| This project is about getting smart to how digital platforms get us smart. One way to make sense of smart and its ready transferability to subjectivity is through the lens of self-actualization. I develop case studies on three platforms that offer tools and knowledge that assist users in the project of the perpetually improving self -- the Fitbit activity tracker and the practice of wearable self-tracking; the MOOC and the practice of informal, low-cost digital learning; and the TED Talk and the practice of sharing inspiration through learned, affective publicity and re-circulation. Through these sites, I define an increasingly common social practice, digital self-actualization, and an accompanying subjectivity-in-formation, the smart subject or smart self. In support of these definitions, I consider the persistent discourse of digital lifestyle management that travels alongside invitations to "get smarter" in physical, intellectual, and emotional ways.;I further consider how this imperative is embedded in the spatiotemporal conventions of how to access digital platforms, how they travel, and how they are reflexively shared. The three words that comprise the subtitle -- wearables, carriables, and shareables -- highlight the ways self-betterment opportunities are made available as and through connected, mobile everyday media. They also support my assertion that proximity is a language of new media that deserves further attention, particularly as it fosters both smart subjectivities and media use through awareness, control, consolidation, automation, repetition, recursivity, and importantly, a particular co-dependence of nearness and distance. How the knowledge of self-making is packaged and delivered -- as bite-sized course videos, as tracked daily step counts, or as an inspirational three-minute "braingasm" -- is key to identifying reconfigurations of mediation that differently value users. Ultimately, smart is not just consumer logic but a directive on how to be a successful digital lifestyle manager and in turn a model media consumer by undertaking the constantly improving self until smart logics have transferred successfully to the body, heart, and mind.;In essence, in actualizing the self, smart subjects actualize as media users. |
