Health tracking media and the production of operational space: a critical analysis of Qantas Wellbeing App

Abstract

This article examines the production of operational space amidst the rise of self- and data-tracking media, through the case study of the Qantas Wellbeing App. We draw on the operational paradigm in media studies to envisage how the Qantas Wellbeing App is embedded in the social-material relations between its users and the app, and the broader data-platform economy. By conceptualising the Qantas Wellbeing App as an operational media, the inquiry focuses on its designs and techniques that prompt users to fulfil prescribed tasks and follow instructions. We follow Lefebvre's conceptualisation of the production of space to evaluate three sets of social relations reconfigured by the Qantas Wellbeing App: human-to-human, human-to-machine, and data-to-data. By relying on qualitative evidence collected from an auto-ethnographic approach, our analyses focus on (1) spatial practices and (2) social relations constructed around the Qantas Wellbeing App between the authors to argue that social space is becoming a programmed reality that adheres to the logic of technological automation. Our analysis here affirms the app's capacity and objective to modify human behaviours and to evaluate how the app has recalibrated the authors’ respective and shared social spaces to create the needed condition of behaviour changes among the users. As social space is centred around human relations and activities, human agency and lives become secondary in an operational regime, which relies on data synchronisation to prosecute for the operational space and life.