

In other words, they are more attentive to operating within the sociocultural norms and boundaries set by the observer, who is of a higher social strata. As a response to the knowledge that one could be scrutinized at any given moment, the surveilled subjects in turn surveil themselves. The panopticon design is a system of control in which an individual or state has the ability to observe and monitor people in excruciating detail, without them being able to distinguish whether they are currently under such a gaze or not. First introduced by Jeremy Bentham, it was later adopted by Michel Foucault as a metaphor for disciplinary power in modern Western society in his 1975 work Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Surveilling ourselvesįundamentally, the origin of self-surveillance can be traced back to the concept of the panopticon. Simply put, the developers of Pokémon Go have certainly accomplished the task of encouraging users to embrace an active lifestyle. Moreover, they noted a dramatic 26% increase in average activity for some exceptionally-engaged Pokémon Go users (Althoff et al., 2016). The results of their study show that there was a significant increase in participants’ physical activity over the course of 30 days. (2016) researched the application’s impact through measuring the alteration in physical activity before and after using Pokémon Go among 31,793 Microsoft Band users who resided in the United States. If one imagines the entire Pokémon Go user base as a dutiful astronaut, they have already accomplished the incredible feat of traveling to the end of our solar system and back. To put this in perspective, the furthest planet in our solar system, Neptune, is approximately 4.5 billion kilometers away from the sun (Cain, 2009).
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Even more interesting, however, is that at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in 2017, Niantic reported that Pokémon Go users across the globe have cumulatively walked 8.7 billion kilometers (Iqbal, 2020).

#Pokemon go account tracker android
Since its release in 2016, Pokémon Go has been one of the most successful mobile applications worldwide, reaching over one billion downloads across iOS and Android platforms as of March 2019. The fundamental design of Pokemon Go's interface Pokéstops, where players can “spin” to collect items that assist them in successfully catching the little beings.Gyms, which are specifically designed spaces where skirmishes between Pokémon can occur.The Pokémons, or the creatures that are intended to be caught.
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In addition, the application makes use of the Global Positioning Systems (GPS) that are built into our portable devices, e.g., smartphones and tablets, to cartographically compose a map of our geographical location on which we are able to interact with the application’s three essential components: With the click of a button, individuals are able to spot various species of Pokémon in their vicinity through the camera lens on their devices, as if they are hidden in plain sight for users to discover. Pokémon GoĪs a collaborative project between Niantic, The Pokémon Company, and Nintendo, Pokémon Go is a mobile application that employs augmented reality (AR) technology to bring Satoshi Tajiri’s creations to life. More specifically, I will utilize the concepts of self-surveillance and the reflexive monitoring self (Lupton, 2014) and examine how Pokémon Go motivates users to continually engage in these self-tracking practices through elements of gamification. Google entries of Pokémon Go weight-loss storiesįollowing the trail of breadcrumbs left by these Pokémon Go trainers, this article will seek to understand the application as a self-tracking application through which individuals are able to achieve wellness, instead of viewing it purely as a mobile game.
