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Health tracking media and the production of operational space: A critical

analysis of Qantas Wellbeing App

Article in Media International Australia · August 2023

DOI: 10.1177/1329878X231194803

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Health tracking media and the production of operational space: a
critical analysis of Qantas Wellbeing App

This article examines the production of operational space amidst the rise of self-
and data-tracking media, through the case study of the Qantas Wellbeing App
(QWA). We draw on the operational paradigm in media studies to envisage how
the QWA is embedded in the social-material relations between its users and the
app, and the broader data-platform economy. By conceptualising the QWA as an
operational media, the inquiry focuses on its designs and techniques that prompt
users to fulfil prescribed tasks and follow instructions. We follow Lefebvre’s
conceptualisation of the production of space to evaluate three sets of social
relations reconfigured by the QWA: human-to-human, human-to-machine, and
data-to-data. By relying on qualitative evidence collected from an auto-
ethnographic approach, our analyses focus on 1) spatial practices and 2) social
relations constructed around QWA between the authors to argue that social space
is becoming a programmed reality that adheres to the logic of technological
automation. Our analysis here affirms the app’s capacity and objective to modify
human behaviours and to evaluate how the app has recalibrated the authors’
respective and shared social spaces to create the needed condition of behaviour
changes among the users. As social space is centred around human relations and
activities, human agency and lives become secondary in an operational regime,
which relies on data synchronisation to prosecute for the operational space and
life.

Keywords: Auto-ethnography; datafication; health-tracking media; space;

operationalism; operational media.

Introduction

This article examines the production of operational space amidst the rise of self- and

data-tracking media. We use the health-tracking application (app) Qantas Wellbeing

App (QWA) as a case study and draw on the operational paradigm in media studies to

envisage the possible consequences of datafication of human bodies and lives. By

1
relying on qualitative evidence collected from an auto-ethnographic approach, the

analysis focuses on 1) spatial practices and 2) social relations as relations of production

between the two authors. Our findings suggest that social spaces of and shared by the

two authors when using the QWA, were becoming a programmed reality. The QWA’s

datafication has engineered such a reality, which involves the automated and continuous

quantification of (the authors’) lives and bodies through digital information (Mejia and

Couldry, 2019).

As the trend of datafication relies on the penetration of surveillance technologies

into all aspects of our lives (Andrejevic, 2019), datafication is introducing a new logic

of capital accumulation and profit maximisation, as Zuboff (2020) writes (p.67).

Datafication has given rise to new meanings of capitalism and its operation in a

digitised world. While Zuboff has focused on modifying human behaviours through

surveillance technologies, Hutchins and Andrejevic (2021) remind us that the

environment, including social and private spaces, must be recalibrated first to create the

conditions for behaviour changes. Importantly, datafication is a continuous process

(Andrejevic, 1029) that enables and is the outcome of behaviour changes. While data-

tracking media might facilitate new behaviours to harvest data, these new behaviours

would enable new datafication processes for machine learning and algorithmic

optimisation (data utilisation). The continuous quality of datafication implies that social

spaces are continuous being reconfigured and repurposed for datafication to operate.

This article explores the emerging notion of operational media, which not only

refers to the technological underpinnings of datafication in this type of media, but also

reveals the political and economic ambitions embedded in its design and execution. The

definition of operational media is still evolving. Some scholars define it as the

2
assemblages of technologies (Crandall, 2005), working media (Hoel, 2018), and

interventional applications (Friedrich and Hoel, 2021) that build on the mechanism of

real-time datafication and information capturing to optimise machine learning and

algorithmic decision-making. As operational media aim to do things to the world and

human body (Hoel, 2018), they rely on specific tasks and instructions instead of

symbolism to generate meaning within their constructed modelled universe (Hoel, 2018;

Friedrich and Hoel, 2021).

We treat the QWA as an operational media to explore the social-material

relations it creates and the relevant social and economic consequences of these relations

in the context of our study. We began our journey by following Henri Lefebvre’s

intellectual guidance on the production of social space (1984, 2009). His analyses of

spatial practices and social relations in a capitalist context are vital to understanding

how personal desires and material needs are systematically managed and strategically

programmed to optimise economic production efficiency (1984, 1976). Moreover, since

human bodies occupy spaces and produce (social) spaces (Lefebvre, 1984), the

technological reconfiguration of the meaning and function of bodies must embody and

be embedded in the broader economic imperative of capital accumulation and

production.

Launched by Australia’s flagship carrier Qantas Airways, the QWA evaluates

users’ self-collected data such as the number of steps taken, sleep duration and quality,

amount of non-screen time, and the daily calories burned and mood changes. The app

then automatically converts the quantified biometrics and personal data into instant

rewards and commercial offers (Henkel & Göretz, 2018; Loo, 2020). These features

resemble similar technical offerings of conventional self-tracking health apps, which

3
encourage users to modify behaviour, lifestyle choice and self-consciousness to enable

continuous datafication and data extraction (Lupton, 2016a, b; Neff and Nafus, 2016).

