Narratives in Numbers
Our digital devices are mass-produced, commodified pieces of hardware. But once in our hands, they feel personal: software is built to respond to our actions, and in turn, our actions may respond to software.
The data that flows between people – through smartphones and internet-of-things devices – form ‘traces’ of our lives: traces of our communication, consumption and movement. Now more than ever these traces allow us to reflect on how we use our time, placing the present in constant reference to the past and the future.
Until recently, this kind of reflection required the unearthing of a dusty photo album or a diary, or a consultation with the weight-scale and the mirror. But now, the interface of a smartphone app places information about our activities in the palms of our hands. Multiplied across global userbases, human actions become bits and bytes, spread far and wide in a kind of ‘data diaspora’ (1).
Over the last few years, my research has been interested in how people record, recall, respond and recast their activities; by exploring data visualisations. In a world already saturated in data, where every interaction with software is logged and mined for patterns and sentiments, my participants willingly generate more data about themselves. They use smartphone apps like MyFitnessPal and Strava, and devices ranging from humble Fitbits to expensive Apple Watches.
My research questions why. Why do people willing subject themselves to more of this? Deliberate recordings of their daily life, rendered within the endlessly scrolling screen of a smartphone app. Well…
…some people seek a shrug: a simple ‘huh’. Sometimes a new way of taking in information, particularly about yourself, is just a little bit interesting.
‘I already knew my sleeping pattern wasn’t that great so, it was interesting I don’t think it really helped me a lot.’
Some seek self-reliance and control in a world full of unknowns. Learning about your body, by making it visible with data, can create a personal resource.
‘The data couldn’t tell lies… When I know the story behind the data, I know how to control myself: I don’t have to rely on other people.’
Some just use it as another way to communicate. Messaging friends with evidence of activity (links, challenges or just screenshots) is a popular way to banter or extend friendly rivalries.
‘…there's that adage I think I've mentioned: It's kind of a joke amongst cycling circles; ‘if it's not on Strava, it didn't happen’. So, my commute this morning is on Strava.’
These reasons for using ‘self-tracking’ apps are all fairly common. Among the hustle-and-bustle of life, they might even seem like unnecessary explanations for a mundane practice. But within these explanations, data become a utility, and a single action is stretched across time. Present actions like ‘sleeping’ or ‘cycling’ add-up to ‘patterns’ of the past, which in turn, become ‘knowledge’ for future exercises in planning and ‘control’.
Van Doorn (2) argues that memory is an ‘expanded now’, where our digital artefacts (things like images, likes, histories, logs, maps and lists) can be used to update and alter our interactions in real-time. We can be physically and digitally present simultaneously, and our actions can have a range of different social meanings across those contexts.
As interview discussions became deeper, my research participants went on to describe ‘spectres’: their personal views of their former selves, bound up in otherwise ‘objective’ numbers. These representations mediate their perceptions of everyday life, and were often judgmental in tone (younger, less confident, slimmer, stronger). But understandings of ourselves do not follow the formats dictated by the design of smartphone apps. We push back against the confines of our screens:
‘The data is like, just something to base-on how you went. The feel is different.’
One of my participants is – according to his Fitbit app – an able-bodied, middle-aged male. With resources spare, he can engage with public-health messages regarding balanced meals and the offsetting of sedentary work practices. We discussed his gym routine, and the attention he pays to his bodyweight, diet, and physical activity.
His app – below – ‘says’ things about him, based on trends in data. It can provide binary assessments of change like ‘gain’ and ‘loss’ or affirm that ‘this week you walked more than last week’. These apps can also offer comparisons; flexing their global datasets to say things like ‘you’re exercising more than men of a similar age’.
But there are things that app data can’t say about us. Data has baggage.
If Facebook knows where your mouse clicks or your fingers tap, if Netflix knows where your eyes dwell, and if Fitbit knows when your heart beats and where your feet tread, are there now – as Whitson (3) posits – only ‘institutionalized forms of memory[?]’
Perhaps. But according to my participant, his personal story is also part of ‘what happened, for the record’ – even if that record is invisible.
Our smartphones cram years of digital wizardry into tiny, shiny devices. Many people are concerned that we too, cram in: more money, more of our time, and more of our selves. But we are impossibly entangled with these technologies, in ways far too complex to be labelled as gain or loss, good or bad. We know that the calculations made by our technologies can limit us, and we realise that by codifying everything we do, devices and data oversimplify our experiences.
But our lives don’t fit neatly into the code of an app or the lines of a graph, and so we continue to assert individual agency by narrating these numbers. Van Dijck (4) troubles the very notion of linear human ‘memory’: instead of ‘now’ or ‘then’ there is creation and recreation. For a world full of digital media, their term is ‘mediated memory’:
Mediated memories are the activities and objects we produce and appropriate by means of media technologies, for creating and re-creating a sense of our past, present, and future of ourselves in relation to others.
Smartphone apps are designed as loops of interaction, which we are all an integral part of. Each interaction can, in theory, change the next. There is a dialogue between systems and users: an ongoing articulation of ‘technologies, infrastructures, and social arrangements’ (5). This is why data about ourselves can be both interesting, pretty, useless, affirming and – sometimes – filled with complex memories of people and places.
Smart technologies will continue to mediate and alter social relations in expected and unexpected ways. For better or worse, these devices boil everything down to ones and zeroes. But numbers can contain narratives: They act as a vessel of human record and a container for stories. By making sure we tell these stories, we can better decide how to mediate our relationship with the world around us.
References
1. Flynn, S. (2017) ‘Medical surveillance and bodily privacy: Secret selves and graph diaspora’, in Flynn, S. and Mackay, A. (eds) Spaces of Surveillance: States and Selves. Palgrave Macmillan: Switzerland, pp. 231.
2. van Doorn, N. (2011) ‘Digital spaces, material traces: How matter comes to matter in online performances of gender, sexuality and embodiment’, Media, Culture and Society 33(4), pp. 541.
3. Whitson, J. (2013) ‘Gaming the quantified self’, Surveillance and Society 11(1), pp. 167.
4. van Dijck, J. (2007) Mediated Memories in the Digital Age. Sandford University Press: Stanford, pp. 21.
5. Fiore-Gartland, B. and Neff, G. (2015) ‘Communication, mediation, and the expectations of data: Data valences across health and wellness communities’, International Journal of Communication 9, pp. 1469.
