The Affective Circle of Harassment and Enchantment: Reflections on the ŌURA Ring as an Intimate Research Device

Introduction

There it is, again. The black ring lies on the windowsill of my study. This beautifully designed “smart” object in its white transparent box has been there for a while, unused. It disturbs me. No, this time it’s more. It has started to harass me by its very presence. It seems as if it is suffocating—as if it can’t breathe inside the plastic box where it is supposed to be charged. I turn my gaze away so that I cannot see it. I’m supposed to use the ring for doing an auto-ethnography on sleep tracking—and so is one of my research collaborators. I feel ashamed about keeping the ring there—not least because it is so expensive and we have used our connections to get them to trial for free. I’m privileged to have a chance to test the ring, but still I don’t feel like doing it. Feeling unsettled, I call my collaborator to ask whether she has started to use it. She answers, with a somewhat embarrassed tone of voice: “Well no, not yet. As a matter of fact, it is still sitting on the shelf of my office and I haven’t even charged it yet. I’m so pleased to hear I’m not the only one struggling!”

Over the past decade, many new digital devices and software have been invented and released onto the market to facilitate the monitoring of personal body functions, habits, and dispositions. These new media technologies generate specific type of personal data that can often relate to very intimate details of their users’ bodies: including such data as their heart rates, physical activity, calories expended, sleep cycles, body temperature, menstrual and fertility cycles, sexual activities and encounters, body weight, and moods. A range of small “smart” devices embedded with digital sensors (often referred to as “wearables”) have been developed. These can be worn on human bodies to monitor and measure their activities and biometrics. Examples of such wearables include smartwatches, wristbands, headbands, devices that can clip on clothing, and pendants. The digital sleep-tracking ring that is our focus here, the ŌURA, is one such wearable device (ŌURA-ring, n.d.). The ring, available in various sizes to suit different adult finger sizes, is a sleek, minimalist design available in shiny black, matt black, or white. Although in place on the finger, its sensors are able to monitor blood volume pulse, body temperature, and physical activity level to calculate sleep length and stages. It syncs the data to a smartphone app using Bluetooth technology, where they can be reviewed by the user.

In this article, we discuss—with the help of Sara Ahmed’s (2004) influential work on affects—our intimate research relationship with the ŌURA ring and the intense affective resonances of this relationship. We had originally planned to use the ring as part of our auto-ethnographic study on the proliferating sleep-monitoring phenomenon. The company that makes the ring generously provided us with two free samples to use as part of our study. We were grateful for this opportunity, and felt obligated to the company to conduct the research as agreed. We were affectively engaged and intrigued by the exciting possibilities of conducting this research and what it might reveal. However, quite unexpectedly, we found that our attempts to start our research were hampered by a set of circling affects that disrupted our initial intentions. Our consideration of these affects in turn raised broader questions for us about the role of such new media devices in qualitative social research methods such as auto-ethnography. They provoked us to engage in reflection about how the very personal feelings that these devices may arouse can be incorporated into the insights of both research findings and methods.

Our attempts to use auto-ethnography to investigate the affordances of the ŌURA highlighted the relationship between embodiment, affect, and intimacy as they can be experienced in this type of qualitative research. Despite our initial enthusiasm, once we started our project, we experienced an unanticipated reluctance to try it for ourselves, and the associated feelings of shame, guilt, frustration, and disappointment that were aroused. These responses were complicated by a set of different feelings when the first author finally did try wearing the ring. As we explain, this emotional struggle has a lot to do with the intimate status of the ring as a sleep-tracking device worn on the body. The intimate nature of the ring generated significant implications for how—or indeed, whether—this kind of device can be successfully used as a research tool. It also related to the conventions inscribed in the academic research process that are often figured and represented as rational, unemotional, linear, and successful. We were confronted with the failure of an original research plan, involving a plethora of emotions. We found ourselves oscillating between enchantment at the possibilities of using the ring for our research, and feelings of harassment, as the unused rings reproached us with their presence. All this led us to position the conflicting or ambivalent affects brought about by the ring as the key concern of our study and to ponder the question: What are these affects trying to teach us?

In what follows, we begin with a discussion of the ŌURA ring as an intimate device. We go on to outline our theoretical and methodological approach to understanding the affective dimensions of digital wearable devices like ŌURA. Narrative excerpts from our auto-ethnographic field notes are then provided and analyzed for what they reveal about our attempts to incorporate the ring into our research. Our discussion section addresses what we learnt from our study and the implications for qualitative research using new media tools like the ŌURA ring.

