@misc{9232185,
  abstract     = {{This thesis examines how Chinese university students experience digital productivity apps in their everyday study lives. It focuses on apps such as Pomodoro Timer and Forest, asking how students understand the relationship between their own self-control and the forms of control built into these platforms. The study is based on semi-structured interviews with four final-year students, together with a discourse-informed analysis of app interfaces. The findings show that productivity apps make study activities more visible by turning them into tasks and focus-time data. Students often use these tools willingly because they help create structure and make progress feel more concrete. At the same time, the same features can also produce pressure. Unfinished tasks and low focus-time records may remind students that they have not done enough. To describe this feeling, the thesis uses the concept of “efficiency anxiety”: a quiet but persistent sense that one should be using time better or becoming more productive. The analysis draws on Foucault’s ideas of biopolitics and governmentality, as well as Deleuze’s theory of control societies. These theories help explain why productivity apps are not experienced simply as external control. Students actively use them to manage themselves, but their self-management is shaped by the app’s reminders and feedback. The thesis identifies four different usage orientations among participants. It also shows that efficiency anxiety can lead students either to regulate themselves more strictly or to step back temporarily through practices such as “lying flat.” Overall, the study contributes to research on digital self-management by showing how self-control and platform-mediated control become closely connected in productivity app use.}},
  author       = {{Hu, Jiayi}},
  language     = {{eng}},
  note         = {{Student Paper}},
  title        = {{Platform-Mediated Self-Control: Digital Productivity Technologies and Efficiency Anxiety among Chinese University Students}},
  year         = {{2026}},
}