Quantified Selves

Abstract

The title of this chapter is taken from the quantified self movement, where people track and analyse aspects of their lives such as steps, travels, productivity, location, glucose, heart rate, coffee intake, sleep and more to understand and improve themselves. Quantified self-representation has rapidly become common far beyond this movement, though: one in ten Americans owns an activity tracker such as a Fitbit or Nike Fuelband, and there are hundreds of other devices and apps to measure different aspects of our lives. This chapter considers what we can measure about ourselves and what we cannot measure, and the consequences of seeing ourselves as data bodies, using smart baby monitors, sex tracking and activity trackers as examples. Concepts discussed include dataism, the new aesthetic and machine vision. Towards the end of 2013, I attended a meeting held by the Bergen Chamber of Commerce on social media marketing. Several hundred marketers ate lunch as they listened to a presenter explaining her company's successful Facebook marketing campaign. 'The wonderful thing about digital media, ' she said, 'is that you can measure everything. ' Her company was launching a new social media marketing strategy, and she was thrilled at how easily they were able to track their progress: how many likes each post received, the age groups who were following the page and how many times different kinds of posts were shared. Adminis-trators of Facebook pages can see at a glance that more people click 'like' on certain kinds of post or on items posted at certain times of the day or of the week. Being able to measure something gives us the sense that we can control it. We can work to improve it, whether it's a marketing campaign or our productivity or our health. Having measurements readily available can also make us forget about all the things we cannot measure. There are currently different kinds of activity trackers commercially available, with names such as Fitbit, Nike Fuelband, Jawbone Up, With-ings Pulse, Misfit Shine and many more. They are worn on wristbands, hung from necklaces or clipped onto pockets, and measure how many steps we take, how many stairs we climb, what our heart rates are or how we sleep. They sync to websites or phone apps in which graphs are generated and daily averages calculated. They connect to other apps, like My Fitness Pal in which you enter all the food you eat to compare your calorie intake with the calories your stepcounter tells you that you burn, or Runkeeper, which uses GPS to track your runs, or other devices such as Withings scale that uploads your weight to the Internet. There are blood pressure monitors for people concerned about their heart, glucose monitors for diabetics and heart rate monitors for amateur and professional athletes. There are to-do apps that show us how efficient we are and time monitors that track whether we're spending time using a word-processor or checking Facebook. We don't typically think of these self-tracking tools as self-represen-tations in the same way as we do self-portraits or diaries, but they do preserve and present images of us: images that are both very accurate and very narrow, whether they track steps, heart rate, productivity or location. Fifteen years ago, well before smartphones and Foursquare, I walked out on the balcony at a party and noticed a woman fiddling with a GPS, setting her coordinates. She told me that most people didn't