The ŌURA Ring as an Intimate Device

According to the developer’s website (www.ouraring.com), the ŌURA was invented by a Finnish health technology company founded in 2013. The developers contend that it is vital for people to gain understanding of their sleep patterns using a self-tracking device, because of the importance that sleep plays in their health and productivity. The website makes direct claims about the intimate nature of the ring and the personal data it collects. The placing of the ŌURA on the finger, it is argued, facilitates this intimacy: “A Ring Makes Your Data More Intimate, and Accurate.” It is claimed that “Your fingers have easy-to-sense arteries, where the ring gathers precise data from your body’s vital signs.” The device is intimate, these words suggest, because it can be placed directly on a part of the human body where its sensors can readily gather accurate biometrics. Images of the hand showing the tracing of arteries are used to support the developer’s claims that the ring is more effective than digital wrist-worn trackers. These biometrics include heartbeat data as well as interbeat intervals (the distance between each heartbeat) and respiratory rate, all of which are algorithmically manipulated to discern what sleep stages users are in and for how long each stage lasts.

The app also calculates a “Readiness score,” which is used to “guide you in making better lifestyle choices.” The idea is that once people know their score, they can decide whether or not they are appropriately rested to tackle life demands and challenges. As such, these representations of the use and value of sleep-tracking using ŌURA conform to dominant discourses on digitized self-tracking of biometrics, which emphasize it as a means to achieve self-optimization, including better health, physical and mental well-being, and work productivity (Berg, 2017; Fors & Pink, 2017; Fotopoulou & O’Riordan, 2017; Lupton, 2013, 2016a, 2016b; Millington, 2016; Ruckenstein & Schüll, 2017; Schüll, 2016; Smith & Vonthethoff, 2017).

The ŌURA also speaks to a growing focus on the importance of sleep to health and well-being and concern that people in the global North are not getting enough good-quality sleep because of factors like stress, too-busy lives, and over-use of screen-based digital technologies (Coveney, 2014; Williams, 2007b; Williams, Coveney, & Meadows, 2015). Such terms as “sleep hygiene” and “sleep coaching” are often used to represent sleep habits as medical matters requiring active attention from people to ensure that they achieve sleep that is deemed restorative and health-enhancing. One consequence of this medicalized approach to sleep is the emergence of a plethora of smartphone and smartwatch apps as well as wearables such as smart wristbands and headbands, and disks or strips embedded with sensors that can be placed under a bedsheet or pillow, all specifically designed to monitor users’ sleep patterns and habits (Ong & Gillespie, 2016; Van den Bulck, 2015; Williams et al., 2015). The ŌURA is one of the more recent additions to this group of digitized sleep-tracking technologies. Like the others, it is a participant in contemporary “cultures of sleep” (Ellis, 2017; R. Hancock & Gillen, 2007).

The ŌURA may therefore be viewed as an intimate new media device in several ways. It is intimate because it is worn on the body and thus becomes part of the envelope of the body, augmenting and decorating it, and monitoring its functions. It is used during periods of sleep, a bodily practice that is itself culturally represented as a highly personal, vulnerable, and culturally charged, taking place in the very private spaces of the bed and bedroom and shared only with sexual partners, young children, or companion animals, if anyone (Coveney, 2014; Ellis, 2017; P. Hancock, 2008; Hsu, 2016; Salmela, 2018; Valtonen & Närvänen, 2015, 2016; Williams, 2007a, 2007b). The ŌURA generates and stores intimate information about wearers’ sleep habits: Information which can reveal previously unknown dimensions of their sleep patterns and quality that can then be potentially used to make changes in their personal bodily practices. Like other wearable devices that are designed to “nudge” users into “good habits” (Berg, 2017; Berson, 2015; Fors & Pink, 2017; Fotopoulou & O’Riordan, 2017; Lupton, 2016a, 2016b; Millington, 2016; Ruckenstein & Schüll, 2017), the ring is marketed as an overtly pedagogical device. It teaches wearers details about themselves and also trains them to deport their bodies differently as part of their practices of selfhood and identity. These personal and highly individual sleep data can also be used as part of close social relationships when users share the insights offered by the ring with others. Therefore, both the ring itself, as an embodied object, and the personal data it generates about otherwise private aspects of the user’s life, are intimate objects.

Our account to be presented in this article demonstrates that we were resistant to becoming the “compliant subjects” (Berlant, 1998, p. 288) of the intimacy promised by the ŌURA developers. We resisted becoming disciplined and datafied by the device—as many other users of new media devices (for an overview, see Ruckenstein & Schüll, 2017, pp. 11-12)—allowing it to come to life by incorporating it into our own lives and our research practices. This resistance was by no means planned—indeed, it confounded and complicated our initial research plans. Instead, it was generated by our affective responses to the idea of allowing the ring to become an intimate element of our private and public lives. Yet eventually one could not resist trying the ring out; the trial involving the emotions of both enthusiasm and disappointment.

