Life logging and loosing yourself
May 2, 2010
In response to a couple of recent pieces on identity by Jeff Jarvis and one by Gary Wolfe of Wired on living by numbers.
It should be becoming obvious by now that I’m quite pragmatic about technologies, especially those that purport to replace mind function with mathematics, and these two threads are kind of along the same lines. Interesting, but not quite right. In fact Wolfe’s piece is quite wrong in some ways, but typical of the cyber-utopian and really getting very dull these days. We’ve had the net 20 years and its still a shiny box to be prayed to for some people. Get over it Wolfe and actually think about what you are saying ! Your words are more important than the technology.
Case in point; Wolfe’s piece describes a number of different strands to the general social and technological movement towards quantification and couples them with communication. Fine. No problems with that analysis. Automated diaries, blood sugar monitoring, chips in the soles of our shoes recording physical exercise, etc, etc, all feeding data into a set of databases that may or may not be accessible by other people to react to. A method of capturing all that time that is wasted without noticing it. A way to streamline activity. Be more productive. Really ?
Quote (of those subjecting themselves to self-tracking);
“they are also looking to understand their strengths and weaknesses, to uncover potential they didn’t know they had. Self-tracking, in this way, is not really a tool of optimization but of discovery, and if tracking regimes that we would once have thought bizarre are becoming normal, one of the most interesting effects may be to make us re-evaluate what “normal” means.”
Apart from the obvious internal contradiction, I wonder whether Wolfe questioned what it is about self-tracking that appeals to the American psyche (as his pieces seems to imply). What it is about systematically removing the spontaneous actions from everyday life that is seen as a positive ? To me its disturbing that a dominant global culture seems so eager to stop thinking and to export the idea that contemplation is no longer a valid goal in itself. Does that imply that Americans believe that understanding of self can only come with unceasing, unidirectional activity. Not only that, but a piece of mathematics is in a better position to tell you what you need than your own mind. Do you trust yourself so little ?
Of course there are good things about the life logging movement. Medical diagnostics is probably the best example, but the good things will tend to be the physical. Try as hard as you can to avoid trying to replicating mind functions. Please ? For me. Just this once.
This is where we cross into the issues around identity that JJ has been looking at. Online identity is something that I’ve dealt with professionally for the best part of a decade and I have to say, technically its no longer an interesting issue. However it is an interesting social and philosophical issue as we spend more and more time immersed in worlds made of other peoples imaginings.
The crucial thing to remember is that we cannot control how other people see us in a world where we can sprout wings and fly off to Brazil in a second. Identity as a projection of self is no longer irreducible if your existence is mediated. So while there is value in being able to prove that you are who you say you are in a transactional sense, there is less and less value in communicating who you are in a personal sense. Question; what is a hate crime in 2nd life ?
The Virtual Revolution – An OK piece, sort of
February 1, 2010
The BBC’s Virtual Revolution season kicked off yesterday with the first in a four-part series The Great Levelling ? Its OK, a decent history of things WWW and some of the people behind the whole ‘social change through techno-libertarianism’ movement.
Its mostly wrong of course. The program’s premise that Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web is somehow divorced from the infrastructure of the internet that it runs on is a stretch at best. To suggest that the web is non-hierarchical simply because you don’t have to ask to join in is falacious and the notion that just because addressing structures are not overtly government controlled, the traffic that they support isn’t subject to oversight is just plain wrong.
The presenter/writer starts from the wrong position. She takes the West Coast hippy route through the material casually disregarding the fact that the internet was designed as a command and control network. DARPANET and its progeny are/were all about hierarchy. Its in the DNA of the Internet Protocol. Domain Name Service is way to organise hierarchical lists of computers. The parasitic technology of TBL’s WWW cannot ignore this fact and at best disguises it through http addressing.
I just don’t see how you can paint over that core design philosophy with some vague San Franciscan musings that amount to a claim to have separated the physical infrastructure from the use of that infrastructure by power of the mind alone.
I prefer to think of the internet and www as a child growing up.
