Digital Media Theory
Prof. Christiane Paul, PhD
ABSTRACT
While the concept of self-tracking is not particularly new, a movement labeled Quantified Self (QS) represents a newly emerged approach to discussions of how to optimize one’s life in the best possible way. Through a promising slogan, “Self Knowledge Through Numbers,”[1] the QS has now become a community that attracts various groups of people who want to have better control of their lives, whether by improving their productivity, health, physical appearance or emotional state through employing wearable digital devices that provide them with instant and easily comprehendible information about their bodies and behavior.
This paper will explore how human perception changes as we experience and adapt to the new environments that emerged with the introduction of communication technologies onto our bodies in form of self-tracking digital devices.
Following Mark Hansen’s concept of embodiment introduced in his book Bodies in Code: Interfaces With Digital Media (2006) where he argues that cyberspace is not anchored in computer graphics, but in the body, which allows a person to feel immersed in virtual reality, this paper employs Hansen’s approach for clarifying the nature of interactions of self-trackers with their “data doubles” as purely informational bodies. I argue that in the context of wearable self-tracking technology, the result of this form of embodiment is amplified awareness of the future body/self as well as a step closer to the conception of the self as a machine.
Keywords: wearable technology, self-tracking, quantified self, data doubles, embodiment, personal analytics.
INTRODUCTION
Contemporary practices of self-tracking or the “quantified self” as some like to call it represent a significant shift from relying upon our own abilities to keep track of ourselves towards handing over these practices to digital media and into the hands of whoever stands behind them as their creator. The field of personal analytics that has emerged around these self-monitoring practices has one important aspect – crunching the collected data into meaningful information that relates to one’s bodily functions, physical appearance, relationships, productivity, diet, illness symptoms, mood and many other aspects of one’s everyday life.
While people have been able to perform these activities by utilizing memory as an analytical tool or by using non-digital technologies for centuries, it wasn’t until we introduced mobile digital devices with Internet connection onto our bodies that we were able to facilitate the ever more detailed and precise measurement of the bodily functions and everyday life in real time. These technologies come in various forms and include wearable wristbands, headbands or patches, with digital sensors embedded into their fabric that are able to collect data from the body or the environment and upload it wirelessly to the server of the company that sells the wearable device.
When making sense of self-tracking through wearable devices as a cultural phenomenon, it must be positioned within other contemporary social and cultural currents related to practices of selfhood and embodiment (Lupton 2012). Self-tracking in this context is more than just a data gathering practice; it is also an identity building practice, which revolves around the question “Who am I?.” Self-trackers believe that the answer is hidden in the patterns that emerge from quantifying their bodily functions and behavior – hence the need to quantify any behavior, from tracking the number of steps, to tracking the mood changes.
As a consequence, these technologies have a deep impact on their user’s perception – they make them reorganize the classification of their bodies and their position within the world they live in. I argue that this is not a new and isolated event, but a continuation of the mechanization of mind that arguably started with the industrial revolution and continued with the introduction of computers into humans’ everyday practices. Sherry Turkle described one of the manifestations of this phenomenon in her book The Second Self (1995) in which she analyzed the computer not as just a tool, but as a part of our social and psychological lives that deeply affects our awareness of ourselves, of one another and of our relationship with the world.
The computer is our intimate companion, the one that’s seemingly always under our control, as it’s the only object that offers instant feedback that is so appealing to our will to control. Because of such nature of this medium, we have started thinking of the workings of a machine in psychological terms – we ascribe human qualities to computers and vice versa. This is evident in the language that we use when talking about the computer (i.e. we give names to machines or say that they ‘don’t feel well’ if they’re not working properly) as well as when talking about ourselves (i.e. saying ‘I need to reboot my system’ when referring to the physical condition of being tired). As Lupton pointed out, while we may refer to cars as human-like, they are rarely represented as intimately as computers, which we describe as ‘work companions’ or ‘friends’ or even ‘lovers’ (1995, 98). Indeed, human-computer interaction is “more erotic than sensuous, more deeply spiritual than utilitarian” (Heim 1992, 61). These personal reflections raise the issue of the emotional and the embodied relationship that users have with their wearable computers as well as the question of re-positioning of self within the world of nature and artifact. When the human body is defragmented and quantified, does that position it closer to the machines?
