Who are you in the Age of Big Data?
Reexamining Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” in Light of the Quantified Self
How should we be measuring ourselves? How should we go about implementing changes to our character?
Since the rise of technologies like Facebook and FitBits, these questions have taken on new layers of complexity, making objective self-assessment more difficult, but also more illuminating. To answer these questions, we will start by looking back to a poignant 19th century philosophy of self-understanding, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau’s “Transcendentalism.”
The Transcendental Attitude
I read Emerson and Thoreau for their mature, poetic conversations and advice on how I ought to spend my time. The transcendentalists are known for their appreciation of the individual, placing a high value on integrity toward one’s self, and the belief that philosophical principles should be based on the mental essence of the human, rather than on generalized physical experience.
More practically, I was reading Emerson and Thoreau for their mature, poetic conversations and advice on how I ought to spend my time as a young student. I connected well with their voices and found relief from academic stress in their thoughtful criticism of organized systems and institutions. Thoreau especially helped me to cultivate a deep appreciation for simplicity.
That being said, some of their ideas prompt salient cognitive dissonance. I am unable to reconcile Emerson’s “self-reliant” philosophy, the idea that a person should value their own intuition and affective tendencies above the “wave of society,” and that you should disregard what others think of you, with the modern shift towards measuring ourselves against others, a deviation induced by social media, big data, and the quantified self movement. I also found it difficult to practice Thoreau’s charming attitude toward nature and simplicity while receiving a daily bombardment of scientific and political information. Although their elegant philosophies still seemed inherently reasonable, I wondered what the Transcendentalists would have suggested in our contemporary technological landscape, and how their ideas could be updated to support an individual embedded in the complex environment of the internet.
“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”
-Thoreau, Walden
The Waves of Social Media
It goes without saying, that evolution did not shape us for a world which included the World-Wide Web. This idea is well discussed in Yuval Harari’s “Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind,” where he explains how the agricultural and scientific revolutions catapulted us out of the evolutionary scheme of other animals and into a new era of rapid development. The processes of technological evolution effect change exponentially faster than those of biological evolution. Attempting to understand the interplay of our modern technology with our biological nature raises a number of fascinating questions, many directly relevant to the attempt to update Emerson’s ideas.
As a poignant example, I recently read Dr. Gavin Smith’s paper “Data doxa: The affective consequences of data practices,” where he examines the idea that the “routinisation of digital devices and data use” can constrain an individual’s ability to conduct critical self-assessment, causing problems and conflict within our complex ontologies. For example, because “search engines and social media platforms possess capacities for filtering what is seen and known,” often on a commercial basis, it is now reasonable to assume that much of the “data” we are exposed to has been corrupted, or is being framed erroneously, a concept known as the popular new term “fake news.” Smith goes on to discuss a general lack of awareness about the collection and monitoring of Big Data, which cultivates a pathological relationship of individuals with data that is both “dependent and misunderstood.” In other words, by participating in platforms like Facebook and Instagram, you allow access to far more information about you as an individual than what you write in the “About” section, and that information is being used in a variety of opaque, primarily commercial ways.
Facebook, Instagram and the family of social media platforms are exactly the type of societal product which Emerson and Thoreau criticized, with good reason. Researchers have consistently shown the negative effects of social media on mental health, including more pronounced concerns for anxiety, depression, lack of focus and decreased self-esteem, among others. Many agree that social media has ironically made us less socially connected. Even back in the 19th century, when newspaper was the primary media, Thoreau was viscerally opposed to much of what he read:
“If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter — we never need read of another. One is enough.”
-Thoreau, Walden
And now Facebook automatically loads an infinite line of videos for us to watch in succession…
In his study, Smith highlights the risk for faulty self-comparison on social media. On the first day of entry-level Statistics, you learn that data can be skewed by outliers. An outlier, as the name suggests, lies outside the bulk of data points. For humanity, the outliers in question are extraordinary moments, like perfect meals, beautiful sunsets, job offers, and parties with friends. Built for advertising, Facebook’s algorithms tend to feed us posts from outlying moments, experiences which make up only a small portion of everyday life. When we assess how we measure up against the rest of our peers, it is no surprise we are left feeling like a small fish, lost in a sea of other people’s personal successes. Cultivating a sense of inferiority is also a good way to move self-improvement products. Emerson would be disappointed with this type of self-assessment, asserting in “Self-Reliance” that “envy is ignorance” and “imitation is suicide.”
