding oversharing, users represent many of their practices with the view to perform the ‘idealised’ body (Kent, 2018) and ‘digital health self ‘. As we have explored in earlier chapters, self-definition through endless selftracking maintains the optimisation of ‘health’ as the continual lifestyle goal for these individuals. This chapter highlights how health and lifestyle have become representative of this ‘optimal self ‘, through the representation of health choices and everyday wellness behaviours on social media platforms. Embodiment of this focus on maximising and optimising health is no longer a priority confined to the ‘health-conscious’, the quantified self movement, users of self-tracking technologies or social media influencers. This chapter identifies how the ‘digital health self ‘ is the conceptualisation of an everyday productive individual, citizen and subject, who self-regulates health as a performance through self-tracking data, conceiving the representation, and thus the curation, as a powerful force and in turn controlling the malleable physical form to attain the performance of a continually improving body, in the hope of a happier, healthier and optimal future.