Thinking Technology
Prof. Eugene Thacker, PhD
Visible and mobile, my body is a thing among things: it is caught in the Fabric of the world.
— Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind”
ABSTRACT
This essay looks into the interactions of Quanitfied Self-ers with their digital doppelgangers, or data doubles,[1] as purely informational entities that exist in virtual realm and are a product of data collected through sensors. Through interactions with their data doubles, users reconfigure their bodies as sites upon which the gaze of self-surveillance and self-experimentation can focus. Data double as a concept implies the abstraction of human bodies by fragmenting them into different data streams and then defragmenting them into data doubles, for the purposes of analyses, exhortations, reminders, and narratives.
These interactions are realized through an interface of an accompanying mobile app that serves as a mediator between the sensor and the body/environment. Through interactions with representations of their personal data, users of Quantified Self tools are placing themselves into a position of both the observed and observer – they are faced with a reflection of themselves, a sort of a technical mirror, although this reflection is far from a social gaze of a body, it is a technical vision of another “dimension of organismic being” (Hansen 2006, 15).
By placing focus on the aesthetics of Quantified Self, following a premise that aesthetics has at its center human perception (Hayles 2014), my aim is to uncover and describe how our embodied materiality is affected by digital self-tracking technologies and to propose a methodology called object-oriented inquiry [2], which is grounded in object-oriented ontology [3] but also departs from it in significant ways.
Keywords: Quantified Self, data-double, posthuman, object-oriented inquiry
INTRODUCTION
“We know how numbers are useful when we manage, advertise, govern, search – in Quantified Self they are useful when we reflect, learn, remember and want to improve.”
— Gary Wolf
During 2007 Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly (both then editors working for Wired magazine) have noticed a certain trend in rising. It revolved around the notions of personal analytics, digital self-tracking, self-improvement, and biofeedback[4], among other things. They decided to give this trend a name – they purchased a web domain and started a company with the same name: Quantified Self. It was a start of a movement that was born in the Bay Area and quickly spread around the world. The premise behind the movement is grounded in the idea that the body, just like any other machine, can be fine-tuned to perform better. However, because that body is flawed, and its perceptual system with all its biases is restricting the amount of information we are able to receive when we perceive things, the rise of wearable technology and ubiquitous computing has offered a possibility for extensions of human perceptual system. With sensor-laden objects (which then become referred to as smart objects) their users are able to outsource their perceptual abilities and thus acquire a new, artificial sensing organ. While our innate sense organs – eyes, ears, nose, skin and tongue – contain receptors that relay information through sensory neurons to the appropriate places within a nervous system, a wearable sensor relays information to the Internet. Self-tracking sensors collect data about their users and then reflect them back in a form of analyses (data visualizations such as charts and graphs), persuasions (textual or visual messages that emphatically urge users to correct their behavior), reminders (most often it includes messages from the app or haptic feedback that behaves as a nudge), and narratives (apps are often constructed following a certain aesthetic and accompanying rhetoric, which in turn brings about certain narratives).
In this body-sensor-internet relationship, perspective is offered as a service, and existence as a platform. The next step in the evolution of digital self-tracking involves sensors that constantly measure the body and its environment, but because they are part of the Internet of Things [5], they are able to automatically correlate their data with data from other connected objects. For instance, a smart-watch could automatically “recognize” what object you are touching at any given moment and correlate that information with other “smart” objects within your environment. This capability could create numerous new possibilities for context-aware applications. The technique is called EM-Sense (Stinon 2015) and it uses some of the material qualities of the body – namely, its natural electrical conductivity to detect whether the object that the user is touching is electrical or electromechanical, and based on the distinctive electromagnetic noise, the sensor is then able to identify the object (Ibid.).
