‘Friendly’ and ‘noisy surveillance’ through MapMyRun during the COVID-19 pandemic

This paper considers the nature of social surveillance through the physical activity tracking app MapMyRun and examines how this was experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic during the UK and USA summer 2020 lockdowns. In contributing to debates in digital geographies around the entanglements of the fleshy and digital body, the paper responds to calls for research to recognise the increasing sociality of self-tracking (Couture, 2021), specifically considering how, during the COVID-19 pandemic, these apps offered a form of connection during a time of isolation. Using data from email and video interviews, I argue that whilst a Foucauldian account of surveillance can be used as a point of departure, it is limited in accounting for the social aspects of self-tracking. I therefore propose that applying Robinson’s (2000) concept of ‘noisy surveillance’ to self-tracking is useful for understanding the messiness of surveillance in terms of the complications and noisiness involved in interactions in digital spaces, as well as the opportunities for performance management online particularly during lockdown.