To Lupton (2016b, pp.2-3), health-tracking media is not just a tool but a “digital

companion species” that works as an active agent to forge an intimate bond with its

users (Salmela et al., 2018). The QWA adheres to the cultural discourse of the

Quantified Self (QS) movement, which celebrates active participation and self-

awareness (QS, n.d.) and manifests the ideological discourse of neoliberalism (Ajana,

2017; Heyen, 2019; Sharon, 2020). Studies about health-tracking apps have revealed

how the economic imperative of monetising everyday lives is core to the business

model of health-tracking media despite the cultural narrative about active, healthy and

positive living manifested in their marketings (Humphreys, 2018). Most, if not all, of

these apps link their users with their commercial partners and the life insurance sector

has been a prominent player in this field of health-tracking media (Lupton, 2016b).

Likewise, the QWA does promote Qantas’s health insurance products, which

Qantas cooperates with the NIB Health fund (Henkel & Göretz, 2018), to its users. One

could continue using the app without purchasing the insurance products, but they would

only earn health points (frequent flyer points) at a lower rate after the initial 28-day trial

period. This arrangement highlights QWA's reward mechanism, which places emphasis

on the app's ability to provide instant and cumulative material rewards such as Qantas

frequent flyer points, as well as discounts on daily essentials and healthy products

(Lyall, 2021; A Current Affair, 2022). Indeed, Lyall’s research of the same app (2021)

has found that most of his study’s participants did not purchase insurance products and

were happy to continue using the app.

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 Studying the QWA can lead us to consider a subtle but potentially significant

paradigm shift in data-tracking technologies. Instead of merely focusing on their

ideological and cultural representations of health standards and lifestyle, conversations

about the QWA’s economic productivity adhere to the emerging scholarly descriptions

of the operational qualities of self-tracking technologies. As Lupton (2016a) argues,

humans have become yet another node in the Internet of Things for generating and

exchanging data.

The functionality of the human body in the broader construction and expansion

of a platformised society is to facilitate seamless data synchronisation between web

systems (Helmond, 2015; Andrejevic, 2020). Self-tracking is not just a digitally enabled

practice that makes social lives ‘data-platform ready’, if we may borrow Almond’s term

(2015), but to make the human body and life ‘operationally ready’. In other words,

health-tracking media is not only configuring users’ mental perception, lifestyle and

physical condition as existing literature has focused on, but this type of media also

reconfigures the purpose, meaning and functionality of social spaces into one that is

centred around data harvesting and utilisation.

Using an operational paradigm can bring us to consider the broader social

consequences of techno-human entanglements. In this article, we ask: How does the

QWA recalibrate social spaces into spaces of operation? Specifically, we are interested

in the following aspects:

● How does the QWA repurpose its users’ social and personal spaces into real-

time data extraction and capturing interfaces?

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 ● How does the QWA connect different data networks to create a total system that

enables flexible data-sharing and synchronisation between multiple market

players?

● How does the QWA reconfigure social relations into relations of operation?

We embraced a digital auto-ethnography approach to explore these questions by

synthesising the operational analysis (Friedrich and Hoel, 2021) with the algorithms-

enabling method (Seaver, 2017). These methods encourage researchers to reflect

critically on their cultural and social positions (Valtonen and Haanpää, 2018).

Furthermore, the worsening COVID-19 pandemic during the research period in mid-

2020 provided a rare opportunity to test and evaluate the auto-reflexive approach in

digital media research. Acknowledging how digital media have embedded in

researchers’ lives, the auto-reflexive approach offers guidance to rethink the

human/non-human, machine-to-machine and physical/virtual entanglement in self-

tracking media.

A spatial-operational turn of digital media

The emergence of media operationalism responds to the epistemological conception of

technologies and humans. We are no longer just living with media as if media are

external objects to human bodies. Instead, we are the media. We produce the content

and data and enable the algorithms for modern digital media to work (Cheney-Lippold,

2017). Algorithms and data are not only telling us what we like, believe in and value,

but they also try to modify us as the preferred type of consumer (Zuboff, 2020), political

subject (Andrejevic, 2021) and even automated subjects (Till, 2019). Likewise, in

authoritarian states like China, governments have exploited algorithms to mould

6
citizens’ morality (Keane and Su, 2019). Human agency is conditioned by digital

technologies' political and economic imperatives as technologies are savvy in

controlling the unconscious mind instead of producing a conscious and well-informed

self (Till, 2019). As Zuboff (2020) argues, digital data are not only the new capital that

yields economic power, but data can repurpose aspects of lives that were once outside

the institutionalised control into new space and forms of social control (pp. 54-55). The

irony is, of course, we supply the data, knowingly and unknowingly, that try to control

us. The experience of using media has become a new form of labour to mine,

accumulate and extract data for the economic interest of technology giants (Till, 2014;

Sadowski, 2019).