DIGITALIZATION OF SELF-TRACKING
Self-tracking wearable technologies extend and enhance the body not only technologically but also by treating it as a kind of “intimate host giving rise to a symbiotic relationship between person and device” (Viseu and Suchman 2010, 162). In discussions revolving around the presence of the body within the emergence of digital communication technologies, social scientists and researchers have assumed somehow opposing attitudes. Some argued that these technologies have enabled people to break out of the boundaries of their bodies and engage in disembodied virtual experience at the expense of their bodies, which thus become futile (Balsamo 1995: Turkle 1995)[2], while others opposed that idea by arguing that the role of embodiment is essential in any human experience (Hansen 2006). The practice of self-tracking within the field of wearable technology stands as an example of breaking out of the boundaries of the body by offering a constantly mediated, imaged and imagined representation of the body. As opposed to virtual representations of bodies (e.g. avatars in virtual worlds), which ultimately offer the same, self-tracking takes a different – it is not a representation of the body image but an abstraction based on data generated by the physical body.
In this newly emerged communication with the body and it’s environment, wearable technology produces new awareness of the body and of the self, new regimes of power and knowledge, new possibilities for the enhancement of human life, and new fears for its degradation and destruction (Edwards, Harvey, and Wade, 2010, 2).
As mentioned, self-tracking is nothing new for humans, but self-tracking by using wearable sensors in combination with wearable computing is a novelty (in this paper I shall refer to this ecosystem as the quantified self technologies or simply QST) that hasn’t really ‘caught on’ with the mainstream public yet[3].
For Anne Balsamo the process of self-tracking results with amplified body awareness and production of docile bodies (1995, 216). Balsamo traced back self-tracking activities as imposed by medical authorities that encouraged monitoring our bodily functions through the use of devices such as electronic scales, home pregnancy kits or blood pressure machines (Ibid.). She observed that these devices function as:
a set of visualization techniques that contribute to the fragmentation of the body into organs, fluid and ‘bodily states’, which in turn promote self-conscious self-surveillance whereby the body becomes an object of intense vigilance and control (Ibid).
Balsamo argued that bodies betray us in this process, as we have nowhere to hide from them and thus have no other choice but to comply and live as docile creatures if we want to avoid self-destruction.
What wearable QS technologies offer today is quite different then what Balsamo observed in 1995, for a couple of reasons. First, the practice of self-tracking is no longer a visualization technique as QS offers its users pre-made visualizations of collected data in form of graphs and maps reflecting the body’s activities – as opposed to lines and numbers offered by early self-tracking devices such as scales and pregnancy kits.
Second, QS includes a strong social component – users often share their data with other users of the device, on social media networks, or with their physicians. And unlike in the early days of self-tracking technology, today’s digital devices such as body weight scales or blood pressure cuffs can be connected wirelessly to applications, which will then, based on the input generate charts and other visualizations that are shareable.
Finally, digital self-tracking implies a constant presence of the sensor on the user’s body (most often in a form of a wristband, headband or patch), which by itself correlates to the extension of the embodied affect. The body in this case becomes a background on which information can be framed (Hansen 2006, 176).
FRAGMENTED PERCEPTION
Indeed, with wearable self-tracking devices their users might become aware of the body, perhaps more than ever before. However, many researchers argue that this body is not perceived as a whole – it is fragmented and fractured into functional parts. And I agree, QS does fragment the body, because it refers to its parts, not the whole. However, fragmentation of the body is not the only phenomenon that takes place; at the same time QS devices create their users’ “data doubles,” purely informational bodies that govern the conversion of human bodies and minds into data flows which can be metaphorically reassembled for the purposes of interaction with self (Ruckenstein 2014). It is important to distinguish that fragmentation happens with the present body, which is then de-fragmented in the image of the future body.
Another argument in favor of fragmentation is the change in language that we use to describe the body. Since the introduction of computer as a medium, we have started thinking of ourselves in computational terms (Turkle 1995, 17) and with the introduction of digital communication technologies (wearable computing that tracks the inner workings of our bodies), we are increasingly using numbers as reference points for thinking and talking about the body and self. When referring to themselves people think and talk about their measures – the number of steps taken, of the calories consumed, of the hours they spent sleeping in the REM phase, they give grades to their experiences (i.e. “the party was 10/10”), they describe body as a system – all of these can be described as giving advantage to quantifying the experience over qualifying it. Because perceive bodies in numbers as more precise in comparison with a qualitative description of the same.