If Heidegger’s Gestel has taught us anything about how modern technology reorients our particular position and direction towards the world because it brings about the new mode of existence into being, so that with power plant, for instance, a river becomes a source of electricity, then with digital self-tracking technologies the body becomes not just a body, but also an object that is able to communicate with other objects: it becomes not only a “selective background on which information can be framed” (Hansen 2006, 176), but also a medium that generates information. In this new form of human-machine interface, the surface of the body – its physical boundaries – become extended. Additionally, once connected to the Internet of Things, the body becomes a part of the system where its biometric data is being used to control objects. In other words, physical body can control aspects of environment, and it can do so automatically, without the need to make conscious decisions, which further breaks down the barrier between biological beings and digital world.
VIRTUALITY AS POSTHUMAN CONDITION
Quantified Self is a ground where numerous processes leading to transformation from human to posthuman have taken their place and although my intention is not to document historical background to how these processes came into existence, I will take some time to offer an insight into what I think was the spark that initiated this particular mode of thinking and enabled the trajectory that brought us object-oriented thinking. When I say “us,” I use it as means to draw myself closer to the Quantified Self as phenomenon that is experienced by a certain group of people – certainly not me, as I have tried but failed to identify my self as Quantified Self-er, and certainly not “everyone else”. QS at its roots is a very Californian movement that appeals to a very specific audience – having spent some time researching the content of the QuantifiedSelf.com website, the central hub of the movement, it quickly became obvious that majority of its members are white males. My intention is thus twofold: besides a desire for proximity, I use “us” to invite the readers to envision themselves as a posthuman collectivity. Following N. Katherine Hayles and her ideas presented in How We Became Posthuman (1999) my definition of posthuman does not imply that there was a shift from human to posthuman, because there was never a complete transformation or sharp break (Ibid., 6). Instead, “human” and “posthuman” are interlaced and “coexist in shifting configurations that vary with historically specific contexts” (Ibid.).
Hayles asserted that posthuman was made possible when “information lost its body,” meaning that it wasn’t until Claude Shannon had developed his famous information theory, and thus opened the door for conception of information as a disembodied entity that can “flow between carbon-based organic components and silicone-based electronic components” [6] (Ibid., 2) that we were able to adopt this particular perception of the body as an object. In addition to Shannon’s idea, equally important was Norbert Wiener’s idea of the feedback loop, which has set the stage for conceptualizing the boundaries of the autonomous subject as porous because feedback loops can flow not just within the subject but also between the subject and its environment.
The appeal of conceptualizing the body as information is obvious – if we are information, then we surely could do away with the body (Hayles 1999, 12). Of course, this argument conceptualizes information and materiality as separate entities, but it doesn’t take into account that for information to exist it must always be instantiated in a medium (Ibid., 13). Information without a medium is nothing – there is no information without a medium.
Before we continue further, I’d like to use these adjectives to describe the qualities of QS mode of thinking: corporate, scientific and computational.
Computational refers to Shannon and Wiener for the most part, and their respective ideas that enabled equating humans with computer, because once information lost its body it was easy to disregard materiality as an essential part of existence and regard mind as the site of human identity (Ibid., 3). The second part of my observation is following Alexander Galloway[7] who asserted that if “cinema is in general an ontology, the computer is, in general, an ethic” (2012, 22). He compared this distinction to differences between a language and a calculus. Language, on one hand, operates through description and reference with a goal of encoding the world, while calculus, on the other hand, operates through computation and processes, with a goal of doing something to the world (actually, to simulate doing something) – it is a system grounded in reasoning and problem-solving methods, which makes the computer an executable machine. So what is the difference? The calculus, according to Galloway, implies a method. This doesn’t mean that computer are ethical, it means that, if an ethic delineates principles for practice, then the computer in its essence has the same effect, because “it is premised on the notion that objects are subject to definition and manipulation according to a set of principles for action” (Ibid., 23). Thus, by moving away from metaphysics and ontology, he turns to ethics and pragmatics in order to be able to understand the computer in terms of its actions in relation to the world. His approach comes as a useful meditation for clarifying the computational aspect of the Quantified Self technologies. In this context, these technologies are not objects, or creators of objects, but behave as active thresholds that mediate between two states: subject and object, natural and artificial, human and posthuman. Essential to this argument is the relationship of command and control.
