Papers by Natasha Schull
Scenes of Attention: An Interdisciplinary Inquiry Scenes of Attention: An Interdisciplinary Inquiry. Eds. G. Burnett & J. Smith. Columbia U Press, 2023: 187-211, 2023
The Data-Based Self: Self-Quantification and the Data-Driven (Good) Life
Social Research: An International Quarterly
The capacity to collect, store, and analyze data drawn from everyday physiological, behavioral, a... more The capacity to collect, store, and analyze data drawn from everyday physiological, behavioral, and geolocational experience is growing rapidly and spreading to an ever-wider range of social domains. A polarized discussion has unfolded around the threats that data technologies pose to human agency and the asymmetries it introduces between those who track and mine data and those who are tracked. Less explored is how data tracking might also serve as a means and medium for self-understanding and creative transformation. Such an inquiry allows a richer understanding of datafication and its dynamics, and more effective critique of its asymmetries and discontents.
Science, Technology, & Human Values, 2021
The afterword discusses how this special issue’s articles work from different angles to unsettle ... more The afterword discusses how this special issue’s articles work from different angles to unsettle the precepts of “attentional sovereignty” — the socially, politically, and economically valorized virtue that anchors most discussions over attention in its contemporary technological predicament. Whether the attentional sovereign appears in its liberal humanist or its neoliberal behavioral economic guise, sovereignty is valorized and considered under threat. By revealing the contemporary and historical backstories to our investment in this notion, these articles shift the terms of the debate around the attention crisis and clear space for thinking anew about the possibilities and limits of attention today.
Self in the Loop: Bits, Patterns, and Pathways in the Quantified Self
A Networked Self and Human Augmentics, Artificial Intelligence, Sentience, 2018
Gambled Away
Anthropology Now, 2012
Patsy, a green-eyed brunette in her midforties, began gambling soon after she moved to Las Vegas ... more Patsy, a green-eyed brunette in her midforties, began gambling soon after she moved to Las Vegas from California in the 1980s with her husband, a military officer who had been restationed at Nellis Air Force Base. Video poker machines had been introduced to the local gambling market in the late 1970s, and she discovered them on her trips to the grocery store. “My husband would give me money for food and milk, but I’d get stuck at the machines on the way in, and it would be gone in twenty minutes. . . . I would be gone too, I’d just zone into the screen and disappear.” Ten years later, Patsy’s gambling had progressed to a point where she played video poker before work, at lunchtime, on all her breaks, after work, and all weekend long. “My life revolved around the machines, even the way I ate,” she recalls as we talk outside the Gamblers Anonymous meeting where we had met. Patsy dined with her husband and daughter only when the three met in casinos; she would eat rapidly, then excuse herself to the bathroom so that she could gamble. Most often she gambled alone, then slept in her van in the parking lot. “I would dream of the machines, I would be punching numbers all night.” Eating alone, sleeping alone, Patsy achieved a sort of libidinal autonomy. Her time, her social exchanges, her bodily functions, and even her dreams were oriented around gambling. “When I wasn’t playing,” she tells
Public Culture, 2016
Online poker gamblers employ software to track and algorithmically analyze play-by-play game info... more Online poker gamblers employ software to track and algorithmically analyze play-by-play game information in real time, parsing opponents’ behavioral patterns and tendencies into color-coded numerical values that hover over their respective positions at the virtual table. These continuously updated statistical dashboards, along with retrospective game analysis and methodical routines of self-adjustment, help gamblers abide swings of chance and avoid falling into the emotionally clouded, fiscally dangerous state of “tilt.” Drawing on interviews with gamblers, observations of online poker play, and discussion threads from poker forum archives, the article explores how the game and its data-intensive software teach gamblers to act from the vantage of an infinite temporal field in which probabilistic values can be trusted to bear out. Although digital media is often associated with choice paralysis and the disappearance of the subject, here it serves as a technology of the self. The comp...
BioSocieties, 2016
Over the last 5 years, wearable technology-comprising devices whose embedded sensors and analytic... more Over the last 5 years, wearable technology-comprising devices whose embedded sensors and analytic algorithms can track, analyze and guide wearers' behavior-has increasingly captured the attention of venture capitalists, technology startups, established electronics companies and consumers. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted 2 years running at the Consumer Electronics Show and its Digital Health Summit, this article explores the vision of technologically assisted self-regulation that drives the design of wearable tracking technology. As key artifacts in a new cultural convergence of sensor technology and self-care that I call 'data for life', wearables are marketed as digital compasses whose continuous tracking capacities and big-data analytics can help consumers navigate the field of everyday choice making and better control how their bites, sips, steps and minutes of sleep add up to affect their health. By offering consumers a way to simultaneously embrace and outsource the task of lifestyle management, I argue, such products at once exemplify and short-circuit cultural ideals for individual responsibility and self-regulation.
