Natasha Dow Schüll
Biographic Data
| ID | 101295 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Natasha Dow Schüll |
| GIVEN NAMES | Natasha Dow |
| FAMILY NAME | Schüll |
| SIGNATURE | SCHÜLL N D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5608-8986 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 17 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 188 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 17 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Addiction by Design
Afterword
The afterword discusses how this special issue's articles work from different angles to unsettle the precepts of "attentional sovereignty" - the socially, politically, and economically valorized virtue that anchors most discussions over attention in its contemporary technological predicament. Whether the attentional sovereign appears in its liberal humanist or its neoliberal behavioral economic guise, sovereignty is valorized and considered under…
Devices and selves
Popular and academic writings on digital technology tend to characterize the effects of its distinguishing properties – abstraction, binarism, and the “reduction of quality to quantity” – in one of two ways. The inductive orientation and fieldwork-based methodologies of anthropology, proceeding from observation to analysis and privileging particular cases over general frameworks, have much to contribute to understanding the effects of digital tec…
The Data-Based Self
The Data-Based Self:Self-Quantification and the Data-Driven (Good) Life Natasha D. Schüll (bio) The reason you begin tracking your data is that you have some uncertainty about yourself that you believe the data can illuminate. It's about introspection, reflection, seeing patterns, and arriving at realizations about who you are and how you might change. —Eric Boyd, self-tracker the capacity to amass, store, and analyze data drawn from the physiolo…
Self in the Loop
This chapter draws on ethnographic research conducted between 2013 and 2017 at Quantified Self (QS) meet-ups in Boston and New York as well as three annual conferences. This chapter brackets the growing literature on how data tracking serves as a technology of power to explore how it can also serve as a technology of the self—as a means, a medium, and a cipher for human experience, self-understanding, and sense of agency. Sherman (2016) has descr…
Digital containment and its discontents
This essay explores a set of existential risks that accompany digital storage capacities, devices, and promises: the anxious exhaustion of digital housekeeping; the disorientation of self-archiving; and the annihilating sense of loss that strikes when digital containment fails
The Datafication of Health
Over the past decade, data-intensive logics and practices have come to affect domains of contemporary life ranging from marketing and policy making to entertainment and education; at every turn, there is evidence of "datafication" or the conversion of qualitative aspects of life into quantified data. The datafication of health unfolds on a number of different scales and registers, including data-driven medical research and public health infrastru…
Data for life
Abiding Chance
Online poker gamblers employ software to track and algorithmically analyze play-by-play game information in real time, parsing opponents' behavioral patterns and tendencies into color-coded numerical values that hover over their respective positions at the virtual table. These continuously updated statistical dashboards, along with retrospective game analysis and methodical routines of self-adjustment, help gamblers abide swings of chance and avo…
Three. The Gaming of Chance
The rise in popularity of online poker has come with a rise in the development of software that allows gamblers to track and analyze opponents’ (and their own) play behavior. At first glance it would appear that players use the software minimize and manage uncertainty—but on closer inspection, it becomes clear that the tracking software serves less to diminish than to potentialize uncertainty. Although some features reduce uncertainties by turnin…
Neuropsychedelia
Addiction by Design
Recent decades have seen a dramatic shift away from social forms of gambling played around roulette wheels and card tables to solitary gambling at electronic terminals. Slot machines, revamped by ever more compelling digital and video technology, have unseated traditional casino games as the gambling industry's revenue mainstay. Addiction by Design takes readers into the intriguing world of machine gambling, an increasingly popular and absorbing …
Gambled Away
Additional informationNotes on contributorsNatasha Dow SchüllNatasha Dow Schüll is a cultural anthropologist and associate professor in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her book, Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas (Princeton University Press, 2012), explores the feedback between the technological configuration of gambling activities and the experience of addiction
The shortsighted brain
The young field of neuroeconomics converges around behavioral deviations from the model of the human being as Homo economicus, a rational actor who calculates his choices to maximize his individual satisfaction. In a historical moment characterized by economic, health, and environmental crises, policymakers have become increasingly concerned about a particular deviation for which neuroeconomics offers a biological explanation: Why do humans value…