Corporate refers to the rise of Busyness, as a byproduct of neo/capitalistic condition. Within a new “always connected” corporate culture, value is attributed to the ones who work “around the clock” and able to efficiently multitask, which represents a shift from regarding idle indulgence in leisure as a mark of high social status. Today leisure time can be considered as such only if one can purchase and squeeze in as many cultural activities in it as possible (Wajcman 2014) because, for one part, the forces that shape virtual life demand of individuals to cultivate their existence online – most often this is executed via social media platforms where one manages his or her second self [8]. One of the most important activities for the members of the QS community is participation in meetup sessions [9] where they share with the group what they discovered about themselves, in a form of a keynote presentation, which follows a certain corporate rhetoric. Each presentation illustrates a distinctive and systematic self-tracking approach that answers the Three Prime Questions: (1) what did you track, (2) how did you track, and (3) what did you learn? I call these instances the “epiphany narratives” because for the most part they follow the “I was blind but now I see” logic, which reminds me of Augustine’s Confessions and other religious and spiritual texts that speak of conversion. By the same token, I see the Quantified Self as a new form of enlightenment, the one in which the cold logic of numbers and data is more appealing, as a source of knowledge, than warm emotion of bodily affective states. Essentially, Quantified Self is a rejection of emotion in favor of data, which basically mimics corporate culture. A good example would be Nicholas Felton and his famous Personal Annual Reports – the Feltron Reports. He is a prominent member of the QS community and a famous graphic designer who is also credited for inspiring the design of Facebook’s timeline (he was a member of the product design team at Facebook). Around 2005 he started producing yearly reports on his life’s experiences. He added an r to his last name to make it sound more “corporate” (MoMA 2011). 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 (Ibid.).
Finally, the scientific part of my description refers to the application of behavioral psychology, which is one of the essential aspects of the QS movement, but even more than that, I see this part instantiated in a scientific subject-object approach of the QS activity. In science, a prime method of inquiry is experiment. What QS tools are supposed to do is help their users uncover hidden traces of their behavior so that they could in turn, empowered with the new knowledge about themselves, change their behavior. This whole process involves sophisticated experimental design with a goal of behavior modification[10] and additionally, it places the user of the QS tool in a position of both an object and a subject – the user assumes both roles, the one of a “rat in a lab experiment” and the one of the scientists controlling the experiment. He or she is both observing and being observed. To further conceptualize this phenomenon I’d like to point out to reflexivity, which is a concept central to the 2nd wave of the development of cybernetics. According to Hayles, it is
the movement whereby that which has been used to generate a system is made, through a changed perspective, to become part of the system it generates (1999, 8)
and because of its subversive effects it is responsible for the confusion of the boundaries we impose on the world because we want to make sense of that world, and the distinction between nature and artifact becomes fuzzy (I will discuss this further in the next chapter). Moreover, reflexivity tends towards infinite regress: the user creates the data and the data creates the user, thus it becomes impossible to say where does one end and other begin.
The second wave of cybernetics reached its maturity when Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela expanded the “reflexive turn into a fully articulated epistemology that sees the world as a set of informationally closed systems” (Ibid,. 10), which means that organisms are able to respond to their environment only insofar as enabled by their internal self-organization. The goal of an organism is to continually produce and reproduce the organization that defines it as systems, which makes it self-making organism. As a result, the theory of autopiesis came to life. The central premise of this theory is that systems are closed – we see the world not as it exists apart from us, but as our systemic organization allows us to see (Hayles 1999, 11). Thus informational feedback loops are no longer seen as bouncing freely between systems and their environments, simply because in this view systems are separated from their environments.