Annual Review of Anthropology, 2016
Over the past decade, data-intensive logics and practices have come to affect domains of contempo... more Over the past decade, data-intensive logics and practices have come to affect domains of contemporary life ranging from marketing and policy making to entertainment and education; at every turn, there is evidence of “datafication” or the conversion of qualitative aspects of life into quantified data. The datafication of health unfolds on a number of different scales and registers, including data-driven medical research and public health infrastructures, clinical health care, and self-care practices. For the purposes of this review, we focus mainly on the latter two domains, examining how scholars in anthropology, sociology, science and technology studies, and media and communication studies have begun to explore the datafication of clinical and self-care practices. We identify the dominant themes and questions, methodological approaches, and analytical resources of this emerging literature, parsing these under three headings: datafied power, living with data, and data–human mediatio...
American Journal of Sociology, 2013
Gambling, particularly machine gambling, invokes key concerns in sociological thought, and in the... more Gambling, particularly machine gambling, invokes key concerns in sociological thought, and in the beautifully crafted ethnography Addiction by Design, Natasha Dow Schüll takes us on a journey from the inner life of gamblers to the broader social climate that they play in, using rich narrative accounts of their experiences, interwoven with sharp theoretical insights, to locate addiction within the structures and practices of late capitalist societies. The gambling industry has increased exponentially in size and power in recent years, with global corporations driving technologically innovative games that steadily colonize new markets within the United States and Asia, generating profits that are increasingly influential sources of revenue for states. Gambling machines are central to this global advance and account for some 85% of industry profit. Against this backdrop, Schüll begins the book with a striking spatial image: a road map designed by Mollie, a machine gambler, to illustrate the circuits of influence gambling has on her life, or the "experiential landscape" of gambling. Schüll uses the map as a conceptual tool to take us on an ethnographic tour de force of the gambling spaces of Las Vegas: casinos and strip malls, recovery groups and drugstores, academic conference halls and industry seminars. During our exploration, we meet many players like Mollie, whose "machine lives" are captivated by "the zone": an affective, trance-like state in which time, space, and even the value of money dissolves in intense play. In the zone, winning is reduced to an unwelcome distraction while continuous play becomes an end in itself. Through the deceptively simple technique of moving outward from the interior workings of machines, into the ergonomics and design of gambling environments, and finally into the bodies and minds of the players sitting in front of them, Schüll builds up a compelling narrative that links the phenomenological experience of play with the wider structures of con
Shifting Attention (Special Issue), 2021
The afterword discusses how this special issue's articles work from different angles to unsettle ... more The afterword discusses how this special issue's articles work from different angles to unsettle the precepts of "attentional sovereignty"-the socially, politically, and economically valorized virtue that anchors most discussions over attention in its contemporary technological predicament. Whether the attentional sovereign appears in its liberal humanist or its neoliberal behavioral economic guise, sovereignty is valorized and considered under threat. By revealing the contemporary and historical backstories to our investment in this notion, these articles shift the terms of the debate around the attention crisis and clear space for thinking anew about the possibilities and limits of attention today.
Social Research International Quarterly, 2019
The reason you begin tracking your data is that you have some uncertainty about yourself that you... more The reason you begin tracking your data is that you have some uncertainty about yourself that you believe the data can illuminate. It's about introspection, reflection, seeing patterns, and arriving at realizations about who you are and how you might change.-Eric Boyd, self-tracker the capacity to amass, store, and analyze data drawn from the physiological, behavioral, and "geolocational" experience of individuals is growing at an exponential rate and spreading to an ever-wider range of social domains. 1 In the "datafication" (van Dijck 2014) of everyday life, big data enthusiasts see a new and important opportunity: to transform areas of life typically known through their qualitative aspects into quantitative variables that can be measured and mined for hidden correlations and patterns. Such data, they argue, promises to yield objective insights into and answers for individual and social problems, increase our rational and predictive power, and provide new forms of self-determination. Yet many scholars are skeptical of these promises, highlighting the ways in which digital quantification technologies "permeate
Annual Reviews in Anthropology), 2017
Over the past decade, data-intensive logics and practices have come to affect domains of contempo... more Over the past decade, data-intensive logics and practices have come to affect domains of contemporary life ranging from marketing and policy making to entertainment and education; at every turn, there is evidence of " datafica-tion " or the conversion of qualitative aspects of life into quantified data. The datafication of health unfolds on a number of different scales and registers, including data-driven medical research and public health infrastructures, clinical health care, and self-care practices. For the purposes of this review , we focus mainly on the latter two domains, examining how scholars in anthropology, sociology, science and technology studies, and media and communication studies have begun to explore the datafication of clinical and self-care practices. We identify the dominant themes and questions, methodological approaches, and analytical resources of this emerging literature , parsing these under three headings: datafied power, living with data, and data–human mediations. We conclude by urging scholars to pay closer attention to how datafication is unfolding on the " other side " of various digital divides (e.g., financial, technological, geographic), to experiment with applied forms of research and data activism, and to probe links to areas of datafication that are not explicitly related to health.
