A Life in Numbers

Reading Response for October 17th, 2016

Key Concepts

• A quantified self offers a more in-depth and objective analysis of one’s own life.
• It can be frustrating for Big-Data collectors whose job is to aggregate data over extremely long periods of time, when this activity encourages us to change.
• Important to understand the difference between correlative behavior and the causes behind them.

Summary

Writer John Paul, in his piece There’s an app for that describes the experience of individuals who are a part of the Quantified Self movement; people who aim to find a better way of living and a more accurate vision of themselves through the analyzation of numerical values in their lives.

Quotations

“Like any other form of self-improvement, QS is not about securing an ultimate fix. It’s about noticing how you live now, in fine detail, and moving playfully towards new ways of being — always fully aware that there will be more changes to make when you get there.”

“What this implies is that QS is a kind of secular ritual. To be meaningful, it can’t be carried out on our behalf by gadgets.”

This is an argument which centers almost wholly around the idea of self-improvement. That is ultimately the ethos at the center of Paul’s writing, the idea that through the deep analyzation of our daily behaviors we can come to a better understanding of what makes us who we are.

This naturally begs the question of whether or not we would then become just the sum of our figures, rather than a distinct personality. Paul would argue, however, that this is not something done for the sake of impressing others, such as much of our usage of social media, but rather to create meaning through the tracking of numbers. This may end up leading to more healthy and active lifestyles and may in fact lead us to challenge the traditional ways in which we conduct ourselves on a day-to-day basis. Thus we do not just become numbers in an endlessly churning machine, but rather people in pursuit of our better selves.

Paul, in his article, talks about the rather curious effect that using an app to track calls made to his parents has on his behavior towards them. He has begun to call them more frequently, and is on the track to become a much better communicator with them, based heavily on the fact that he now uses technology to track these communications. He wonders if there is a sort of hollowness to it, in the act of calling a loved one, if it is done purely for the sake of hitting an arbitrary goal.

It is thus important to understand that while technology tracking may encourage him to make these calls, it is ultimately his desire, as a son, to talk to his parents more often that caused him to set these goals in the first place. If the desire did not exist beforehand, then the app would not force him to do so.

Technology enables us to live the lives we always mean to, and to look at how we might be better spending what limited time we have.

Question

In regards to your own projects, for those of you doing project 2, what ways might the technological tracking of your life affect your day-to-day behavior in how you interact with other people? If you have already begun collecting data, how then have you noticed a change, if there is any at all?