What followed in the third wave of cybernetics is the understanding of self-organization not just as the re/production of internal organization, but also as the ”springboard to emergence” (Ibid.) because inspiration for this conception was the emerging field of artificial life, namely computer programs that are designed to evolve beyond the programmer’s anticipation. Informational code thus became regarded as a form of life. This particular “cultural perception that material objects are interpenetrated by information patterns” (Ibid., 13) is called virtuality. The duality, which is at the heart of this condition plays with the separation of materiality from information, which as a consequence has enabled the view of the world as an “interplay between informational patterns and material objects” (Ibid., 14). Virtuality today is instantiated in an array of technologies, from virtual reality goggles such as Oculus Rift, augmented reality devices such as Google Glass, all the way to Quantified Self technologies. To live in virtuality means to favor information over material condition, which is precisely what is at play in the Quantified Self movement.
THE FLESH OF WEARABLE COMPUTING
A brief look at the history of intellectual thought reveals that one of the important issues behind various debates about human nature, our position in the universe as well as our characterization of self and identity, is related to boundaries – as suggested by Franchi and Guzeldere in Mechanical Bodies, Computational Minds (2004), we have a long history of separating human beings from other creatures, organic or inorganic, actual or imaginary (such as half‐human half‐animal beasts), fictional monsters created by humans (such as Frankenstein’s monster), mechanical artifacts in human form (such as automata and robots) and human‐machine hybrids (such as cyborgs). Useful for this argument is the concept of convergence, which has become a catchphrase that describes the collision and interaction of things that have until this point been regarded as existing on separate ontological planes. Convergence is where new media collide with old media, grassroots collides with corporate media, media producer collides media consumer[11] or for the case of this essay – bodies collide with computers.
However, if the computer has so degraded the plane of immanence, as I discussed in previous chapter, that it may reduce and simulate it using the simple principles of logical relation, then we have to consider it through the glass of what’s opposite to immanence – transcendence. If being is its object, and ethics is its experience, then the computer is what allows the body to transcend to the realm of objects. Let us think of it this way: computer can take as many forms as possible, and as such – in itself – is inaccessible to our perception and it never appears to our consciousness. We access the computer through the interface. It is what allows the consciousness to grasp the other (in this case, the machine) and its subjectivity, and it is also what allows the computer to grasp its user. This is what Sartre called a transcendence-transcended (1943). In his view, consciousness does not make sense by itself: it arises only as an awareness of objects. Phenomenologists call this quality intentionality, which refers to the ability of the mind to form representations, and shouldn’t be confused with intention. From this perspective, consciousness and intentionality are indistinguishable terms. In Sartre’s account, the presence of other causes one to look at oneself as an object and see one’s world as it appears to the other through recognition of subjectivity in other. So, in Quantified Self, the presence of the sensor-app tool causes one to look at oneself as information.
Sherry Turkle’s research has dealt with this in 90s and it revealed that we experience computers as being on the border between inanimate and animate, as both an extension of the self and part of the external world. Some of the reasons relevant to our discussion are proximity, which simply implies the coupling of the sensor-body-interface, instant feedback, which appeals to our will to power, and personalization, which is in fact responsible for considering computers as parts of ourselves – it is where self is most densely instantiated as data.
In regards to convergence between bodies and computers, Merleau-Ponty’s notion of flesh tells us that there is no inside and outside: we are already inside out, porous and one with the world. To further expand this idea in the context of Quantified Self, it is useful to think of miniature digital sensors worn on or close to the body as opposed to sensors inside the body – this could be the next stage of convergence, however, what’s important for this discussion is the underlying belief behind this assertion, that machines can come closest to the body only through surgery, which is based on the idea that there is a divide between inner and outer, that skin is a mediator between flesh and world, and it needs to be cut open in order for there to be a “full convergence between flesh and technologies” (Kozel, 2007, 270). In that sense, and following Merleau-Ponty’s idea, we could argue that convergence is not something that will happen at some point in the future, it is an intrinsic condition of all things – one is not swallowing the other, one is always one with the other. It is a mode of existence that is immanent to all things.