The Affective Dimensions of Digital Wearable Devices

Digital devices and the data they generate are “lively”: They are entangled with human bodies and everyday lives (Lupton, 2017b). These assemblages exert a kind of “thing-power,” as Bennett (2004, p. 351) puts it, or “the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to product effects dramatic and subtle.” Affective responses are integral to the thing-power of digital devices. Studies of people who use wearable self-tracking devices, for example, have identified that the oftentimes ambivalent emotional responses to the devices and the data they generate as key elements of their motivation to adopt and continue their use or else to discard them (Fotopoulou & O’Riordan, 2017; Pantzar & Ruckenstein, 2017; Smith & Vonthethoff, 2017; Sumartojo, Pink, Lupton, & LaBond, 2016).

The recent literature on human-nonhuman encounters as part of social science research has noted that such research is a “shared accomplishment” between humans and nonhumans (Marres, 2012, p. 140). In their edited book, Invented Methods: The Happening of the Social (2012), Lury and Wakeford bring together an array of short reflective accounts by researchers of various specific methods they have used, including conceptual devices, such as anecdote, category, experiment, and list, and material objects such as tape recorder, photo-image, and cultural probe. Each sociologist represents their designated devices as active participants in the construction of research. Some openly divulge the emotions they harbor toward their research technologies, as in Les Back’s affectionate account of his trusty tape recorder. Other sociologists have recently used such phrases as “the social life of methods” to identify and emphasize the contingent and emergent nature of methods. This approach explicitly draws attention to the fact that social research methods are both part of the social world they seek to document and also work to constitute that social world (Law & Ruppert, 2013; Law, Ruppert, & Savage, 2011; Savage, 2013), or indeed, are “performative of the social” (Law et al., 2011, p. 8).

Thus far, however, few social and cultural researchers have as yet confronted the ways in which wearable smart devices like ŌURA operate as research coparticipants, shaping what is known. Although increasing attention has been paid by ethnographers to the enrollment of mobile technologies, such as smartphones, in everyday ethnographic practices (Postill & Pink, 2012; van Doorn, 2013), they have tended to skate over the issue that the intimate and affective relationship that develops between the device and the ethnographer, which shapes the way the ethnography is conducted as well as the findings. Nor have they taken into account the nondigital elements of the environments in which new media are used (or not used; Moores, 2012; Pink, 2015). Understanding these aspects are important when making sense of the ways in which new media such as wearable self-tracking devices are incorporated into everyday lives, including the working lives of researchers. These contexts may include affective, spatial and sensory elements (Pink, 2011; Sumartojo et al., 2016).

To examine the intimate relation of our researcher bodies with the ŌURA ring as a novel research assemblage, we draw inspiration from Sara Ahmed’s (2004) influential work on affect. The recent “affective turn” involves different strands of research with different ontological and epistemological premises (see, for example, Blackman & Venn, 2010; Clough & Halley, 2007), involving also different—and debated—takes on emotions and affect, and their relation (see, for example, Gorton, 2007). Ahmed avoids making a clear distinction between emotion and affect as this would only reinforce the problematic division between mind and body as well as social and biological; as she points out in her conversation with Sigrid Schmitz (2014, pp. 98-99), the habit of (re)producing strict distinctions detaches us from the messy reality of the world which is more about entanglement as it is a rivalry between distinctive concepts.

Ahmed’s emphasis on the relationship between bodies, language, and affects as well the relationality of affects are particularly helpful for our study. Her key question “what do emotions do?” helps us to consider how emotions operate to “make” and “shape” the relations between our bodies and the ring. In Ahmed’s (2004) way of thinking, affects do not reside “inside” or “outside” of the body. Nor are affects properties of subjects or of objects. Instead, affects are to be conceptualized as forces that move between objects and subjects. Although the movement, or circulation of affects, is a key focus of Ahmed’s theorizing, it also involves a consideration of attachment—of what “sticks.” For us, the ŌURA ring became a sticky object through personal and social tension (Ahmed, 2004, p. 11). These forces—that both move and stick—are integral to thing-power that Bennett (2004) refers to, animating the liveliness of new media technologies.

Furthermore, Ahmed’s idea that emotions are directional is of particular importance to us. As emotions are “about” something, they involve an orientation toward an object. This “aboutness” of emotions means they involve a stance on the world, or a way of apprehending the world (Ahmed, 2004, p. 7). In this sense, affect is bound up with human meaning-making, and to understand this meaning-making, the histories of contact between people and objects need to be recognized. Affects cannot be detached from personal and cultural histories, conventions, and habits. As the ŌURA ring is a new media device, our feelings toward it are shaped by (gendered) cultural narratives on technology and by our own spatial locations, age, personal experiences, and memories. Other researchers and another device might result in another story. It is thus the process of taking an orientation toward the object that matters in our analysis. Such an affective orientation, or a stance, is an epistemic stance to us as it guides the way we apprehend and know the world (cf. situated knowing, for example, Haraway, 1988).

