Experiencing Health (In)Visibility:Attention in Digital (Self-)Surveillance

Ordinary measurement practices of personal health are a planetary phenomenon. As surveillance extends across planetary scales through these measurement practices, personal health technologies illustrate a shift toward the intimate domain of surveillance in everyday life. Health apps and wearables promise care and prevention while introducing new forms of observation, normativity, and responsibility. In doing so, they produce specific visibilities while generating new invisibilities, rendering some aspects of health knowable and actionable while others recede from view. This paper proposes the notion of ‘attention’, understood as a co-constitutive process, as a conceptual lens to rethink the ambiguities of digital health (self-)surveillance where visibility and invisibility are negotiated, rather than framed through binary frameworks of empowerment and discipline. Drawing on an ongoing qualitative study in Denmark about non-patients’ self-tracking practices, I argue that these practices make aspects of health (in)visible that can both cultivate agency and enact control, depending on how they are interpreted and embedded in everyday life. Through the lens of attention, I show how this ambivalence unfolds in the tension between new forms of attunement and self-experience, even as these same practices can be co-opted and turned against the self. Empirically, this approach makes it possible to trace how human agency is enacted through selective engagement, reinterpretation, or deliberate avoidance, while remaining constrained by the steering of attention imposed by technological systems. Attention thus grounds abstract debates about surveillance in lived bodily experience by focusing on how digital technologies configure and are, in turn, reconfigured by what users notice, attend to, and how this shapes actions in relation to their health. This paper contributes to surveillance studies by illustrating how (self-)surveillance operates through attention: an ambivalent mode that simultaneously orients the self, creates new forms of uncertainty and reshapes experiences of health in data-intensive societies.