As mentioned, operational media aims to do things to the world and the human

body (Hoel, 2018). It is task-orientated and filled with instructions when presented to

users (Friedrich and Hoel, 2021). Operational media is inherently a form of disciplinary

media that seeks to map and expand the power boundary of the regime (Crandall, 2005).

Operational media’s principle is not to suppress the space of private life and subjectivity

but to repurpose lived spaces into disciplined spaces to maximise and optimise value

extractions (Cibangu, 2013; Andrejevic, 2020; Hutchins and Andrejevic, 2021). As

Figure 1 summarises, there are four primary techno-operational features of operational

media based on a reading of current literature.

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 Figure 1 Four primary techno-operational features of operational media (created by the authors

and based on theorisations by Friedrich and Hoel, 2021; Crandall, 2005 and Cibangu, 2013).

These qualities highlight the centrality of ‘space’ in the operational paradigm

and how the production of new operational space is vital to the functioning of

operational media. The centrality of space is not only reflected by the fact that

operational media imposed its own modelled universe instead of ‘reflecting or

reconstructing’ actual events to achieve total capturing effectively. Operational media

also emphasises the constant interactions between the virtual and physical spaces to co-

define the meaning of each other (such as driving with GPS). The interdependency and

interaction between media’s technological appearance and human agency, between

different and once unrelated data network systems and between human agents are all

spatially defined and materialised.

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 There has been a renewed interest in Henri Lefebvre’s conceptualisation of the

production of space among the latest digital media research (Drakopoulou, 2013; Fuchs,

2021; Newlands, 2021). The production of space, as Lefebvre (2009, p.186) writes, ‘is

permeated with social relations’ of production (2009, p.186) by conflating the ‘daily

reality (daily routine) and urban reality’ and linking up ‘the places set aside for work,

“private” life and leisure’ (Lefebvre, 1976, p.38). Social space describes the dialectic

between the lived reality and the dominant representations of the world, and

communication has always been at the centre of the articulation (Fuchs, 2021). Space,

according to Lefebvre, ‘produces a code and language’ that instructs and constructs the

practices of everyday lives (Fuchs, 2021). Lived space, both representational and being

represented, is conceived by those in the power of decision-making and knowledge.

Properties and lives in social space are programmed and pre-determined. By citing and

building on Lefebvre’s works on ‘rhythmanalysis’, Shove (2009, p.21) argues that the

space of representation is not merely aesthetic but that activities and temporalities of

these activities are allocated for specific (economic) purpose and outcome.

Of course, Lefebvre’s argument was confined to the available media and

communication technologies when the internet, WIFI and platform media were not

readily available for everyday use. Communication was still perceived as merely

‘reflecting’ the social world (1976, p.815) and data was understood as ‘proximate to

daily life’ (Lefebvre, 2014, p.816). Today, data no longer reflects life but creates it (van

Dijck, 2013). Building on Lefebvre’s spatial analysis is to reflect on the broader

consequence of the operational turn of media technologies. In conceptualising an

operational city, Andrejevic (2020, pp.94-112) argues that cities have become the

platform interface producing ‘a fully interactive space’ for data generation. Urban space

9
is the spatial entity that produces countless and endless instructions to its human

inhabitants to datafy their lives and bodies.

Operationalism embodies the philosophical belief of objective truth, and

operational media runs on the premise of ‘data are objective’ (Cibangu, 2013; van Dijck,

2013). The operational space is presented as the proper space that minimises human

emotions and errors. Media users are no longer seen as human agents with raw emotions

but as data systems that will be synchronised through the programmed ways of media

use and life (Hoel, 2018). Unlike Lefebvre’s original perception that people produce

spaces through interpersonal, emotional and social interactions, in the regime of

operational media, space is produced through the technical dialogue between data

systems. Social relations are no longer just between humans but can emerge through

human/non-human entanglement and even between machines. Human agency becomes

secondary and non-exclusive in society's construction, hence, production. Such a form

of media produces a programmed view of the world that pretends to be subjective and

individualistic but is inherently standardised and centralised (Crandall, 2005). Space is

no longer representational as Lefebvre has once claimed (1984). Space is or will be

made operational.

Methodology: an immersive approach

The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged what Giaccardi et al. (2016) consider as the

taken-for-granted human-centric methods in the qualitative research of technology

studies. Traditional fieldwork instruments became less desirable and practical with

restricted mobility and health precaution measures. While using the autoethnographic

approach might result from the global pandemic, the operational-turn in media studies

10
also demands researchers to draw on and reflect their personal experience with the

cultural phenomena and social issues under investigation (Ellis, Adams and Bochner,

2011). Autoethnography sets out to observe and study the multiple and often

overlapping sets of relations between humans, and between human and non-human

agents, which are increasingly manifested through digital media.