Machines, Medication, Modulation
Digital Gambling
Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Las Vegas among game developers and machine gamblers, I correlate a set of digitally enhanced game features with phenomenological aspects of gamblers’ experience, demonstrating the intimate connection between extreme states of subjective absorption in play and design elements that manipulate space and time to accelerate the extraction of money from players. The case of the digital gambling interface e…
The Grit beneath the Glitter
The Grit beneath the Glitter: Tales from the Real Las Vegas. Hal K. Rothman and Mike Davis,eds. Berkeley: University of California Press,2002. 388 pp., index
The Datafication of Health
Over the past decade, data-intensive logics and practices have come to affect domains of contemporary life ranging from marketing and policy making to entertainment and education; at every turn, there is evidence of "datafication" or the conversion of qualitative aspects of life into quantified data. The datafication of health unfolds on a number of different scales and registers, including data-driven medical research and public health infrastru…
The shortsighted brain
The young field of neuroeconomics converges around behavioral deviations from the model of the human being as Homo economicus, a rational actor who calculates his choices to maximize his individual satisfaction. In a historical moment characterized by economic, health, and environmental crises, policymakers have become increasingly concerned about a particular deviation for which neuroeconomics offers a biological explanation: Why do humans value…
Digital Gambling
Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Las Vegas among game developers and machine gamblers, I correlate a set of digitally enhanced game features with phenomenological aspects of gamblers’ experience, demonstrating the intimate connection between extreme states of subjective absorption in play and design elements that manipulate space and time to accelerate the extraction of money from players. The case of the digital gambling interface e…
The Data-Based Self
The Data-Based Self:Self-Quantification and the Data-Driven (Good) Life Natasha D. Schüll (bio) The reason you begin tracking your data is that you have some uncertainty about yourself that you believe the data can illuminate. It's about introspection, reflection, seeing patterns, and arriving at realizations about who you are and how you might change. —Eric Boyd, self-tracker the capacity to amass, store, and analyze data drawn from the physiolo…
Digital containment and its discontents
This essay explores a set of existential risks that accompany digital storage capacities, devices, and promises: the anxious exhaustion of digital housekeeping; the disorientation of self-archiving; and the annihilating sense of loss that strikes when digital containment fails
The Grit beneath the Glitter
The Grit beneath the Glitter: Tales from the Real Las Vegas. Hal K. Rothman and Mike Davis,eds. Berkeley: University of California Press,2002. 388 pp., index
Abiding Chance
Online poker gamblers employ software to track and algorithmically analyze play-by-play game information in real time, parsing opponents' behavioral patterns and tendencies into color-coded numerical values that hover over their respective positions at the virtual table. These continuously updated statistical dashboards, along with retrospective game analysis and methodical routines of self-adjustment, help gamblers abide swings of chance and avo…
Gambled Away
Additional informationNotes on contributorsNatasha Dow SchüllNatasha Dow Schüll is a cultural anthropologist and associate professor in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her book, Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas (Princeton University Press, 2012), explores the feedback between the technological configuration of gambling activities and the experience of addiction
Afterword
The afterword discusses how this special issue's articles work from different angles to unsettle the precepts of "attentional sovereignty" - the socially, politically, and economically valorized virtue that anchors most discussions over attention in its contemporary technological predicament. Whether the attentional sovereign appears in its liberal humanist or its neoliberal behavioral economic guise, sovereignty is valorized and considered under…
The Grit beneath the Glitter
The Grit beneath the Glitter: Tales from the Real Las Vegas. Hal K. Rothman and Mike Davis,eds. Berkeley: University of California Press,2002. 388 pp., index
Digital Gambling
Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Las Vegas among game developers and machine gamblers, I correlate a set of digitally enhanced game features with phenomenological aspects of gamblers’ experience, demonstrating the intimate connection between extreme states of subjective absorption in play and design elements that manipulate space and time to accelerate the extraction of money from players. The case of the digital gambling interface e…
Machines, Medication, Modulation