Merleau-Ponty’s idea of flesh does not simply imply that everything is made of the same substance; instead it is “concerned with active perception and living in the world” (Kozel, 2007, 276) and it is possible to describe it as a “dynamic web of perceptual and behavioral relationships” (Ibid.). Flesh is our embodied relationship with the world.
SPECULATIVE AESTHETICS AND QS
So far we have mentioned two dualisms at play within the Quantified Self ideology: mind/body, information/material. I’d like to point to the third one – visceral/visual. In Quantified Self, what is visceral becomes visualized and what is visualized becomes visceral. This formation is enabled via engagement and interaction of QS users with their data doubles and can be categorized as the relationship between oneself and one’s own physiological data – the self-to-self relation. This particular relation is what enables the perception of body as information – as data, as opposed to a process. It is a single material instantiation of bodily processes in various forms of data that enables this perception. So how does body arrive from process to information? To oversimplify it, I will put it this way: it happens in a transfer from qualitative to quantified.
What makes digital self-tracking possible is the assertion and understanding of the body as a set of informational processes. In a truly cybernetic and posthuman spirit, Quantified Self is an instantiation of information losing its body (Hayles 1999, 4) and becoming an entity able to flow between different materials. The Quantified Self-ers’ struggle to “hack the body” and uncover the inner workings of its system (that are impossible to perceive without digital sensors) so it could perform better than it was originally intended is possible because the body is regarded as an object for control, rather than an essential part of the self. Indeed, this ideology is on par with mind-body dualism – users of these tools see the body as an obstacle as the tool shifts the focus from embodiment to cognition.
With Quantified Self technologies, its users might be aware of the body, perhaps more than ever before, however, that body is not perceived as a whole – it is fragmented and fractured into functional parts. These technologies fragment the body, because they refer to its parts, not the whole. Some sensors track the body as positioned in space (its geo-location), some track heartbeat, or breathing, or skin’s electrical conductivity, or mind waves. Some sensors do combine functions, but there’s no such sensor that is capable of “sensing” the body as a whole. In a process of “looking” inside at the body, sensors s create their users’ data doubles, purely informational entities 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). But, before one’s data can be visualizes, it has to be synchronized.
According to Wikipedia, data synchronization is “the process of establishing consistency among data from a source to a target data storage and vice versa and the continuous harmonization of the data over time”(Wikipedia 2015), while data visualization, according to Greg More, a lecturer at RMIT university who specializes in translating complex data into visual displays, is “a new paradigm of communication where aesthetics, temporality and vast quantities of data are used to provide clarity to complex situations” (CUSP 2015). Currently, there are QS tools that require some kind of effort from the user to sync the sensor with smartphone (or desktop) application in order to get the data off of them, and there are tools that perform this automatically.
I’d like to focus now on the aesthetics of QS. My aim is to uncover and describe any additional ways in which our embodied materiality is affected by encounters with our quantified virtual bodies, by following a premise that aesthetics has at its center human perception (Hayles 2014).
Speculative realism brings a major challenge to this premise. It rejects the idea of the centrality of the human and replaces it with an approach in which everything exists equally “without privileging any viewpoint, especially the human, as the defining perspective for the others” (Ibid., 158). Everything, in this regard, means literally everything, from humans, animals, plants, artifact, to imaginary concepts and phenomena. The challenge here lies in the fact that, as Hayles asserts, “all aesthetic theories to date rely on the centrality of human sense experience” (Ibid., 159). How do we even begin, then, to imagine an aesthetics in which inanimate objects, incapable of sense perceptions as we understand them, are included in aesthetic experience? An approach that Hayles used in her essay is to engage ideas and arguments of speculative realism and extend them to aesthetic regime. To generalize aesthetics this way, one must approach identify aesthetics
with “enjoyment” (Levinas’s term) or “allure” (Harman 2007) so that the sensual qualities of objects in which other objects “bathe” is understood as an essentially aesthetic response (Ibid.)