We consider autoethnography in a digital era is a form of ‘more-than-human’

research, which had emerged before the pandemic and sought to understand the

emotional and material bonds between humans and the environment (Dowling, Lloyd

and Suchet-Pearson, 2016; Pitt, 2014). The approach instigates researchers’ critical

reflexive accounts to interrogate the research topic (Wright, Lloyd and Suchet-Pearson,

2012). As digital media has penetrated many aspects of lives and the pandemic has

accelerated and intensified the processes of platformisation, digital media might have

become what Nimmo (2011, p.109) describes as the commonly used/seemed objects

with ‘banal substance’ that have become so immersed in people’s lives, including those

of researchers. In this sense, researchers are no different than ‘ordinary’ digital media

users in terms of navigating and living with the structural logic of surveillance,

datafication and automated decision-making (Maalsen, 2019).

By remaining as ‘remote observers’, digital media researchers run the risk of

failing to appreciate the integration of digital media in everyday life (Maalsen, 2019).

Recognising the changing hybrid roles would allow researchers to capture the

knowledge from ‘within’ (Markuksela, 2013 in Valtonen and Haanpää, 2018, p.2) and

to attend to ‘the ways in which the autoethnographer’s body changes during the field,

both physically and socially’ (Valtonen and Haanpää, 2018, p.14). Social scientists have

long established that researchers’ bodies are just as culturally constructed and socially

11
orientated as everyone else’s. By critically reflecting on their bodies, researchers can

access the private and intimate spheres of life that would otherwise be inaccessible

through another research means (Gloud, 1995; Ellis, 2016; Valtonen and Haanpää,

2018). Seaver (2017) suggests digital media researchers should recognise themselves as

‘practitioners’ of digital, data media. In reflection of our involvement with the QWA we

would further argue that it is only ethical to disclose and acknowledge our immersions

into the QWA ecosystem and platform economy. Our bodies were indeed part of the

broader data-production chain and digital capitalism (Zuboff, 2019; Nieborg, Young &

Joseph, 2020) both during and outside of the pandemic.

As the inquiry ultimately focuses on spaces the QWA produced, the

autoethnographic approach aims to experience and experiment. There were two phases.

The first was the observational phase, which took a bird’s eye view of the media. It

followed the operational analysis to map and identify the operational construction and

facilitation of social practices, agencies and infrastructural networks the media brought

together (Friedrich and Hoel, 2021). The second was the ‘experimental’ phase involved

enacting operational functions to gain critical insight into the platform, a step where we

took inspiration from Seaver’s intervention of algorithms research (2017).

Although the study only involved two participants (researchers), the QWA's

algorithmic mechanism worked in a similar way as it offered the same options to both

authors (users). Our biometrics, such as our Body Mass Indexes (BMIs) and life

routines, were recorded and calculated with the same frequent flyer point conversation

formula. Furthermore, the different lifestyles between us and the different social

environments (one of us was living in lockdown while the other had more mobility and

12
freedom during the research period) also provide intriguing insider perspective into the

decentralisation and recentralisation mechanism of the data economy (van Dijck, 2013).

We installed and used the QWA on our respective smartphones (one was an

Android phone, and the other was an iPhone) to immerse the QWA’s algorithms and a

new life coordinated concerning the app’s operational logic and spatiotemporal system.

We then drew on self-reflexive accounts and cross-examined each other’s experiences

to understand the relationships between (physical and virtual) objects and human

practices. Due to physical mobility and social interaction constraints, researchers who

lived in two different countries installed and used the QWA for 92 days during June and

August 2020. Since the QWA required another health-tracking app to co-function, the

researchers used Samsung Health and Apple Health. Access to both Android and iOS

systems enabled some generalisation as we could observe and compare the QWA’s

operations on the two most dominant smartphone operating systems in the world.

We first walked through the QWA to identify its key operational functions and

structures and then examined these operations across the micro-, meso- and macro

layers of use and operation (Friedrich and Hoel, 2021). Table 1 summarises the

elements and layers emphasised in the operational analysis developed by Friedrich and

Hoel (2021) and the notes we have taken about the QWA. Each author made notes of

their respective observations and then compared and cross-examined each other’s

research notes to identify commonalities and potential discrepancies to ensure the

observational phase captured all relevant aspects of the operational structures and

aspects of the QWA. It is obvious that an operational-centric analysis explores what

media do in and to our lives and attend to several sets of dialectics: the dialectic

between the structural logic and content of the media, the dialectic between users and

13
platform, and the dialectic between programmed purposes and the environments of use.

Since the QWA must be linked with another health-tracking app to function, its

operational governance, operative moments and environment are always relative to the

other health app and the smartphone’s operation systems.

Elements of operational analysis Case study: QWA

Task: to identify the tasks and steps of To achieve the predetermined daily, weekly
achieving the task of the operation. and interactive tasks (e.g., steps, off-screen
time, and BMI) to obtain Qantas frequent
flyer points.