Does this mean that with QS technologies we no longer perceive bodies as processes, but as information? Has fragmentation of our bodies also fragmented our perception of time? I see this phenomenon as manifestation of (or just another step towards) the instantification of our every-day actions, practices, and duties. The reason for it lies in the abundance of everything that we as a society produce – from products we buy to information we consume, everything is present in extremely large quantities, so large that its amount transcends our abilities to process it. As a result, we no longer care for continuity; we buy clothes that quickly become replaced with other clothes, we get involved in numerous short sexual encounters, our relationships last for a short time, our attention spans are shrinking as well as our vocabularies. We consume massive amounts of content on Internet that comes to us in a shrinked form. The abundance of information (the big data) makes us want to crunch it to understandable bits (most often in visual form).
Feltron Report serves as an example of what visual possibilities are offered with the QS technologies. In 2005 Nicholas Felton – a graphic designer and one of the lead designers of Facebook’s timeline whose quantified reports are a part of the permanent collection at MoMA NYC – started producing yearly reports on his life’s quantifiable experiences. He added an r to his last name to make it sound more “corporate.” His extensive reports may even contain information provided by people with whom he had a significant face-to-face encounter, such as presented in 2009 report. The collected information forms a database of his personality and habits, from facts (where he went, what he drank) to more subjective material such as his mood (MoMA 2011).
What’s important to distinguish here is that Felton represents those users of QS technologies who are not relying on pre-made visualization, but are actively engaged into visualizing collected data themselves. The pages of his reports are a highly aesthetic, presented in a series of rich infographics that push the boundaries of personal data quantification and of visual data representation. Following Nathaniel Stern’s arguments concerning embodiment, perception and affect (2014), we might argue that Felton’s infographics become active agents in an “unfolding and enfolding narratives of bodies and space” (Ibid) and of time, as I see it, as these visuals ultimately provide a layer of the future body projected onto the current body.
As much of one’s self-identity is built around the body image, what is preventing the disappearance of the body that Balsamo (1995) feared is the ability to look at the future self (and future body) that “data doubles” provide. The promise of the Quantified Self as a movement revolves around the notion of an enhanced and better image of the future (possible) self. This represents another important shift – by enabling the user of the wearable computer to constantly be aware of the future self, it directly affects their self-schema and changes the perception of their current self. If the perception of past or future self is related to the current self, then we might even argue that all these perceptions change with the introduction of the self-tracking digital tool onto the body (Markus and Nurius, 1986).
With this in mind I would like to point out to Nataniel Stern’s assertion of embodiment as “our materialization and articulation, both actual and virtual: as they occur, and are about to occur” (2014). For Stern, embodiment is an “incipient activity” (Ibid.) – body is constantly emergent, always active and dynamic; constantly changing through its relations to the outside and inside. When interacting with their “data doubles” that are represented in forms of charts and graphs, the QS users become active agents “in an unfolding and enfolding narrative of bodies and space” (Ibid), and while their real body (flesh) may be physically present, their imagined, “future body” is at that moment of interaction equally real, and as such prevents the body of becoming perceived as obsolete.
QUANTIFIED BODIES AND WEARABLE SPACES
In a chapter called “Wearable Space” from his book Bodies in Code, Hansen introduced the phenomenon that occurs at the intersection of two poles that bind together current conceptions of wearable and ubiquitous computing. The first one is fluidity between human body and computer, while the second one is fluidity between body and space embedded in the “primary medium of sensation” (2006, 175). When Hansen states that
space becomes wearable when embodied affectivity becomes the operator of spacing (Ibid.)
he is referring to the “embodied framing of information,” which could most simply be described as space that emerges from the interaction of wearable technology, body and environment so that one’s self-tracking digital device becomes a part of their surroundings and an important operator of embodied experience. When wearing a self-tracking device, the user becomes engaged into constant negotiation that happens on a body-sensor-environment relation. The mere awareness of this constant negotiation is the wearable space that moves around with the user.