Although Ahmed primarily focuses on examining the circulation of public emotions via cultural texts, in our study, we emphasize the affects circulating in the private and intimate sphere of our (blurred) academic and personal lives. In observing how we responded to different social contexts and activities (e.g., from the home bedroom to university cafeteria), and using our own researcher bodies as resources for grasping diverse affects, we are able to highlight the lively, messy, troubled, ephemeral, and unpredictable nature of live affective processes (Knudsen & Stage, 2015, p. 2). In doing so, we can ponder the elements of the thing-power of this new research device.

Taking into consideration our empirical focus, the ŌURA ring and its interrelation with our bodies in flesh, we further emphasize the importance of the body and embodiment in our theoretical frame (see also Fotaki, Kenny, & Vachhani, 2017; Lupton, 2017a; Probyn, 2000, 2010; Pullen & Rhodes, 2015; Pullen, Rhodes, & Thanem, 2017). A critical dimension for our analysis here is the recognition that the body is a sleeping and waking assemblage, in which human flesh is configured with nonhuman objects (Ellis, 2017; Valtonen, Meriläinen, Laine, & Salmela-Leppänen, 2017; Valtonen & Närvänen, 2015; Williams, 2005). Our research focus thereby resonates with recent calls made in studies of affect. As Knudsen and Stage (2015, p. 5) argue, “research questions about affect become increasingly more answerable if they are concretely linked to specific bodies (for instance, the researcher’s own body) in specific (and empirically approachable) social contexts.” The institutional context of our study, the academic workplace, commonly values the triumph of disembodied reason, and the ability to control emotions is a cornerstone of the formation of the competent academic self (Longhurst, 2000). It is in this context that the ŌURA ring enters: destabilizing, or indeed, troubling this assumption.

Background of the Study

Although we, as three coauthors of this article, are all women living in countries in the global North, we entered this research project with different sociocultural backgrounds and life experiences. Both Salmela (later: Tarja) and Valtonen (later: Anu) live in Finland, Northern Europe; work at the same university; and are both involved in a wider research project critically examining sleep cultures in the context of tourism, organization studies, and marketing. In turn, Lupton (later: Deborah) lives many thousands of kilometers away in Australia. Of us, only Tarja and Anu had access to the use of an ŌURA ring—provided by the company that developed it.

The idea of researching the ŌURA ring began when Tarja and Anu planned to conduct a collective auto-ethnographic study of our experiences of sleep tracking. The motivation to do such a study with a selected sleep tracking device traces back to 2013. Back then, the phenomenon of sleep tracking seemed to be rapidly expanding. We wanted to try the devices out ourselves to create a stance toward this growingly popular practice. Already at this point, we had experienced a highly ambivalent emotional response toward the practice of sleep tracking. For us, it was an interesting but simultaneously confronting phenomenon—something that would require stepping out of our comfort zone if we tested it ourselves. At that stage, it was the well-known Sleep Tracker worn on the wrist that we planned to use as a research device. However, it remained in a shelf in our closets, all wrapped up nicely in its packaging. Back then, the distance between the device and ourselves as ethnographers could be partly explained by the size of the Sleep Tracker device and the imagined discomfort and inconvenience of using it during sleep. Sleep tracking devices had already become sites of our personal, and social, tension (Ahmed, 2004, pp. 10-11).

Several years later, we were willing to give sleep-tracking devices another try. One day, Anu received an e-mail from the developer of the ŌURA, who had come to work at the same university. He knew that Anu was leading a project on sleep, and suggested a meeting over a coffee. A plan to conduct a study on ŌURA emerged. We were given two rings, one for Anu and one for Tarja, and a name of a person who could assist in their use, if necessary. The eventual auto-ethnographic study involved using the ring to track our sleep and engaging with the We Are Curious Personal Health Record platform, where we would share our sleep data and discuss with others. We thought that this approach would work well to generate insights into how the device worked in practice and to investigate its personal and social affordances.

Despite her professional interest in self-tracking practices and cultures, Deborah has never herself willingly used a digital self-tracking device to monitor her own body. Before being involved in the ŌURA project, she already harbored reluctance to personally use such a device, either for research or personal purposes, because her previous research had identified significant data privacy and security concerns about collecting personal data in this way. Thus, while Deborah was not offered the opportunity to try out the ŌURA for free, as were the two of us authors, it is unlikely she would have agreed to do so. In her case, her affective responses were characterized by suspicion of how and why the developers and other third parties such as hackers or health insurance companies might use her personal data.

To identify and acknowledge the affects involved in our experiences of the ŌURA ring, Tarja and Anu kept self-reflexive diaries of their troubled experiences of the idea of allowing the ŌURA ring to touch our skin, share our beds, and enter our slumber. In addition, Tarja used ŌURA for three days approximately at the halfway of the research project and kept self-reflexive diary of her experiences, which she shared with the other authors. Deborah was invited by the other authors to respond to their reflections and contribute further analytical insights to the discussion here presented. In doing so, she drew on insights from her previous projects on the sociocultural dimensions of self-tracking.