Operative moments: to identify and define To operate the QWA:

the structural process and the nature of the
task of the operation. ● Install the app and carry the phone.
● Exercise and achieve the
predetermined targets.
● Communicate and interact with friends
via the QWA.
● Check rewards (frequent flyer points
earned) progress.
● Travel planning and redemption
(future use).

Alignment grid: to identify the different Technological environments:

environments of use and understand how
information obtained from one context ● The QWA: in-app environment.
communicates with information obtained ● The associated health app – mobile
from another. media technology environment.
Social environments:
● Users’ environment (i.e., COVID-
pandemic).
● Inter-user relations (rankings,
cheering).
● Rewards and membership status in the
Qantas Frequent Flyer program
(Qantas’s business environment).
● The spending propensity for future
travels (the future consumption
environment).

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Analytical resolution: Layers of agencies:
1. To identify the heterogeneous agencies ● Users and their bodies.
across the operational levels. ● Everyday life (social).
● Platforms company (the QWA and
2. To understand the temporal logic and
Qantas).
interdependency between operative
● Between users and their interactions.
moments.
3. To examine how agencies are
constructed through layers of operative
moments.

Table 1 An operational analysis of QWA.

The second phase involved the actual use and, sometimes, deliberate enabling of

technical functions to observe the social experience and dynamics of QWA use.

Seaver’s (2017) experimental approach to enacting platform algorithms led us to follow

a similar research trajectory. In addition to following the standard steps-tracking

function, which is the QWA’s default feature, we also explored a range of other less

explicitly displayed functions and features, such as calculating BMI, entering blood

pressure scores, and organising weekly challenges between the researchers. We paid

particular attention to whether there were any significant distinctions between QWA’s

operation across the two mobile media systems.

In addition to following QWA’s requirements, we tried to circumvent QWAs’

‘rules’ to optimise the task outcomes. For example, by the author who lived in a region

with strict local COVID-19 lockdown rules, which only allowed residents to take one

one-hour outdoor activity per day. This author was carrying their phone all the time at

home even when walking between rooms. The COVID-19 restrictions in both countries

forced us to be creative to maximise our daily steps and led to subtle behaviour changes.

As a result, we became conscious about carrying our smartphones throughout the most

15
mundane and repetitive activities. For example, we were competing against each other

for the weekly challenges, and the desire to win was, unintentionally and unexpectedly,

sincere. Examining the practices and emotional devotions to the operational context and

possibilities enabled us to understand the heterogenous agencies across the human and

non-human agents in the QWAs’ operations. Likewise, we also learned to appreciate

how the overlapping of the technological and economic environments coordinate the

alignments of operational moments. The QWA’ cross-contexts alignment grid

dis/enabled various spatial practices that repurposed social spaces and relations.

Discussions
Spatial practices and operational interfaces

The discussion section is written as the collective autoethnographic account of the two

authors, and we use first-person pronouns to present our reflection on the journey of

using and researching the QWA. By following the operational framework we begin our

analysis here by making the assumption that spaces have always functioned as the

interface to enact orders and disciplines. Specifically, our inquiry focuses on QWA’s

interfaces and in-app qualities to understand how the app ‘communicates’ the required

tasks, instructions and orders to us. In doing so, we envisage how our everyday spaces

were repurposed into interfaces of data harvesting. We first zoom into the specific

spatial practices the QWA enables its users. The tasks and the required social practices

of the QWA are clearly and explicitly stated from the beginning of the app by inviting

users to set their daily and weekly targets (Figure 1) after installing and logging into the

app. In reviewing health tracking technology, Neff and Nafus (2016, p.54) state that

while the incorporation of data-tracking technology into health service aims to facilitate

patient’s choice, “choice” is embedded in the ‘bureaucratisation of healthcare, turning

16
medical decision making into a kind of algorithm or recipe.’ The same goes with the

‘invitation’ to set our own exercise targets in the QWA. The decision to set the goal was

not the expression of the self but a guided decision that was rationalised through the

QWA’s instructions and materialistic offering of frequent flyer points. The discourses

around healthy and active lifestyles are centred around the future utilisation of frequent

flyer points earned through daily walks and activities.

Figure 2

The Daily Challenge and Weekly Challenge sections occupied the centre and a

highly visible spot on QWA’s landing page (Figure 2). These sections set out the

17
spatiotemporal expectations of the tasks. The two tasks were sequentially correlated and

spatially quantified as the Daily Task works like an operative moment of the Weekly

Task. The progression tables highlighted the number of steps walked and required and

the potential Qantas points to be earned. Further, these tables also indicated the number

of steps still required to complete the task. The real-time recording and display of one’s

daily and weekly progress guided users to identify, define and track possible spatial

practices to accomplish the tasks.