To develop this strategy, I will start by asserting that a data double is the human inverted, as in a mirror, with a purpose of understanding it through the ways in which it encounters the world. However, my agenda is not a reconstruction of the worldview of this object, but instead its consideration as a part of the existence that it shares with me. My intention is to understand them in order to orient myself in the world.
I have previously in this essay asserted that the computer is capable of simulating consciousness. Thus a useful question would be: what is it like to be a data double? Contemplation on what kind of knowledge is accessible to us is essential for further unwrapping of these thoughts. Following Harman, Bogost accepts that “all objects recede interminably into themselves,” which implies that putting things “at the center of a new metaphysics also requires us to admit that they do not exist just for us” (Bogost 2012, 10). This argument follows the logic of the second order of cybernetics that gave birth to autopoiesis theory and asserted that systems are informationaly closed. However, with third order and virtuality, material objects are interpenetrated by information patterns, which in fact separates materiality from information.
CONCLUSION
So what kind of knowledge is accessible to us? How I see things in my environment certainly isn’t their real quality – if I were to say that the light on my smartphone’s screen is dimmed, that wouldn’t be the truth about its “real” condition, only the description of light as I see it, according to the amount of light waves that enter my eye through the pupil, which is controlled by the iris. The lens then focuses the light waves onto the retina, and rods and cones in the retina then convert them into signals that are carried to the brain by the optic nerve. Color is not inherent in objects. An apple is not red – red is located only in my brain. This is the reason why object-oriented ontology begins with the rejection of a common philosophical view, which they term correlationism:
This position tacitly holds that we can aim our thoughts at being, exist as beings-in-the-world, or have phenomenal experience of the world, yet we can never consistently speak about a realm independent of thought or language. Such a doctrine, in its countless variations, maintains that knowledge of a reality independent of thought is untenable (Bryant, Srnicek, Harman 2012).
But if correlationism does not exist, and objects “recede interminably into themselves” then how can we even begin to discuss them? For Bogost and Harman, the mere fact that because we exist in different systems, and can never truly know real qualities of objects, or know how they perceive us, whatever we conceive of them is practically a fairy tale – a metaphor. I am on the same page as far as this part of the argument is concerned, however, and because correlationism does not offer an adequate springboard for this discussion, I propose for another, more productive for my strain of thought: interrelationism. Unlike correlationism, which implies access, which in turn implies duality, which then implies different poles of a relationship, with interrelationism, these issues fall out of the picture, as we are now inside a relation, enmeshed, existing on a flat plane. My intention with this concept is also to attack the enemy, which in my view is the notion of duality, so firmly seated in almost every single sphere of existence.
Following this concept, we can now bring the convergence and cybernetics into picture. Because there is no “me” without “you,” there is no “one” without the “other.” As Merleu-Ponty pointed out, we share the same flesh. Our systems are self-directed, but we influence each not through correlations but through interrelations. How do objects speak to us? The vocabulary by which users and system can communicate comprises a set of concepts such as brands, design, typography, iconography, infographics, feedback, data synchronization, and data visualization.
What does all this mean for speculative aesthetics? I started with the observation that human perception is central to aesthetics and noted the challenge that speculative realism poses to that observation. I ended by arguing that the way to escape not just anthropocentrism, but also dualism, is through acceptance of interrelationism an imaginative projection into the worldviews of other objects and beings, based on evidence about their ways of being in the world, although I must emphasize that these metaphors cannot be confused with an object’s own experience.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bogost, Ian. 2012. Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing. Univ Of Minnesota Press
Bryant, Levi, Srnicek, Nick, and Graham Harman. 2012. “The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism,” In Human Studies – Springer Journals. DOI: 10.1007/s10746-012-9218-0
Franchi, Stefano, and Guven Guzeldere. 2004. Mechanical Bodies, Computational Minds: Artificial Intelligence from Automata to Cyborgs. A Bradford Book
Galloway, Alexander. 2012. The Interface Effect. Polity Press. Malden, MA
Hansen, Mark B. N. 2006. Bodies in Code: Interfaces With Digital Media. New York, NY: Routledge
Hayles, N. Katherine. 1999. How We Became Posthuman. University of Chicago Press: Chicago.
