When things are staring at people
The home is connected. And observes us.
The connected objects have a good eye on us. We will no longer be able to shake them off. What do they tell about us?
How would the water kettle characterize you, which you encounter in the morning mainly grumpy? What does the sneaker report that regularly accompanies you when you are at your limit? And what would the vacuum cleaner robot sharing about you, who knows what it was like under your sofa? Our things have become observers of our everyday lives. They become our silent roommates. Unlike in the past, they record their experiences in their logbooks. Which thing should you portray after your death?
“15 drops of rain, step, step, inhale, step, step, exhale 15–2 -1- 2–1, he feels how the rhythm brings life to the tired limbs and how the rising pulse gently awakens the body. 80, 90, 100, 120, 130, the runner looks at the clock, nods, smiles, trots.”
This is how reporter Eva Wolfangel portrays jogging Florian Schumacher. His things could tell a lot about Florian Schuhmacher. Because Schumacher is a Quantifier. He is a man who optimizes his life by measuring everything that can be measured. And one about whom a series of sensor data perhaps says more than any of his interview statements. The Quantified Self movement gathers people who put their lives into numbers. They count their steps and monitor their sleep patterns, track their mood, pulse and skin resistance, weight and air quality, record their ECG and measure insulin and cortisol levels in the blood, have their DNA analysed. Wearables — portable, networked devices — enable them to constantly collect data without having to do much or even behave abnormally. The crowning glory for many: sharing the success they have achieved.
Two journalists, Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly, made the Quantified Self movement a big deal. While working for the technology magazine “Wired”, they came across various technologies: from life logging to biometrics. The two realized that as different as things are, they have one thing in common — they add an extra dimension to everyday objects. Together, Wolf and Kelly founded Quantified Self Labs in 2007.
“These new tools were being developed for many different reasons, but all of them had something in common: they added a computational dimension to ordinary existence,” Wolf writes. Because the quantified ego is above all a good story. The fitness trackers are unforgiving. Fitness wristbands and smartwatches with ECG function, surveillance cameras and smart assistants. They are all researchers in our lives.
In 2009, German politician Malte Spitz filed a lawsuit against Deutsche Telekom for the usage data recorded by his smartphone for six months. He made it available to a team of journalists from Zeit Online. The result was a classic of sensor journalism. The geodata was coupled with explanations. To do this, the journalists made use of the following data that was freely available on the Internet
Information from the life of the MP, such as Twitter and blog entries. We got to know the behaviour of the top politician, whom we approached more closely than any reporter for half a year. If Spitz had lied about his whereabouts during this time or had had a meeting that he would have preferred not to have had, we would know. The motion profile of his smartphone created a frighteningly accurate picture of his life.
Data journalist Marco Maas will be happy to give you an impression of what data can be collected. In his “Sensor Residence” project, Maas provides an insight into his apartment, which is equipped with a variety of sensors. From the carbon monoxide concentration of the breathing air to the networked mattress — Maas has equipped his apartment with several hundred sensors. And all this out of the conviction that these make his life more pleasant.
But even those who do not actively measure themselves collect data. Data scientist Charles Givre talks about what his Smarthome knows about him: from intelligent door locks to roller shutters. Even his barbecue behaviour is tracked: via a sensor on the propane gas bottle of his gas barbecue. At a big data conference in New York in 2015, he said: “If you were to start aggregating this over time, you could get a frighteningly accurate picture of pretty much where I am at any given time of day.” When Givre pitted his devices to get information, he came across some vulnerabilities. Even three years later, he reports, little had changed in this respect. So the tracking data could also become the involuntary documentation of a life.
Our Things probably don’t Like us
When machines write stories about people, they don’t just tell positive things. And they are not completely unbiased. In his book “Die granulare Gesellschaft” (“The granular society”), German sociologist Christoph Kucklick analyses in detail how digitisation is changing our lives. One of his core theses: The technological development forces us to rethink the concept of equality. In an interview, he explains: “The more precisely we measure, the more clearly the differences emerge. And in the digital world we measure much more accurately than before. Cars now have hundreds of sensors, so it’s possible to measure down to the tiniest detail how each individual driver drives unlike every other.” A detail that is interesting for car insurers, for example.
Pro Publica maintains the “Machine Bias” project. Journalists research how machine learning models behave and how the resulting injustices can be uncovered. In her book “Automating Inequality”, political scientist Virginia Eubanks paints a completely pessimistic picture of how humans are observed through their devices. From her perspective, the data feeds algorithms that are increasingly decisive for our lives: “Marginalized groups face higher levels of data collection when they access public benefits, walk through highly policed neighborhoods, enter the healthcare system, or cross national borders. That data acts to reinforce their marginality when it is used to target them for suspicion and extra scrutiny” (fVirginia Eubanks, Automating Inequality). Making the unequal treatment visible on the basis of the actually collected data of networked objects will also be a journalistic task in the journalism of things. And it won’t be easy.
Paparazzi using Sensors
Some paparazzi of German society magazine “Bunte” had discovered a special form of sensor journalism for themselves and equipped the private doormat of a top politician with sensors to uncover his love affair. As soon as someone stepped on the doormat, they positioned their cameras. In fact, such doormat sensors are available as part of alarm systems. Publisher and graphic artist Klaus Staeck wrote: “The magazine hardly stops at anything. Except for seriousness. In any case, a doormat in front of Müntefering’s apartment […], peppered with motion sensors, does not belong to the research work of serious journalists.”
All this raises questions: Will a profile be possible without this data in the future? Will it perhaps even be made possible to integrate the live life data — the heartbeat of a top athlete, the adrenaline level of a musician — into the profile? And what is the relationship between this sharp measurement data and the journalistic world observed?
