Metaversal Mining

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 ?