Elise Li Zheng

Contact-tracing systems emerging during the COVID-19 pandemic, represented by China's Health Code Systems (HCSs), are commonly portrayed as top-down, data-driven, seamless, and automatic surveillance systems. In contrast, drawing on science and technology studies (STS) insights, this article examines the practical, open-ended, relational, and bottom-up dynamics of contact-tracing and surveillance systems, focusing on street-level state actors and their accountability labor involved in the HCSs. Based on interviews and documentary analysis conducted between 2020 and 2022 across multiple localities, we reveal that HCSs were less like systems but more like a sociotechnical assemblage that is contingently shaped and maintained by heterogeneous actors, power positions, meanings and interests, actions and performances, and types of labor. In particular, street-level state actors, who have high stakes in the party-state system and face huge top-down accountability pressure, treated the HCSs less as a surveillance tool but more as a tool for practicing, performing, and eluding accountability labor. In turn, via interacting with the HCSs, tech giants, local telecommunication subcontractors, and citizens, they demonstrate their competence in the administrative function, avoid scrutiny and punishment, and protect their political careers. This article paints a realistic picture of conflicts and disconnections within surveillance systems. It highlights the often-overlooked role of street-level state actors in shaping such systems in contingent and unintended ways. Further, it reveals how the surveillance-oriented narratives and assumptions and the practical reality, while misaligned with each other, work together to make citizens passively and actively comply with uncertain and outrageous control.

Fitness apps on mobile devices are gaining popularity, as more people are engaging in self-tracking activities to record their status of fitness and exercise routines. These technologies also evolved from simply recording steps and offering exercise suggestions to an integrated lifestyle guide for physical wellbeing, thus exemplify a new era of "quantified self" in the context of health as individual responsibility. There is a considerable amount of literature in science, technology and society (STS) studies looking at this phenomenon from different perspectives, linking it with the sociology of self-surveillance and neoliberal regimes of health. However, the human-technology interface, through which the micro- (behavioral) and macro- (social) aspects converge, still calls for extensive examination. This paper approaches this topic from the postphenomenological perspective, in combination with empirical studies of design analysis and interviews of fitness apps, to reveal the human-technology link between the design elements and people's perception through the direct experiences and interpretations of technology. It argues that the intentionality of self-tracking fitness app designs mediates the human-technology relations by "guiding" people into a quantified knowledge regime. It shapes the perceptions of fitness and health with representations of meanings about a "good life" of individual success and management. This paper also gives a critique of current individual, performance-oriented fitness app designs and offers the possibility of seeking alternatives through the multistable nature of human-technology relations—how altering interpretation and meaning of the design with a cultural or social context could change the form of technological embodiment.