Lifetracing 3. Recording Frenzy and Monitoring

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¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 As described by Nicholas Carr (2009) in “The self-recording craze is nothing new — but now we do it digitally”, the major shift in the recording of our lives has been from important events to mundane things due to “the proliferation of mobile phones, digital cameras, personal websites, blogs and podcasts”. Software enables and facilitates the logging of our daily lives — lifelogging — with its potential ability to capture, store, search and retrieve. Kevin Kelly describes the goal of lifelogging as the desire “to record and archive all information in one’s life. This includes all text, all visual information, all audio, all media activity, as well as all biological data from sensors on one’s body. The information would be archived for the benefit of the lifelogger, and shared with others in various degrees as controlled by him/her.” (Kelly 2007)

¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 In 2004 Nokia launched its Lifeblog software and service which creates “a multimedia diary of your life through images, messages, and videos you collect with your phone” (Nokia 2009). You can post your images and messages to your blog or to a photo account such as Flickr. [6]

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Illustration 6: Nokia lifelogging software automatically tracks and stores all your text messages, photos, audio, etc. on your phone and displays it in a timeline.

¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 0 The popularity of recording the ‘mundane’ things of our daily lives may be seen in the microblogging and social networking service Twitter that asks us the question: What are you doing? Besides the mundane answer of “having lunch”, it is also used to record the extraordinary events in our lives:

¶ 6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 0 http://twitpic.com/135xa — There’s a plane in the Hudson. I’m on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy. 9:36 PM Jan 15th from TwitPic. (Krums, 2009)

¶ 7 Leave a comment on paragraph 7 0 With the proliferation of mobile devices equipped with cameras and the advent of cheap flat-fee Internet subscriptions, lifelogging seems to be on the rise. We upload content and context (for example GPS data and timestamps) to the web which is networked by nature because of the indexing machines called search engines. We are not only feeding our content platforms with our own content; we are also feeding the search engines with user data. This data is used for datamining and therefore “[...] it is crucial to understand the new role of the users as both content providers and data providers” (van Dijck, 2009: 47). John Battelle describes Google’s index filled with user data as a “database of intentions” which is:

¶ 8 Leave a comment on paragraph 8 0 The aggregate results of every search ever entered, every result list ever tendered, and every path taken as a result. It lives in many places, but three or four places in particular hold a massive amount of this data (i.e., MSN, Google, and Yahoo). This information represents, in aggregate form, a place holder for the intentions of humankind — a massive database of desires, needs, wants, and likes that can be discovered, subpoenaed, archived, tracked, and exploited to all sorts of ends. Such a beast has never before existed in the history of culture, but is almost guaranteed to grow exponentially from this day forward. This artifact can tell us extraordinary things about who we are and what we want as a culture. And it has the potential to be abused in equally extraordinary fashion. (Battelle 2003)

¶ 9 Leave a comment on paragraph 9 0 Google Flu Trends “uses aggregated Google search data to estimate current flu activity around the world in near real-time” (Google) and is a famous example of the database of intentions in action. Another example is We Feel Fine by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar who datamined the blogosphere for feelings. In a subsequent project, I Want You to Want Me, they used data from public dating profiles, visualized this data and described it as a mosaic of humanity. Instead of using this data for health issues or for artistic purposes it may also be used for monitoring or surveillance.

¶ 10 Leave a comment on paragraph 10 0 3.1 Self-Surveillance

¶ 11 Leave a comment on paragraph 11 0 The changing notion of the user as content provider and data provider also implies a change in thinking about consumer surveillance:

¶ 12 Leave a comment on paragraph 12 0 Discussing the role of the consumer, Siva notes another Google illusion — that of the free service. We pay for Google with our data — our searching habits, our surfing habits — and this fuels Google’s cash cow, personalized advertising. Siva calls for a renewed approach to understanding this kind of consumer surveillance, one that pushes aside the tired model of the panopticon (which Foucault analyzed in Discipline and Punish). He cites some of the ways surveillance has changed: it is private rather than state-run, and we don’t know how much they know. Most of all, we’re encouraged to transgress — to enjoy! as Zizek would say — rather than forced to reform as in Bentham’s model. That is, on the Web we need to show our true selves. (Stevenson, 2007)

¶ 13 Leave a comment on paragraph 13 0 While we pay for Google with our data, we also have increasing access to our own data. We show our true self on the web by exposing detailed information about ourselves. A Twitter related service that allows you to track and expose detailed information about yourself is your.flowingdata (YFD) which “lets you record personal data with Twitter to both increase awareness and improve yourself. For example — your weight and eating habits” (YFD 2009). As a Twitter based software tool that focuses on the registration of the self it is part of a new software genre of self-surveillance.