Born into a military family, DARPA laid out its morals, made sure that it ate its greens so that it had strong bones in later life. The de-militarising of the internet was the system going to school and meeting kids from the other side of town. Different folks but still recognisable, still ‘us’. The last 20 years have been it playing high-school football, getting to 2nd base with your best girl behind the bleachers, taking a part-time job to pay for a parts for a clunker to trick out. (I don’t know what any of that means by the way. I’m British. We have cricket. Its not the same)
The recent move to allow non-latin script in website addressing is the kid going to college, meeting radically new people and getting into all sorts of high jinx, maybe getting in trouble with the law over a misunderstanding. In parallel to that is the kid starting to take an interest in travel. Spreading to Africa, seeing poverty at first hand will change it, but still at its core is the Internet Protocol and the design philosophy of Cerf & co. This is where we are now.
Still to come the kid takes a trip around the whole world and graduates from college. Current WWW penetration is around 25% global population, so until over 50% of world population has access World Wide Web is not even an accurate name. That will happen soon enough and the East African Fibre Optic cable will help that process along.
At some point after the internet has reached everyone and everyone has had a chance to define their own space, exert their own influence, only then will we find out what is possible with this tool. The child will have grown up.
But unless a new infrastructure is put in place to run the traffic over, it will still be Vint Cerf and DARPA’s little nuclear resistant command and control network at heart. The values that it grew up with will not change.
La vie virtuelle
July 26, 2009
I’ve just had a wake-up call from reality. I hate those things, they always mean that I’m going to have to do something I don’t like.
Recap: I applied and was offered a place to attempt my PhD at the other end of the country. I recently went there for the first time. Lovely place, pleasant town, college was a bit run down but they are getting a new one soon.
But it felt wrong. I couldn’t really put my finger on it.
Was it the interactions that I had with people while I was there ? On the whole they weren’t unpleasant, probably not the most helpful folks I’ve every met in the service sector, but honest. They seemed OK online.
Was it physical isolation ? OK it was a long drive from here to there, but here is more isolated than there.
Maybe it was just the weather and sleep deprivation due to heavy rain on canvas.
It was a long drive home, so I thought about it quite deeply (but not to distraction). I think that the place wasn’t sufficiently different to where I was coming from. The physical balance was different with more focus on land and less on sea, but essentially the elements are the same. Even the economies of the areas are similar – mining, farming & tourism. Again, a different balance but the same elements.
And I wondered about how that sort of ambient situational noise would translate into online communities or even if it is relevant since the sense of physical ‘place’ online has no direct analogy. In a way this is what my PhD was supposed to be about – the translation effects between online & offline versions of reality. What do people say when the world is looking over their shoulders vs what do people do in the privacy of their own lives ?
Update – has ‘place’ been replaced by ‘community’ online ? If so, perceiving community is not dependent on any physical parameter, apart from access to the net. What does that mean in terms of nation and of national politics ? If our community only lies in virtual space do we pledge allegiance to the physical embodiment of the virtual space and form our own armies to protect server farms ? Do we take responsibility for that virtual community and its real-world impacts or is there something inherently different about a non-corporeal community ? Does its basis in the commercial world mean that an online community can be expected to persist in the same way as a physical one ? What happens when Facespace goes bust ? Is it the same as a nation going into political turmoil ? Are there online refugees ?
Yes, lots to explore over the next few years. Check out the new report on the Internet and Civic Engagement from the Pew Internet Project. Interesting stuff, but a bit cart before the horse. I think that we need to address some of the deeper questions about how people engage with each other before we start to act on this sort of data.
Loving this app
July 4, 2009
I’m sure that there must be simply oodles of uses for this. I can’t for the life of me think of one 
Buzztracker.org – geographic news search
I think that its the irrelevance of location of the news source that tickles me most. You are as likely to see an Australian paper reporting on Micheal Owen’s transfer to Man U as you are to see a Chinese site talking about the coup in Honduras. Since the vast majority of these stories are syndicated news feeds the thought that these maps of associations somehow equate to news rippling out from its origin is a stretch to say the least since there is no significant time lag difference between when Sydney sees a European story and when Beijing sees an Latin American one. But its a nice art project and I love it for that.