Hayles, N. Katherine. 2014. Speculative Aesthetics and Object-Oriented Inquiry, In Speculations: A Journal of Speculative Realism V (158-179)
Harman, Graham. 2007. “Aesthetics as First Philosophy: Levinas and the Non-Human,” In Naked Punch. www.nakedpunch.com/articles/147 (accessed May 1, 2016)
Jenkins, Henry. 2008. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. NYU Press
Kozel, Susan. 2007. Closer: Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology. MIT Press
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. [1948] 2004. The World of Perception. Translated by Oliver Davis. Abingdon, UK: Routledge
MoMA. 2011. Talk to Me: Design and the Communication between People and Objects.
Ruckenstein, Minna. 2014. “Visualized and interacted life: personal analytics and engagements with data doubles.” In Societies, 4 (1): 68-84.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1943. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. Washington Square Press; Reprint edition (August 1, 1993)
Stinson, Liz. 2015. “Em-Sense Enabled Smartwatch Can Detect When You Touch a Doorknob,” In Wired.com. http://www.wired.com/2015/11/em-sense-enabled-smartwatch-can-detect-when-you-touch-a-doorknob/ (Accessed May 8 2016
Turkle, Sherry. 1995. The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit. New York: Simon & Schuster
Wajcman, Judy. 2014. Pressed for Time: The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism. University Of Chicago Press
————-
[1] Quantified Self as a practice seeks to detect and uncover something that is typically not a subject of human reflection with a goal of converting the discoveries into traceable and perceptible information (Ruckenstein 2014). To further unwrap my ideas in this paper I will rely on the concept of “data double” (Ruckenstein 2014, Lupton 2013, Haggerty and Ericson 2000) as discussed in the field of surveillance studies.
[2] To the best of my knowledge, the method was first proposed by N. Katherine Hayles in her essay Speculative Aesthetics and Object-Oriented Inquiry (2014). Here, I am applying principles of that same methodology to discuss the aesthetics of data visualizations within the Quantified Self movement.
[3] Object-oriented ontology (OOO) is a field of philosophical inquiry that is grounded in speculative realism. It was first proposed by Graham Harman, whose work on the metaphysics of objects has led him to the development of what he named object-oriented philosophy (OOP). His ideas were taken up and further devloped by Levi Bryant, among others, who named the field object-oriented ontology.
[4] Biofeedback refers to techniques that involve using various instruments and sensors that provide information about physiological functions with a goal of gaining greater awareness and being able to manipulate these functions at individuals will. It uses visuals, sound or haptic feedback such as vibrations to alert the user when a certain action is required.
[5] Internet of Things (IoT) is a system and a network of physical objects embedded with sensors, electronics, and network connectivity that enables them to collect and transmit data (Wikipedia entry).
[6] The notion of informational pathways connecting the organic body to its inorganic, prosthetic extensions is also central to the construction of cyborg. “Cyborg” and “posthuman” are often used interchangeably. For further discussion see Hayles (1999).
[7] For further discussion on the computer as a mode of mediation see Galloway’s book The Interface Effect (2012).
[8] For further discussion on the psychology of computation and the computer as part of our social and psychological lives, see Sherry Turkle’s Second Self (1984).
[9] Video recordings of these sessions are stored and available for viewing on QuantifiedSelf.com
[10] The term “behavior modification” was coined by psychologist B.F. skinner during the 60s as a referral to techniques for altering one’s behavior through positive and negative reinforcement. From a linguistic point of view, the phrase is a verbal noun phrase: even though it describes an action, it doesn’t function as a verb, but as a noun. It is subjectless, meaning that we don’t know who or what is performing the modification.
[11] For a discussion on cultural transformations that are taking place as media converge, see Henry Jenkins’ The Convergence Culture (2008)