(Trying to) Build a Relationship With ŌURA

Yes, yes! A good time to meet Anu—we have scheduled a meeting by a cup of coffee to discuss our ŌURA project. It feels like a weight has been lifted from my shoulders, as I now know that she isn’t using the ring either. For the past few days, the ring hasn’t really been staring at me with an evil look—it has—quite surprisingly—even aroused new interest. Perhaps it’s because the pressure is now off to use it? After a moment of hesitation, I leave the ring in my study and head to the cafeteria. We start discussing of work, with a highly emotional vibe. Suddenly we find ourselves jiggling and giggling on the couch. We laugh about the situation with ŌURA: an unsuccessful research process! “This is what research is really about—it just doesn’t always work, the plan, does it???” The poor ring in our office rooms—we feel sad about it, really! We suddenly feel thoroughly excited about talking about the ring. We find inspiration to work on a paper about not using it—so inspired that we notice ourselves roaring with laughter and it makes us feel excitingly rebellious! The ring seems to be there—even when it isn’t. As if the ring in our rooms enables us to think more creatively. We want to write about this process—about this damn little black ring! (Narrative 1)

This excerpt from Tarja’s field journal reflects the way in which our responses to ŌURA dramatically evolved. At this point in the research process, both of the rings stayed on the shelves of our offices and the pressure to start to use them for auto-ethnographic purposes had diminished in its affective force. Once this pressure had relaxed, this allowed us to be creative and to cherish the irrational and nonlinear nature of doing research—something that we ourselves had so far left unspoken in the final outcomes of our academic writings. It gave room for bursts of affective responses to themes outside our actual research focus; to laugh at the supposed rational practices of scholarship, and the illusion of a linear research process. The ring stimulated the possibility to be “us” as researchers—as women in academia—proud of our backgrounds and hesitation about self-tracking. Our reluctance to go along with the originally planned fieldwork with the ŌURA ring made the contingent nature of academic research overtly visible. The fieldwork started to encircle around this technologized black ring in ways we couldn’t control.

One reason for our reluctance is that we knew that the ŌURA ring would bring work to our beds: The data gathering would enter one of our most private spaces. It would be fieldwork we would be conducting when in the deepest mode of bodily relaxation, and possibly sharing our beds with partners, other family members, or pets. Much to our surprise, the ring incited us to feel simultaneously uninterested and utterly interested; both excited and withdrawn. This was unexpected, as for us, it almost seemed that the research project would just languish because of our ambivalent emotional relationship with the ring: just like the ring itself would remain inert if it were not put into use. But still, in our conversations, the ring seemed mysteriously as if it were still alive on our bookshelf. The affective resonances it emanated were realized in our reflections.

Although ŌURA’s self-tracking power was closed off and it couldn’t reach its full potential, it somewhat hauntingly asked for our attention. There came a moment when we noticed almost feeling sorry for the ring to be in its box all alone in the office, while we chatted about it in the cafeteria. Simultaneously, the ring pushed us away while demanding attention: The ring was inert unless it was entangled in flesh with its living user and dependent on the human to make it lively, to give it the rhythm of our hearts to feel, our pulse to catch, almost as it needed our blood to suck, our flesh to eat. Then, an unexpected event happened.

It came out of nowhere. Yes, I took the ring with me from the uni. Now the ring is in my home, on the bench in the corridor. There it is, staring at me again. I can almost imagine a twisted smile of pleasure in its plastic face. I was about to use it. Why? Can’t really tell. But no—I didn’t do it. There it lies, unused. I’m so going to take it back to the uni. I don’t like the pressure it places on me. Whoa, the ring has really exercised a lot in my backpack. (Narrative 2)

The ring followed Tarja into her home even when it was earlier decided that it was all right not to use it for the purposes of the research. The whole event seemed strange and unexplainable: Why did she take the ring with her when going home? Why did the ring still “haunt” her? Perhaps it was a moment of hesitancy toward her own beliefs of the problems of self-tracking? Maybe it was just curiosity? The ring was closer to Tarja’s body when it was carried in her backpack—but covered in many layers, sharing the space with other stuff in the backpack, and thus struggling to reach its user. The ring had entered her home but only the corridor, which didn’t have an intimate symbolic meaning to Tarja. The place was more neutral—the ring was far away from the bedroom. But at the same time, the corridor was a place for Tarja that reminded her when coming from work and opening the front door that now all the duties relating to work and the pressure of measuring anything have ended, and she can relax. And when she then saw the ring sitting on the bench on the corridor, it seemed like an intruder—a stranger in her home—something which had to be sent away. But even though she did take the ring away, the process continued, as demonstrated in the following excerpt . . .

