We know what Tracy would say! So I haven’t asked her.

But I kind of like counting things. (“Kind of?!”, asks Sarah)

The issue is this. Mine is broken, falling apart, and we’re a few weeks away from the end of the workplace fitness challenge. My choice is struggle along with the broken one and chuck it at the end of the challenge. I could let those who hate fitness trackers stomp on it for fun! Or buy a new one. If I’m going to buy a new one I’d like to do it now since this one is a pain. I’ll explain in a minute.

An aside: I live in a product testing sort of household. We’re tough on stuff. If it survives my family, buy it. Seriously. Car door handles have come off in my hand. Don’t get me started on the kids. We all break things. So the FitBit tragedy is no big surprise.

What happened? Well, it got wet a lot. I don’t come in when it rains and I do lots of physically hard things. The strap started to fall apart. I bought a new strap. But that never quite worked. Now my FitBit won’t even sync with my the app on my phone and in order to charge it I have to hold the whole thing together with a clothes pin. It looks silly and the not syncing kind of tips the scale. The new strap is purple and while I like purple for the strap it also makes the screen purple and I can’t easily read the numbers.

I’m trying to decide if I should think of the FitBit as an interesting experiment or something I want to continue.

What do I like? I like the heart rate data. I like the social aspects. (Hi mom!) I like tracking sleep.

Steps are easy for me I’ve discovered because I don’t drive to work and I live in a large house and there are dogs in the world. I like hitting the extra big numbers when I travel. But my regular everyday steps are pretty good too. So the step counting is mostly just an exercise in self-congratulation. Go me!

It’s also sort of cool having the time on my wrist again after all these years of not. I like the syncing and I like seeing trends over time. In an ideal world, I’d get a scale that also synced with the FitBit app on my phone and count all the things.

What don’t I like? The aesthetics. It’s ugly. Also, it’s not even ugly and durable. See remarks above. It covers up my beautiful wrist ink, sort of. It’s also expensive. The FitBits with heart rate data are in the $200 range.

So, what’s your two cents? Do you have a fitness tracker? Do you recommend it?

I lost my FitBit briefly this week and it brought to light a funny, longstanding disagreement between Tracy and me. I posted to Facebook about losing it. Friends chimed in sympathetically with hints and tips about finding things.

Cate said, “Tech is apparently for losing.” She’s blogged about her love/hate relationship with fitness technology here.

This blog’s Martha told a story of a friend who lost her FitBit and got it replaced by the company.

But Tracy’s comment when the thing was inevitably located, as lost things often are (thanks Sarah!),  made me laugh out loud. Tracy wrote, “Back to monitoring your every move. I honestly don’t get the fit bit thing. I was relieved for you when you lost it.” I had known that Tracy wasn’t happy with the Global Corporate Challenge team fitness tracking. She compared it to the panopticon.

I wasn’t without the FitBit for long but I missed the reminder to go to bed and get some rest. I could see that I’d miss tracking sleep. I also liked knowing my resting heart rate. When I was training seriously on the bike we used resting heart rate for measuring recovery after recovery weeks.  (I didn’t really need it for tracking steps it turns out.)

A feminist philosopher friend lost hers a few weeks ago. (Hi S!) And when she posted about missing it she said it was one of the few things she did for self care. Like me, actually more than me, she cares for a lot of people in her family.

The contrast between the FitBit as self-care and the FitBit as surveillance tool strikes me as interesting, as capturing two different things that go on in women’s lives.

First, there’s the role many of us play in our families caring for children and for the elderly. It can be hard when that’s your life to pause and pay attention to your own needs. When I blogged about tracking food, see Another perspective on tracking, that’s what I said appealed to me about it.

I wrote, “Mostly it feels liberating. Sometimes it feels like a chore.  But in a hectic busy family with lots of meals, snacks, and groceries on the go my food log often serves as a way to remind me that what I eat matters. For me, it’s much more about making sure I take care of myself.”

Second, there’s the pressure on women to discipline our bodies, to take care of ourselves from the point of view of attaining or maintaining an attractive, thin appearance. From that point of view the FitBit and other forms of tracking look like body surveillance tools.

In her post, Tracking and the Panopticon, Tracy wrote, “The reason I despise tracking is that I see it as a kind of monitoring and self-regulation that functions very like the panopticon.  In case you don’t remember (or never knew), Jeremy Bentham (18th C philosopher) came up with this design for prisons such that the inmates wouldn’t be able to tell whether they were being watched at any given time. Michel Foucault built on this idea, driving home the point that the power over the prisoners arose from their ignorance about whether they were being observed.  The discipline came through their self-monitoring more than through external force.  Feminist philosopher, Sandra Bartky, gave this scenario a uniquely feminist interpretation, arguing that women exert this kind of self-discipline over their bodies. The monitoring is internalized and self-imposed. It’s that self-imposed monitoring and need to exert control that concerns me about tracking.”

I’ve enjoyed teaching a course on fashion and feminism this year and one of the lessons students have learned is that things can have multiple meanings. While most were opposed to cosmetic surgery, for example, on feminist grounds, there’s this perspective too. We had a really fun class on Dolly Parton and the meaning of Dolly’s fashion choices. And so it is, I think, with tracking and the FitBit. It depends on your context and how and where you live. One person’s important act of self care could very well be another person’s self surveillance tool.

That conversation between people who share feminist commitments and a desire to get strong and find joy in movement, but who disagree about lots of the details (like bicycles and tracking!) is one of the things I love about our blog.

Where do you stand? Do you find the FitBit (and its ilk) a soul crushing tool of body surveillance or a liberating opportunity for much needed self-care? And as I tell my students, there are no right answers here.