From « Smart Grids » to « Quantified Selves ». Reflexive Technologies and the Trace-Based Regulation of Conduct, a Case Study on Electric Consumption in the Home

This paper analyzes the development of« reflexive » socio-technical infrastructures, aiming at enabling and organizing the encounters between persons and real time dynamic visualizations of their own practices, in the hope that from such encounters will emerge new forms of individual conduct. Such reflexive infrastructures are crucial to the development of a trace-based regulation of practices by proposing augmented subjects ways of assembling and interacting in a kind of public space of traces. Based on an experimental case study of reflexive visualization of electric consumption practices, we will use different theoretical perspectives to understand how users are affected by such encounters with traces of their own activity, and how such encounters constitute particular types of subjects and attachments, i.e. “quantified selves”. We will show and discuss how several devices are used to reinforce and make socially accountable such attachments, for instance by making visible the similar calculated practices of a reference social group in the interfaces. Reflexive technologies propose a kind of soft, bottom-up regulation of practices which is crucially dependent on how persons are put together in a space of mutual awareness regarding their calculated behavior, and which is relevant to the development of what we might call a trace-based « democratic » governmentality.