The shortsighted brain
The young field of neuroeconomics converges around behavioral deviations from the model of the human being as Homo economicus, a rational actor who calculates his choices to maximize his individual satisfaction. In a historical moment characterized by economic, health, and environmental crises, policymakers have become increasingly concerned about a particular deviation for which neuroeconomics offers a biological explanation: Why do humans value…
Addiction by Design
Recent decades have seen a dramatic shift away from social forms of gambling played around roulette wheels and card tables to solitary gambling at electronic terminals. Slot machines, revamped by ever more compelling digital and video technology, have unseated traditional casino games as the gambling industry's revenue mainstay. Addiction by Design takes readers into the intriguing world of machine gambling, an increasingly popular and absorbing …
Gambled Away
Additional informationNotes on contributorsNatasha Dow SchüllNatasha Dow Schüll is a cultural anthropologist and associate professor in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her book, Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas (Princeton University Press, 2012), explores the feedback between the technological configuration of gambling activities and the experience of addiction
Neuropsychedelia
Three. The Gaming of Chance
The rise in popularity of online poker has come with a rise in the development of software that allows gamblers to track and analyze opponents’ (and their own) play behavior. At first glance it would appear that players use the software minimize and manage uncertainty—but on closer inspection, it becomes clear that the tracking software serves less to diminish than to potentialize uncertainty. Although some features reduce uncertainties by turnin…
Data for life
Abiding Chance
Online poker gamblers employ software to track and algorithmically analyze play-by-play game information in real time, parsing opponents' behavioral patterns and tendencies into color-coded numerical values that hover over their respective positions at the virtual table. These continuously updated statistical dashboards, along with retrospective game analysis and methodical routines of self-adjustment, help gamblers abide swings of chance and avo…
The Datafication of Health
Over the past decade, data-intensive logics and practices have come to affect domains of contemporary life ranging from marketing and policy making to entertainment and education; at every turn, there is evidence of "datafication" or the conversion of qualitative aspects of life into quantified data. The datafication of health unfolds on a number of different scales and registers, including data-driven medical research and public health infrastru…
Self in the Loop
This chapter draws on ethnographic research conducted between 2013 and 2017 at Quantified Self (QS) meet-ups in Boston and New York as well as three annual conferences. This chapter brackets the growing literature on how data tracking serves as a technology of power to explore how it can also serve as a technology of the self—as a means, a medium, and a cipher for human experience, self-understanding, and sense of agency. Sherman (2016) has descr…
Digital containment and its discontents
This essay explores a set of existential risks that accompany digital storage capacities, devices, and promises: the anxious exhaustion of digital housekeeping; the disorientation of self-archiving; and the annihilating sense of loss that strikes when digital containment fails
The Data-Based Self
The Data-Based Self:Self-Quantification and the Data-Driven (Good) Life Natasha D. Schüll (bio) The reason you begin tracking your data is that you have some uncertainty about yourself that you believe the data can illuminate. It's about introspection, reflection, seeing patterns, and arriving at realizations about who you are and how you might change. —Eric Boyd, self-tracker the capacity to amass, store, and analyze data drawn from the physiolo…
Devices and selves
Popular and academic writings on digital technology tend to characterize the effects of its distinguishing properties – abstraction, binarism, and the “reduction of quality to quantity” – in one of two ways. The inductive orientation and fieldwork-based methodologies of anthropology, proceeding from observation to analysis and privileging particular cases over general frameworks, have much to contribute to understanding the effects of digital tec…
Afterword
The afterword discusses how this special issue's articles work from different angles to unsettle the precepts of "attentional sovereignty" - the socially, politically, and economically valorized virtue that anchors most discussions over attention in its contemporary technological predicament. Whether the attentional sovereign appears in its liberal humanist or its neoliberal behavioral economic guise, sovereignty is valorized and considered under…
Addiction by Design
Computer Science (12 works) · Psychology (12 works) · Sociology (9 works) · Gambling Behavior and Treatments (6 works) · Epistemology (5 works) · Political science (5 works) · Engineering (3 works) · Innovative Human-Technology Interaction (3 works) · Internet privacy (3 works) · Las vegas (3 works)