I’m writing another article at my office. As part of the background research work, I read about a deadly disease called Fatal Familial Insomnia, where a person dies due to their inability to sleep. I start to worry about the short amount of sleep I have been having lately. I realize that, in fact, I do have just the right device waiting for me to measure my sleep . . . The ŌURA looks at me again from the shell. It looks demanding. I shiver. Maybe . . . now’s the time? Could I give it a go? I walk to the ring and take it out of its box. It’s big—too big for my middle finger, but suitable for the first finger and the thumb, although a bit loose. I put the ring into my first finger. It touches my skin. Now, the ring has got what it wished for. And, in ways I can’t explain, so have I. (Narrative 3)

The emotional turmoil she felt about her sleep led to her trying out the ring—to experience its touch on her skin—and to give it a chance. It was a moment where the ring made its first physical contact with her flesh. But the place in which the physical and affective entanglement took place was not a private one: It was the workplace, a somewhat neutral place, and as such, it was reassuring for the author to try the ring out there. The deliberations about death and lack of sleep that were part of her other research made her hesitate again about her own attitudes toward self-tracking. For a moment, self-tracking, in the form of an expensive and small digital device that waited to prove its worth, seemed like a good opportunity. And it was this affective moment, an ambivalent but powerful combination of fear of stress, even death, and of enthusiasm about the self-tracking device that was already to hand, that made Tarja disrupt and ruin the “second” plan of research, causing further emotions of shame and guilt. The rollercoaster ride continues as Tarja deliberates on her first physical contact with ŌURA:

I put the Bluetooth on in my phone. I start the ŌURA app that I have downloaded before when we first got the rings for testing. Nothing happens. My hand is dry—maybe it’s because of that? I search Bluetooth devices with my phone, doing it again . . . Nothing. The ŌURA app now asks me to put the ring in my finger. I do it, again. It searches . . . trying to connect. No. “Put the ring in the charger and try again later.” “Ok. Feeling a bit frustrated, I’m still so interested in trying out the ring that I put the ring in the charger and get a bit eager for it to download. I carry on with working on my other article. Or try to concentrate on it . . .” (After a while) “I’m frustrated! No, I’m pissed off! It’s connected but still there’s no activity level there to show me. Aargh! My attention comes back to the ring, again and again, stopping my work and my flow. I feel I don’t get anything done today at work! This is what I hate about apps and tracking!!!” (Narrative 4)

Already this intense affective moment is the first reminder for her of the reasons she has been reluctant about self-tracking with digital devices. It was exactly this reminder that made her so angry, frustrated, and disappointed—she knew this was going to happen! She remembers the discussions with Anu about not having the energy or will to take care of the ring: to remember to charge it, to connect it with our phones, to make sure that our phones are charged and the Bluetooth connection is working. This experience correlates with Anu’s frustration while trying to download the ŌURA app from the Internet to her smartphone. The same text appeared on the screen: “your phone does not . . .” Also the very idea that she should go and visit the University’s IT helpers (all men) and seek their assistance made her feel angry. She could easily imagine the situation when a middle-aged woman enters their room and asks technological advice: the men’s little smile, patronizing tone of voice, and the inevitable words, “Well, it should work.” Both Tarja and Anu have experienced this event so many times in the past.

But there was, indeed, little chance to resist technology in that situation. It seemed that the small ring had its own ecosystem behind its sophisticated good looks: It was in symbiosis with our flesh as well as with another technological object—the smartphone. Even though the ring was a stand-alone device, which means that it gathered information of our bodies without being attached to another device, it still was useful only insofar as the information it gathered from the body became visualized. If there was no synchronization between the ring and the other parts of its ecosystem, the ring kept the information to itself. (And what does it do with that? Hopefully nothing!) According to the ŌURA website, the ring can store data for up to three weeks without reconnecting to the app on a phone, provided the ring is kept charged. Once the phone is in range again (and its Bluetooth enabled), the ring will upload the data to the phone automatically.

But even if the ring knew what to do with that data without us seeing the data in visualized form, there isn’t a long way to go for the ring: The ring becomes inert again when the power is expended, and one has forgotten to take care of it. So it never has an agency of its own and the opposite is true: The human doesn’t have any access to her bodily “recordings” without this kind of technological object (in a sense that we are discussing self-tracking numbers and data). This makes the relationship between the ring and its user reciprocal and intimate. But what separates us from the ring, for one thing, is the ability of the ring to recover—to rise from the dead when it is recharged. It doesn’t forget anything (if its memory isn’t emptied). When out of energy and power, the ring is a somewhat comatose state where it (inanimately) slumbers. It is a state where one doesn’t lose one’s lively data, but protects them behind the cold, inanimate shell. After a while, Tarja’s patience paid off . . .