Following the early phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1948), Hansen makes a distinction between the “body-image” and the “body-schema” – the former “characterizes and is generated from a primarily visual apprehension of the body as an external object” (Hansen 2006, 38), while the latter emerges from “the operational perspective of the embodied organism” (Ibid., 39).
CONCLUSION
As far as the relationship between human and computer is concerned, the introduction of digital communication technologies on the body has blurred the boundaries between embodied self and computer more than ever before. These devices become extensions of the body image and sensation (Lupton 1995, 98). It’s difficult to perceive them as merely inanimate objects; for their users they are not just tools that tell them how many steps they took in a day, they are also instruments of expression. Interactions with these instruments reposition the status of the body as “instrument and tool that enhances its role in the process of perception” (Simanowski 2011, 124).
The advent of digital technologies that are able to assist humans in the collection, measurement, display and interpretation of the data about their bodies has intensified body awareness to great extent. Self-tracking in this context is more than just a data gathering practice; it is also an identity building practice. Because of such intimate nature of this medium, which makes it ideal for “construction of a wide variety of private worlds, and through them, for self explorations” (Turkle 1995, 15), we have started thinking of the workings of a machine in psychological terms – we ascribe human qualities to computers and vice versa. We have started thinking in computational terms, which has only intensified with the creation of purely informational mirror images of ourselves that are brought to life with the wearable self-tracking technologies.
Furthermore, within the context of QS technologies, the merger of science and art turns the body into a “painterly tool for an ever-changing visual feedback system” (Simanowski 2011). As a result, we no longer perceive bodies as processes, but as information – fragmentation of our bodies has also fragmented our perception of time and space.
What’s more important, by enabling the user of the wearable computer to constantly be aware of the future self, it directly affects their self-schema and changes the perception of their current self. As Sherry Tukle pointed out, in our relationship with the computer, we ask of it where we stand in nature, as well as in the world of artifact (1995). The nature of embodied interactions of self-trackers with their “data doubles” as purely informational bodies that represent projections of their future selves, as a result has an amplified awareness of the future body/self. Ultimately, this identity building practice brings us a step closer to the world of artifact and the conception of self as a machine.
BIBILIOGRAPHY:
Balsamo, Anne. 1995. “Forms Of Technological Embodiment: Reading The Body in Contemporary Culture.” In Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk. Cultures of Technological Embodiment, edited by Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows, 215-239. London, UK: SAGE Publications Ltd.
Hansen, Mark B. N. 2006. Bodies in Code: Interfaces With Digital Media. New York, NY: Routledge
Heim, Michael. 1993. The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality. New York, NY: Oxford University Press
Markus, Hazel, and Paula Nurius. 1986. “Possible selves.” American Psychologist 41 (9): 954–969. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.41.9.954.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. [1948] 2004. The World of Perception. Translated by Oliver Davis. Abingdon, UK: Routledge
MoMA. Talk to Me: Design and the Communication between People and Objects. July 24–November 7, 2011
Ruckenstein, Minna. 2014. “Visualized and Interacted Life: Personal Analytics and Engagements with Data Doubles.” Societies 4: 68–84.
Simanowski, Roberto. 2011. Digital Art and Meaning: Reading Kinetic Poetry, Text Machines, Mapping Art, and Interactive Installations. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press
Stern, Nathaniel. 2014. “Interactive Art: Interventions in/to Process.” In A Companion to Digital Art, edited by Christiane Paul. New York, NY: Wiley-Blackwell.
Turkle, Sherry. 1995. The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Viseu, Ana, and Lucy Suchman. 2010. “Wearable Augmentations,” In Technologized Images, Technologized Bodies: anthropological approaches to a new politics of vision, edited by J. Edwards, P. Harvey and P. Wade. Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books
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[1] The movement was initiated in 2007 by Wired Magazine editors Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly who have built the website that serves as a community hub for perhaps the most diligent group of QS trackers.
[2] This type of disembodiment was the main discourse in the 90s when the idea of embedded sensors and ubiquitous computing was still nascent.
[3] According to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, 69% of U.S. adults keep track of at least one health indicator such as weight, diet, exercise routine, or symptom, however, few of them – only 9% – use either an app on their mobile device or an online tool to keep track of their health (Pew, 2014)