As mentioned, we became more conscious of the presence of our smartphones

and our respective engagement with our phones while using QWA. Incorporating

smartphones into our daily routines and activities has become essential to achieving and

executing tasks. Our bodies, which produce and occupy space (Lefebvre, 1984), have

been configured by the app to execute the repurposing of the everyday spaces of our

lives, including those moments of immobility and ‘non-social’ personal spaces. Right

under the ‘steps’ challenges are the Sleep Health Challenges, which invites users to put

down their phones before bedtime and until they get up the next day: a modest 2.5

Qantas point is offered. Even so, we did lay down our phones by the self-designated

bedtime although there were occasions we ‘cheated’. For example, we continued to use

our phones with the touchscreen functions while placing the phone ‘down’ and

unmoved (which did not interrupt the sensor), or connected the main messenger apps

like WeChat and WhatsApp to another computing device without having to move our

phones.

Nonetheless, we both felt the Sleeping Challenge was the ‘easiest’ way to earn

Qantas points because it required the least amount of physical labour and time inputs.

We felt this was the easiest mode of point earning not only because it required the least

18
physical and mental inputs but because it also did not require us to mobilise our

personal networks (such as the inviting a friend bonus point). The 2.5 points could be

earned from the most personal and private space and time. Of course, we were using the

QWA when travel was not possible, and it provided interesting aspects for reflection.

The need to embed smartphones into one’s daily life and routines, and utilise all

spatiotemporal moments, including those physically immobile ones, was vital. While

the decisions to carry the phone and participate in the sleep challenge expressed our

agency to exploit the QWA’s point-earning system, these decisions were still confined

within and defined by the spatiotemporal rhythm programmed by the app. Our

respective personal spaces of bedrooms and beds became the very sites of continuous

monitoring, datafication and value extraction.

19
 Figure 3

The QWA’s temporal calculation was vital to materialise its operational space.

Time was presented as a unit to calculate economic outputs and productivity. The

calculation of Qantas points depended on the quantity of data supplied (meeting the

daily target) and the temporal measure of self-tracking (the 24-hour and seven days

cycle and the pre-set sleeping time). Such a mode of calculation alludes to the typical

formulation of wage calculation in a capitalist economy. The QWA decided users’

rewards based on their efficiency and productivity of the total data generated against the

given timeframe. Zerubavel’s classic work (1985) on the quantification of time reveals

how the notion of civilisation operates on transforming everyday life and routines into

countable and measurable units. In a digital era, digital technology has imposed a new

temporal regime that disrupts analogue temporal rhythms (Hassan, 2011) to favour

technology corporations' economic and political interests (Wajcman, 2018). Indeed, the

20
logic of ‘time control’ has been integrated into the design and operational systems of

digital media, many of which have the ‘hidden’ power to configure users’ daily routines,

schedules and their sense of temporality (Hassan, 2011)

The QWA’s operational interface embodies the traditional ‘calendar

management system’ and the more ‘hidden’ type of time-control mechanism. The QWA

not only sets out the tasks but the spatiotemporal logics of work, practice, and decision-

making to encourage its users to maximise the utilisation of all spatial practices and

activities for data extraction (hence, earning points). Utilisation here refers to the total

capturing of data and the maximum usage of all forces of production. Unlike the

conventional notion of panopticon, where the human body is the primary subject of

surveillance, for health-tracking technology, users’ bodies have become what Gidaris

(2019, p.137) describes as ‘a data-generating machine’.

Gidaris’ point, of course, alludes to Foucault’s (1990) argument that the body

needs to be produced as a machine to optimise and discipline for effective economic

control (the anatomo-politics of the human body). To enable the mechanisation of its

users’ bodies, the QWA relied on two mechanisms. The first mechanism involves

creating a total system that maximises data sharing and utilisation. The second

mechanism involves repurposing social relations into the relation of operation that

disciplines users’ bodies to achieve the overarching economic objective of data

extraction and capturing. The following section discusses these two sets of

mechanisms.

The production of a total network system

An operational interface requires reciprocal dialogues between data networks to forge

21
the back-and-forth across the physical and virtual, imagined and actual spaces. The

reciprocation creates a new system that is defined by its expansiveness and totality in

data extraction and utilisation between market players related to QWA. For example,

the QWA requires users to synchronise the app with another health-tracking app, and

different smartphone systems operate differently. This feature resembles what Nieborg

and colleagues (2020) term as the ‘app imperialism’ that global system operators like

Google and Apple benefit from gatekeeping apps in local markets. The QWA was

located within the broader app ecology, governance and multi-sided data business

market of the app economy (Nieborg, Young and Joseph, 2020).

As mentioned, one of us used an iPhone, and Apple Health was already activated

and ready to be synchronised on his phone. The other, who used an Android phone, on

the other hand, needed to download and install either Samsung Health or Google Fit. He

chose Google Fit. Both smartphone operating systems also allowed QWA to

synchronise with one of the three designated health-tracking apps: Fitbit, Strava or

Garmin. We were required to grant permission for ‘data sharing’ and ‘location access’

during the synchronisation processes. We hence assumed that not only the QWA

(Qantas) can obtain these data, but the smartphone (system) operators (Apple, Samsung,

and Google) could access our personal information and biometrics. Our assumption was

confirmed by QWA’s Terms of Use (ToUs):

‘By using the app or any of the App Services, you consent to us collecting

and using technical information about the Devices and related software,

hardware and peripherals for services that are internet-based or wireless to

improve our products and to provide any services to you’.