I did it. Success! It tracks! It really says something about me and my activity level! And what . . .? It doesn’t require that my phone is with me all the time? Yes, yes! I’m not dependent on my phone! It is only the ring that must be in my finger for me to get some statistics! Oh, it’s good to use it as much as I can, as it gets to know me better that way. Ok, I think I’ll manage. I feel so excited! At the same time, I feel so guilty! I shouldn’t be wearing it, should I? This is not what we planned with Anu! Did I ruin our plan? Should I even reveal I have used it? But I’m so excited about the ring . . . I think I should do some exercise now to get it going, to calculate my activity—not so much my sleep that I’m now interested in—but how many steps, how many calories do I exactly burn? Ohhh—this is exciting! (Narrative 5)

Together with the happy feeling of success of making the ŌURA work, the feelings of shame and guilt were aroused. The moment was full of simultaneous excitement and anxiety—an excitement largely unexplainable and partly truly understandable: For Tarja, it was a huge achievement to make the ring work. This affective response also tells about the expectations and emotional charge toward the ring. It was something that was talked about for so many months: And now, Tarja saw it in practice—it was her that the device was now tracking and learning to know. The story continues as she takes the ring with her to her home, now on her finger, not in the backpack with other stuff and even entering the bed in the guestroom—making the technological device important and reflecting a huge step in the affective relationship with the ring:

First night with the ring is now behind me. It stayed on well! After waking up I instantly turn on my phone and the app, the Bluetooth, and start waiting for it to sync. Usually I don’t carry my phone with me in the bedroom or anywhere near my bed, but now I make an exception. Of course, I have to see how I slept! As a matter of fact, I slept in the guestroom alone last night—I had an argument with my husband and even though I’m a bit upset about it, I feel a kind of freedom to concentrate on the data I’m now about to discover. I feel so selfish in doing that. It’s not me, really, to track anything—or carry my phone with me and be interested in numbers telling me about my body. I feel almost like a stranger to myself. There they are. . . The stats! I slept WELL! Oh man, that’s a nice amount of deep sleep, isn’t it? And REM? I remember something about dreaming last night—yes, this is when it happened! Hey, it says about my readiness level for today . . . I’m all good to be active today! (Narrative 6)

The ring suddenly “hopped” to Tarja’s bed after her months of reluctance toward it. This process is an example of the lively and often unexpected nature of the research process and our intimate relationships with research devices. All of a sudden, the device became a source of inspiration for her—she even noticed saying good things about self-tracking to her friends and family members: that maybe she had been too black-and-white in the past in her attitudes. But in this excerpt, it remains important to notice that the ring never entered the master bedroom that she usually shares with her partner and two cats. Moreover, she didn’t wear the ring in the most private places in her home—in the kitchen, the sauna, the shower, either. It was the living room and the guestroom, and the places outside her home, that she carried the ring with her for three days (and two nights). But the whole arrangement with the ring and the separate beds made her feel selfish and again, guilty. At the same time, she couldn’t hide the enthusiasm—and that’s what made her feel even guiltier and a stranger in her own home—and body, leading to frustration:

In the evening, I start to get frustrated with the ring and the way it nags me to still take some steps even though I’m tired. The ring starts to feel useless. I don’t want it to track me anymore. I want to live my Sunday my way—not the “ring way.” My husband and I have also solved our argument, and I’m able to sleep in our bedroom again. I don’t want to take the ring with me. The ring is in its packaging where I put it a couple of hours ago. I know, that I won’t be taking it from there again. These three days were interesting, but after the first excitement, I was confronted by the very reasons I hate tracking. (Narrative 7)

Discussion and Conclusion

In this article, we have sought to uncover the affective dimensions of an auto-ethnographic research process as spontaneous, disrupted, and disruptive when affected by, and constructed upon, an intimate relationship between a novel research device and a group of researchers. As we have shown, the ŌURA ring, as it entered into a research assemblage with us, generated many powerful affects. Our reflections have raised a conflicting affective relation of researchers-in-flesh to a technological device gaining a powerful agency during a research process, shaping it and threatening the limits and boundaries of what we consider as intimate-public-work-related lives.

We have attempted to identify and analyze the complexities and liveliness of thing-power of the ŌURA ring as it lived with us in our working and domestic spaces. Our lively experiences with this new media technology draw attention to the nonlinear and highly affective nature of a research process. Our analysis identified what Ahmed (2004) calls the “stickiness” of (in our case, research) objects (pp. 20, 45, 74, 89-100). This stickiness provides valuable insights into how a relationship between researchers and a research device becomes developed, contributing to the understanding of human-nonhuman encounters in research processes and their affective dimension. More broadly, our own experiences with (not) using the ring engendered some important insights into why and how other people might take up or resist the affordances of a digital sleep-tracking device like ŌURA. As such, our original research intentions were at least partly achieved, despite the disruption to our initial plans.