History and Anthropology, 2017
This essay explores a set of existential risks that accompany digital storage capacities, devices... more This essay explores a set of existential risks that accompany digital storage capacities, devices, and promises: the anxious exhaustion of digital housekeeping; the disorientation of self-archiving; and the annihilating sense of loss that strikes when digital containment fails.
Public Culture, 2016
A man sits before a large desktop monitor station, the double screen divided into twenty-four rec... more A man sits before a large desktop monitor station, the double screen divided into twenty-four rectangles of equal size, each containing the green oval of a poker table with positions for nine players. The man is virtually "seated" at all twenty-four tables, along with other players from around the world. He quickly navigates his mouse across the screen, settling for moments at a time on flashing windows where his input is needed to advance play at a given table. His rapid-fire responses are enabled by boxed panels of colored numbers and letters that float above opponents' names; the letters are acronyms for behavioral tendencies relevant to poker play, and the numbers are statistical scores identifying where each player falls in a range for those tendencies. Taken together, the letters and numbers supply the man with enough information to act strategically at a rate of hundreds of hands per hour.
Biosocieties
Over the last 5 years, wearable technology – comprising devices whose embedded sensors and analyt... more Over the last 5 years, wearable technology – comprising devices whose embedded sensors and analytic algorithms can track, analyze and guide wearers' behavior – has increasingly captured the attention of venture capitalists, technology startups, established electronics companies and consumers. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted 2 years running at the Consumer Electronics Show and its Digital Health Summit, this article explores the vision of technologically assisted self-regulation that drives the design of wearable tracking technology. As key artifacts in a new cultural convergence of sensor technology and self-care that I call 'data for life', wearables are marketed as digital compasses whose continuous tracking capacities and big-data analytics can help consumers navigate the field of everyday choice making and better control how their bites, sips, steps and minutes of sleep add up to affect their health. By offering consumers a way to simultaneously embrace and outsource the task of lifestyle management, I argue, such products at once exemplify and short-circuit cultural ideals for individual responsibility and self-regulation.
Social Studies of Science, 2011
The young field of neuroeconomics converges around behavioral deviations from the model of the hu... more The young field of neuroeconomics converges around behavioral deviations from the model of the human being as Homo economicus, a rational actor who calculates his choices to maximize his individual satisfaction. In a historical moment characterized by economic, health, and environmental crises, policymakers have become increasingly concerned about a particular deviation for which neuroeconomics offers a biological explanation: Why do humans value the present at the expense of the future? There is contentious debate within the field over how to model this tendency at the neural level. Should the brain be conceptualized as a unified decision-making apparatus, or as the site of conflict between an impetuous limbic system at perpetual odds with its deliberate and provident overseer in the prefrontal cortex? Scientific debates over choice-making in the brain, we argue, are also debates over how to define the constraints on human reason with which regulative strategies must contend. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research, we explore how the brain and its treatment of the future become the contested terrain for distinct visions of governmental intervention into problems of human choice-making.
The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2005
... Natasha Dow Schull received her doctorate in anthro-pology from the University of California,... more ... Natasha Dow Schull received her doctorate in anthro-pology from the University of California, Berkeley. ... Draw Poker Double Down Stud® Poker Double Pay Poker Fast Action Draw Poker Fifty Play Draw Poker Five Aces Poker Flex Play Poker Game King 4.3 Poker ...
Book Reviews by Natasha Schull
American Ethnologist, 2003
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Papers by Natasha Schull
Book Reviews by Natasha Schull