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Illustration 7: your.flowingdata: Collect Data About Yourself via Twitter © flowingdata.com

¶ 15 Leave a comment on paragraph 15 0 Self-surveillance can be seen as a form of “sousveillance”, a term coined by Steve Mann as a potential counter term for surveillance. Surveillance is the act of watching performed from above by organizational structures, whereas sousveillance is the act of watching from below by individuals. Sousveillance consists of:

¶ 16 Leave a comment on paragraph 16 0 hierarchical sousveillance, e.g. citizens photographing police, shoppers photographing shopkeepers, and taxi-cab passengers photographing cab drivers, as well as personal sousveillance (bringing cameras from the lamp posts and ceilings, down to eye-level, for human-centered recording of personal experience). (Mann 2004: 620)

¶ 17 Leave a comment on paragraph 17 0 We could consider self-surveillance as a subcategory of sousveillance in which the object being watched is not the other but the self:

¶ 18 Leave a comment on paragraph 18 0 Self-surveillance is usually understood as the attention one pays to one’s behavior when facing the actuality or virtuality of an immediate or mediated observation by others whose opinion one deems relevant — usually, observers of the same or superior social position. But we propose to open the concept to include individuals’ attention to their actions and thoughts when constituting themselves as subjects of their conduct.

¶ 19 Leave a comment on paragraph 19 0 The enlargement of the concept of self-surveillance implies associating it with practices of the care of the self. These practices require the stipulation of the part of the individuals that must be cared for and worked upon, a movement which corresponds to the production of an ethical substance. (Foucault, 1985 cited in: Vaz & Bruno: 273)

¶ 20 Leave a comment on paragraph 20 0 This relationship with the “care of the self” is clearly seen in YFD which focuses on sleeping, weight and eating habits. Through self-surveillance in the form of collecting data about the self and exposing this data, “people are liberated from shame and the ‘need’ to hide, which leads to something called ‘empowering exhibitionism’” (Koskela 2004: 1999). A web phenomenon related to this exhibitionistic empowerment is showing off your statistics on social media platforms.

¶ 21 Leave a comment on paragraph 21 0 3.2 Statistics Envy

¶ 22 Leave a comment on paragraph 22 0 A common trend on the social web is the showing off of statistics of how many people have read your blog, how many friends you have on Facebook and how many people have favored your pictures on Flickr. This type of user data was previously only accessible for the platforms carrying the content and user data for internal reference only. If you wished to know which kind of browser had been used to visit your website you had to pay for a statistics provider. Nowadays, services and engines gathering and harnessing all types of user data and behavior are increasingly opening up; especially the APIs, which leads users to develop new programs on top of the existing services.

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Illustration 8: Showing off statistics

¶ 24 Leave a comment on paragraph 24 0 The increasing availability of statistics/numbers about the self is leading to a vanity or statistics envy trend on the social web. TwitterCounter, “The Ultimate Twitter Statistics Provider”, is a service allowing you to track the growth in your Twitter followers and provides you with a badge for your blog or website to display your current number of followers in order to attract even more followers. It also shows your rank within the global top 100 most followed Twitter users or the local top 100. Another Twitter related service, the Twitter Analyzer, allows you to analyze your Twitter friends and provides sensitive information such as your “Most Loyal Friends (ReTweeting),” “Closest Friends,” and “Disregarded Friends.”

¶ 25 Leave a comment on paragraph 25 0 Statistics are used to measure or compare one’s self but are also used by engines for ranking content. Just like the Google PageRank algorithm that ranks webpages according to the number of inlinks a webpage receives, Twitter users can be ranked by the number of followers a user has and Twitter content can be ranked by the number of retweets a tweet has received. Popularity is measured by the amount of attention shown in the number of Diggs, followers, subscribers, visitors, stars, positive reviews, times an item has been shared or favored, etc. The public display of these numbers is typical of Web 2.0 behavior and reveals the entanglement of positioning oneself online through the use of social media platforms, search engines and user behavior. A new type of online identity is formed in this assemblage of platform, engine and user: Identity 2.0.

¶ 26 Leave a comment on paragraph 26 0 Footnotes

¶ 27 Leave a comment on paragraph 27 0 [6] Nokia Lifeblog now seems defunct as nokia.com/lifeblog redirects to nokia.com/photos an application for managing your photos. This may have to do with the proliferation of applications being able to post images and messages to the web. The Internet Archive has archived Nokia’s Lifeblog page from March 18, 2004 – October 27, 2007 at http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.nokia.com/lifeblog.

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