Refreshing Quantification and other Ploys to Give Up the Habit: A Repertoire of Relations, Identities, and Rhetorical Devices in Smoking Cessation Applications

摘要

In this paper we analyze 26 smoking cessation applications on Android OS focusing on how they address their implied users. We identify 'refreshing quantification' as a main method, which endorses a portrait of the users as myopic in risk perception, but heroic in their individual pursuit to reach the non-smoker identity. App-created relationships and identities give rise to a temporal order based on contemplating the past and anticipating the future. Users are guided towards an autonomy-centered identity project, which renders them accountable for success or failure in smoking cessation. Users' experience of smoking cessation is co-constructed in their interaction with the app-coach and with peers. Apps and peers offer diagnoses, advice, labels that populate the world in which the would-be ex-smokers pursue their project.