We propose that the affective force of the ring operates through the logics of both enchantment and harassment. Noticing this contradictory nature of our affective experience, and taking it as a key concern, enables us to trace how a set of affects are on the move when the relation between our bodies and the ring is examined. Thus, instead of taking some “master feeling” as the starting point of the study, such as hate, fear, or happiness, as many feminist and cultural researchers on emotions and affects tend to do (e.g., Ahmed, 2004), we allowed different affects surrounding the ŌURA ring to emerge, and pondered how our research process was directed by these affects. Our empirical research strategy also enabled us to show the workings of relational ontology (Wetherell, 2015): demonstrating how affects surrounding the ŌURA ring changed and moved when situated in a different temporal, social, cultural, and material contexts.

Acting both as an intimate self-tracking and research device, the ŌURA became a sticky object through personal and social tension and saturation of affect which was directed toward and generated by it (Ahmed, 2004, p. 11). This saturation of affects within/around the ring unfolded a circulation of conflicting emotions within us—doubt, guilt, fear, shame, dismay, disappointment, and hesitation as well as joy, relief, excitement, enthusiasm, and pride—piling and piling until the process seemed to come to an end. When the first author finally slipped the ring on her finger despite her earlier reluctance to do so, she became emotionally attached to the device after being “awayed” (Ahmed, 2004) by it for a good time. Moments of “towardness” impelled her to be almost obsessed with the ring and what it told her (to do). There were also times when she felt intensely awayed from the ring again—resulting in her deciding to put it away in a drawer, hidden from sight. The relinquishment of wearing the ring can be considered as a “loosening” of the affective tie between the ring and the first author, giving birth to a circulation of “awayness.” But what still reminds us of the stickiness of the ring is the very fact that we are writing about it now.

As our analysis found, despite being “sticky” at times, objects, affects, and bodies are also dynamic assemblages. In our research process, the ŌURA ring’s affective flow manifested in ways where it was first not used, then used, and then discarded. Furthermore, even when not used, the ring wasn’t lost or put away, it was there all the time. The ring enchanted and harassed us, enchanted again, and then harassed again. Its thing-power eventually inspired us to write this article. It circled around our conversations and moments of writing. We suggest that with this circling and flowing (non)presence of the ŌURA evoked/inhabited affective potentialities that began to threaten us: A new media device gained a powerful agency.

Our theoretical and empirical approach provides one possible way to identify these feelings, helping in particular to highlight the importance of personal and cultural contexts for understanding how “smart” devices for self-tracking like ŌURA are incorporated (or not) into people’s mundane routines. In our case, the research contexts included our access to free samples of ŌURA and our subsequent need to fulfill our obligation to the company’s expectations; our knowledge and interest in the phenomenon of self-tracking, bodily monitoring, and sleep scripts; and their development and orientation to the (non)division of work and free time. Other contexts in which we sought to bring the ring into our auto-ethnographic research included our physical locations, our interactions with the material object of the ring, and our interactions with other people. As we found, our feelings about the ring changed, in some cases rapidly, when the social, cultural, and material contexts changed.

Sharing our auto-ethnographic experiences in this article is, for us, a profound act of intimacy. We have recounted some revealing and highly personal elements of our lives, and have challenged the ideal of the successful academic researcher as disembodied and rational. Our empirical account presents emotions considered as “unruly” (Ahmed, 2004, p. 3) or less-appreciated in academic discourse (such as shame and guilt) or simply not appropriate for normative academic discourse (e.g., Katila & Meriläinen, 2002). We thereby offer an alternative approach to the academic research process, as these types of feelings are frequently erased from accounts included in the final versions of research articles, even those attempting to provide broad self-reflexive accounts (Fraser & Puwar, 2008; Gilmore & Kenny, 2014; Law & Urry, 2004). The emotions arising during our research process can be considered to “frustrate the formation of the competent self” (Ahmed, 2004, p. 3)—in our case, the ideal of a competent academic. Nevertheless, as we outline above, taking seriously these intimate emotions and voicing them publicly is a generative act, as it configures novel questions and facilitates the critical research endeavor.

Our study also illustrates the complex and fuzzy nature of ethical issues involved in research process employing new media devices. We fully agree with the Markham and Buchanam (2012) who highlight that ethical considerations should be responsive to diverse contexts and adaptable to continually changing technologies. Our focus on affects and embodiment leads us to suggest that perhaps the emerging stream on “corporeal ethics” (see, for example, Pullen & Rhodes, 2015) might provide a fruitful stance for furthering the debate on ethics related to studies on new media technologies. Then, the affective moments (as the ones we experienced during our process) can be considered, and indeed are also ethical moments.

To conclude, what emerged from our research process with ŌURA was a creation of a communal place/time/opportunity to reflect on the circling of affective practices around self-tracking devices as well as what should count as a successful academic research project. Although our auto-ethnography of the ring was experienced at first as a “failure” of our initial research plan, by reflecting on the affective and intimate dimensions of this “failure,” we have achieved other important insights into both the lived experience of engaging with a sleep-tracking device and its possibilities as a research tool. The “circle of failure” evolved into new opportunities, instigated by the thing-power of the researcher-device assemblage.