Although he did not use statistical terms, Emerson’s idea mirrors those of modern scientific researchers, who learn to disregard outliers when developing generalizable principles from data sets.
The lesson: do not compare yourself to outliers.
Updating Self-Reliance
The problem is clear: modern social technology disrupts our ability for critical self-assessment. Does this mean that we should follow Thoreau by moving into a cabin in the woods and disconnecting ourselves from Internet of Everything? It is a very tempting idea…but first we should remember everything that data and social technology have given humanity in the last decade. Improving our most basic human capacity, social technology has given us the ability to instantly communicate with anyone, almost anywhere on the planet. It has given scientists an ocean of raw data on human action to be analyzed and learned from. Perhaps most importantly, the internet has allowed for an unprecedented dissemination of knowledge and understanding which had previously been reserved for university researchers and industry experts. The list goes on.
“Social Media replaces nothing, but complements everything.” -Neal Schaffer
We cannot be so quick to abandon the techno-social landscape, so we must find harmony. How could we reconcile Wolf’s “quantified self” and big data trends with the age-old, Delphic mantra “Know thyself,” which preaches self-understanding rooted in consciousness and spirituality, instead of blood sugar levels and hours of REM sleep?
Consider an addition to the transcendental attitude: If the methods of collecting, analyzing, and commercializing complex information produce results which are transparent and well-understood, a person may use the raw data as a tool to better discern themselves and the objective world.
Just as with the scientific method, transparency is crucial. For any scientific report to be considered valid and useful, authors must clearly detail research methods, results and any potential conflicts of interest which may have allowed bias into the conclusions. This process ensures that under identical conditions, the same experiment will produce the same outcome, which can then be considered a usable fact. Unfortunately, transparency doesn’t always generate maximum profit. Modern news websites, as commercial entities, have less of an incentive to fact check publications when catchy click-bait titles and clever framing bring in much heavier traffic, and when Likes are positively correlated with shareholder return. Thankfully, there are sites like The Knife Media, who are committed to providing unbiased news and social information.
Critical Self-Assessment
Data and data-driven conclusions must also be understood. Consider a typical promotional statistic: “9 out of 10 dentists would recommend this toothpaste.” There are some questions to ask, especially when making financial decisions:
- What was the sample size?
- Who paid for the research?
- How were research questions framed?
- Is this result relevant and generalizable?
Understanding what data-based evidence tells us is only valuable when we also understand how and why it was studied. In general, the statistics governing claims made about your toothpaste probably wouldn’t hold up under scrutiny. We can realize some of Emerson’s wisdom, who recommended this exact sort of healthy skepticism by warning that “truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.”
Emerson and Thoreau lived in a different time. Their base of knowledge was limited, tiny in comparison to the mountains of information available to the average student today. Their strategy was to derive truth only from what they themselves had experienced.
“Only so much do I know, as I have lived.”
-Emerson, The American Scholar
The internet and its emergent products, social media included, can now provide equally visceral evidence for truth, so long as the two precautions are taken. Thinkers today have the opportunity to acquire truth and understanding from a global network of peers, with validity ensured by proper application of the scientific method. Where Thoreau would’ve needed to leave his cabin and venture back to the cities to hear fellow lecturers speak, we now have more video lectures available on YouTube being produced daily than could probably be consumed in an average lifetime.
With this harmonization, we see that even after 150 years, transcendental ideas can provide wisdom and guidance during the pursuit of knowledge through scientific inquiry. If studied with integrity and diligence, Big Data induced by social technology can provide deep insights to help us assess and understand ourselves and the world around us. Following Emerson’s advice from a statistical perspective prescribes that to conduct critical-self assessment, compare yourself to the faceless data of the masses and avoid making decisions based on the skewed information from your newsfeed.
To the scientist:
“Don’t be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.”
-Emerson, Journal 1841–1844
About the author:
A student of Mathematics, learning to read and write, who spends too much study time playing guitar. Raised with a twin brother in a small western British Columbia town, playing in woods that would have pleased Thoreau. — Jonas Petersen, Content Creator at The Brane.
About The Brane:
At The Brane, we believe in promoting the application of the scientific method for the sustained improvement of humankind, and in empowering experts in their tireless investigation of the frontiers of knowledge. To make our vision a reality, we spent the last three years building an open science platform where users may search for, contribute, peer review, organize, and discuss all science and tech topics, and get rewarded for their contributions. Stand taller. See further. Follow us to find out more.
