The Quantified Self in the Energy Demand Management: A New Forme of (bottom-up) Regulation of Practices ?

Our presentation analyzes the development of “reflexive” socio-technical infrastructures in the field of environmental protection and energy demand management. Such reflexive infrastructures aim at enabling and organizing the encounters between people and real-time dynamic visualizations of their own practices, in the hope that such encounters will give rise to new forms of individual conduct. Such reflexive infrastructures are crucial to the development of a trace-based regulation of practices by offering “augmented” subjects ways of coming together and interacting in a kind of public space of traces.

Based on an experimental case study of smart metering for the residential electric consumption, we will try to understand how users are affected by such encounters with traces of their own activity, and how such encounters constitute particular types of subjects and attachments, i.e. “quantified selves”. But mostly, we will discuss the limits of these technological infrastructures of self-tracking. And we will show how several social devices, based on gamification and social interaction, are used to reinforce and make such attachments socially accountable, for instance by using the accountability requirements or reward for the effort that seem to promote virtuous practices in the field of environmental protection.