22
 The ToUs statement located in the setting menu was difficult to find. There was

no reminder of the ToUs nor request for our permissions to accept/reject the ToUs

during the installation and registration processes. In addition, we found the wording of

the ToUs statement was not easily understandable, nor did it specify any details about

how and what data will be collected and utilised. These characteristics were consistent

with a typical ToUs statement of social media (Sunyaev et al., 2015).

In reflection, we felt that if we did not approach the QWA with a research

agenda, we would ignore the details of the QWA’s ToUs statements. This omission

might suggest our ‘unreflexiveness’ to mobile apps in general, which have become so

embedded in life and made us in line with the view of many other social media users

(see Obar and Oeldorf-Hirsch, 2018). Our defence would be that not accepting the ToUs

was not an option because it meant one could not use the app. While the QWA’s ToUs

is just another example of ‘the lie of the Internet’ (Obar and Oeldorf-Hirsch, 2018),

presenting a vague and misleading ToUs statement might be strategic. Sunyaey and

colleagues’ study (2015) found that many respondents ignored ToUs statements because

they found them a ‘nuisance’. It is possible that by making the issue of privacy and data

ethics a ‘nuisance’ to our daily digital use, the QWA made a calculated decision to

evade the ethical and legal responsibilities around datafication. In reflection, we felt we

were encouraged to ignore the app’s legal, moral and ethical obligation to its users. Our

omission might have legitimised the QWA’s operational regime and its role as a vital

data intermediary (Janssen and Singh, 2022) of an expansive data-business network.

The potential role of the QWA and even Qantas in being the intermediary of

different data network systems can interfere with the QWA’s business model. As

mentioned, it seems that the QWA’s main objective is not to create new customers who

23
are ready to spend, but to increase the number of members who will have ongoing

engagement and relation with the app and Qantas. After completing the 28-Day Trial,

the point earning rate will drop to normal (Figure 4). As the screenshot shows, the

landing page would display the Qantas Insurance advertisement and notify users that

users could earn points at a far higher rate if they purchased eligible Qantas Insurance

products. However, this notification was relatively static: the QWA did not actively

send reminder notifications to promote the insurance products to us during the research

period.

Figure 4

24
Instead, and as will be further discussed later, the QWA was actively sending

notifications to remind us about our respective daily activity records, targets,

achievements and progress, and the outcomes of the weekly competitions between the

two of us and between us and our other connections on the QWA. The contrast here

might suggest that the QWA’s business model was less about generating immediate

revenue and profit for Qantas and its business partners. Instead, the app aimed to

maximise data collection through 1. expanding the membership base and 2. maintaining

members’ engagement with the Qantas brand. Indeed, one of us has never purchased

anything from Qantas since using the QWA. Still, in reflection, not making purchase

does not mean Qantas had not collected our personal data and biometrics and the QWA

continues to do so as long as we use it.

The QWA functioned as an intermediary facilitating the back-and-forth data

flow between its users who supplied the data and a consortium of its stakeholders

(smartphone system operators, Qantas and its business partners). The QWA manages

the data flow across the physical and virtual spaces and between users’ present practices

and perceived future rewards. The spatiotemporal convergence has effectively created a

total system that ensures the effective data extraction and economic values productions

of these data for all QWA’s stakeholders. Furthermore, the flexibility of data

synchronisation and commercialisation has created a total system that achieves full and

continuous capturing of data produced by our techno-spatial practices. Such a total

system consists of sets of data networks across multiple commercial sectors, namely the

aviation and travel industry (Qantas), technology sector (Apple, Google and the

smartphone company), insurance and financial, health and wellbeing, sportswear and

other existing and future business partners of Qantas. There is no boundary to contain

25
how ‘far’ data might travel and how they will be used. This flexibility ensures effective

data monetisation as Qantas does not need to work on how these data need to be used by

its business partners. More importantly, we might further argue that data has become the

capital of economic production. Traditional business, like Qantas Airways, has

transformed into an agency or a ‘data intermediary’ (Janssen and Singh, 2022) to

harvest, process, share/transfer and utilise data.

The production of relations of operation

Qantas indeed did not intervene in the daily operation of the QWA because the app had

created different mechanisms to discipline us to co-manage and mutually supervise each

other. The QWA encouraged its users to connect with their families and friends and set

weekly tasks competing with them. As an incentive, inviting friends can earn 150

Qantas points. Users can initiate challenges and invite their in-app friends to participate.

A ranking chart that shows the progress (steps) and the result of the competition appears

below (Figure 5). Another chart ranks users against their QWA friends with the number

of Qantas points earned throughout their QWA use.

26
 Figure 5

As mentioned, the QWA had been actively reminding us to interact with each

other and our respective connections by regularly sending us the ‘cheer up’ notification.

Likewise, we also received notifications whenever our contacts on the QWA had

‘cheered’ us up or if they sent us a ‘cheer’ back. There was no limit on how many times

we could send ‘cheering’ to our contacts. Although it was a mundane practice of a click

of the button, both authors did constantly send cheers to each other. The cheering and

ranking systems encouraged users to monitor each other’s daily physical (steps) and

rewards (points) progress. These features provide opportunities for constant co-

monitoring and management, which affirm what van Doorn (2017) calls a decentralised

and scalable management technique that outsources control to an app’s users themselves

and that there is a false sense of empowerment and participation through this

27
decentralised and distributed managerial format (Till, 2014). The constant interactions

between users create a sense of competition that bonds users. The interactive relations

between users, which appear to be socially interactive, are indeed orientated towards the

specific objective of data harvesting and extraction.

The transformation of social relations into relations of operation was driven and

guided by the QWA’s algorithms, which visualised our daily and weekly progress and

compared our exercise progress against our networks on the QWA. The relation of

operation differs from the relation of production: the latter is the endpoint in the chain

of economic activity. The former, however, refers to the relationship that

operationalises the relation of production and optimises the value of production. The

QWA certainly did not change our social relations nor any of the social relations

between us and our respective social connections on the QWA. Our interactions through

the QWA had, nonetheless, generated data for the app to harvest. The fact that we did

not immediately consider the economic imperatives of our interactions and mutual

engagement with the QWA was crucial to the app’s operational regime. The QWA was

not facilitating community building but constructing a system of continuous datafication

through users’ engagement with the app (Whitson, 2013).

Our experience of mutual supervising was not unique. In the broader platform

economy, it has been documented that algorithms are replacing human managers in

managing workers and assessing their outputs (Lee et al., 2015; Sun, 2019). Social

relations are no longer derived from the cultural and social meaning of human

interaction but the economic functions. The term ‘social’ has masked the underlining

economic imperative and business interest and legitimised the presence and functioning

of the techno-data intrusion in life. As discussed in the previous section, data utilisation

28
and potential monetisation lie in the hands of large corporations, namely Qantas

Airways and its business partners in the case of the QWA.

Conclusion

Through studying the case of the QWA, this article has attempted to examine the

production of operational space by analysing the repurposing of social spaces and social

relations. The operational paradigm of media studies invites us to investigate the

operational dynamics and layers of the QWAs and to make some general remarks about

the self- and data-tracking of mobile media. Notably, the operational paradigm focuses

on media technology's broader and diverse consequences instead of lingering on the

micro-individual level outcomes (Kim et al., 2017). This article has analysed the social

and economic imperatives of the QWA and platform operations. By reflecting on data

collected from our autoethnographic practices, we argue that media operationalism, as

exemplified by the QWA, is essentially spatial, as the app sets out to transform the

space and temporality of its users' lives.

The QWA has constructed an operational space to ensure endless opportunities

for seamless data extraction and utilisation by repurposing everyday spaces into

interfaces of operations. In achieves this through reconfiguring social relations into new

relations of operations. Operationalisation can be understood as a trajectory or ethos of

technological change rather than a fixed status that describes contemporary digital

media. The QWA represents a new trend that media technologies are becoming the

manuals of everyday life. Operational media aims to instruct rather than represent,

facilitate action instead of constructing imagination, strive for anticipation instead of

participation, and achieve maximum utilisation instead of general imagination. Most

29
importantly, making operational spaces requires human labour to carry out the repetitive

actions and practices of the predetermined but minimises and even excludes human

agents from deciding how to make life-relevant meaning out of the space and the media

technology. Freedom is an illusion when one lives in an operational space. Freedom of

choice and free expression of subjectivity is then confined within the already limited

choices and options at the mercy of the dominant structures (Marcuse, 1964). While

operational space requires human inhabits and involvement, it works hard to minimise

human participation in decision-making.

We recognise the limitation of our approach of a researcher- and platform-

centric analysis and aim to shed light on possible conceptualisation for future research

that examines the interweaving between social practices and datafication and

algorithmic optimisation. Future studies can adopt traditional instruments such as

interviews and field observations to understand users’ lived experiences and spatial

practices to probe the dialectics of the heterogeneous agencies between human actors

and media technology.

Data availability

Data are available upon request from the two authors upon reasonable request.

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 Ethics declarations

Competing interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

Ethical approval

This research did not require any ethical approval. This article does not contain

any studies with human participants performed by any of the authors. Researchers used

critical self-reflection, they did not engage into any other human participants for this

study

Informed consent

This article does not contain any studies with human participants performed by

any of the authors.

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