Nathan Jurgenson – The Social Photo

With the rise of new media platforms that allow the vast majority of people to socially interact with each other in a new format comes to this social change that impacts the way we “socially” view the world. Jurgenson proposes that in order to understand this change in the interaction we must look into the history of social media and its relationship with social photography. He goes into detail the history of photography itself and how the definition of what constitutes photography has now been a subject of debate due to the accessible and popular social media applications like Instagram that has somewhat redefined the act of documentation. Now, people all over the world can photograph and document every aspect of their lives, which is a drastic change to how photography had been limited to the “professionals” in the past. Jurgenson also brings up this aspect of the need to create an illusion of decay and age through the use of filters on Instagram that highlights people’s desire for authenticity.

To what extent can something that is posted on Instagram truly be considered as “photography” in terms of some expert standards? What are the requirements of that? Can ANYONE be a photographer?

Jill Walker Rettberg – What can’t we measure in a quantified world?

This talk highlights the interesting aspect of quantifying data that persists in our society today. About anything and everything that you can imagine can be quantified into numbers that in turn can impact the way we go about life. An example that Rettberg had used is the data collected from her Fitbit that displays the number of steps she had taken in a day, and how when she noticed that one day she wasn’t walking the recommended amount of steps on a certain day, she actively changed her routine to make herself move more which in turn gave her more steps. This is just an example of how numbers can make us decide to change our lives. She brings up multiple examples of quantifying data devices that are created or are in the process of creation that is meant to add convenience to ourselves.

Do you think that in the future, such devices would be so integrated into our daily lives that it would be the new normal to worry about our “life stats” every minute?

Ben Grosser – What do Metrics Want? How Quantification Prescribes Social Interaction on FB

Numbers and metrics have now become an important aspect of our lives due to different social media that utilizes those quantifiers in likes, shares, and comments like Facebook. In this article, Grosser goes into detail the strong desire for more that persists in the users of Facebook that ties together with the capitalistic tendencies of the society that dwells in it. More likes and shares equal to more self-worth, exchange value = personal worth. He then details the browser extension he had created to combat this persistence and bring to light our dependencies on the numbers through his creation, the Facebook Demetricator.

Do you think that society will ever move past the desire and need for more in terms of depending on the metrics that persists through social media?

Documentary Vision 

The reading talks about the “desire for life in a documented form”. The emergence of a generation that is dominated by phones and how culture is changing is due to the new technology and apps. This causes systematical and social behavioral changes. The article talks about our obsession with photography, and how we are also replicating the past with these new apps that make our photos look a specific type of way.  

Why is society becoming more concern about their public self image? 

What Do Metrics Want? How Quantification Prescribes Social Interaction on Facebook

The article talks about how metrics through a social system such as facebook, drives our need to increase these metrics. However, removing these metrics with Facebook Demetricator demonstrates how the platform solely focuses on the quantification and how our society is headed towards that direction.  Users are bombarded with numbers on the home page, but removing them makes the platform look unfamiliar. I think a lot of the metrics are making us addicted to this ideal of self improvement and self worth. 

Would you use social media if it didn’t have quantifiable data available to you? 

 Wearables and how we measure ourselves through social media

This tedTalk talks about data and how we are always quantifiably measuring ourselves through media. She talks about how we use these data to improve ourselves, such as through Fitbit and baby trackers. Something I found very interesting and never really thought about was the idea of dataism, which the belief that all data is the absolute truth. I think I agree and disagree with this fact because although data may show our non measurable activities in a quantifiable way, it only shows the “digital traces” we leave behind. 

Do you think that automated technology and application will make us more greedy to become this “perfect human” that Benjamin frankiln talked about? 

Nathan Jurgenson – The Social Photo – (book, pp. 1-15)

This article made me think a lot about the rise of photography. This is really the original form of social media. There was a lot of people who thought negatively about photography similarly to how boomers think about social media today. Having smart phones has definitely extended the true meaning of photography and how it is so accessible to billions of people around the world. One quote I liked from this reading was “I treat social photography here less as an evolution in photography or as

the advance of amateur snapshot photos and more as a broader development in self expression memory and sociality.” This is a good point to make because there has definitely been a huge change in photography due to the accessibility of cameras, and the social media revolution, but a majority of these images that are shared isn’t really photography but rather a way for someone to document there life and express themselves. 

Jill Walker Rettberg – “What can’t we measure in a quantified world?” (talk, 20m)

I found it interesting that the main focus here was wearable items outside of your iPhone. Since this is from 2014 where apple watches weren’t as popular, there was lots of other inventions for tracking yourself and digitizing your life. The sex app really stuck out to me for a few reasons. I think it a really poor way to measure sex, and this idea can be explained with other applications too. With step trackers, sleep trackers, heart rate monitors, and many other “wearables,” humans are getting a very skewed view of what they think they’re body is telling them. Not to say technology doesn’t assist us in measuring certain things about it, it’s just that it is a small slice of the big picture. A few thousand extra steps, or few extra minutes of sleep that was recorded on your phone, can give you a wrong idea of how your body is actually improving or not. 

Ben Grosser – What do Metrics Want? How Quantification Prescribes Social Interaction on FB

The most interesting part of this article is when you discussed the metrics of Facebook and what they really mean. Obviously the main purpose behind metrics is tap into ones psychology and make them use the platform for. That is the primary goal of Facebook because they want to keep growing. A great way to describe this addiction is when you explained how people get anxiety from likes and the timeliness of them. When things get older and don’t get enough likes, you have no choice but to crave an escape from this feeling.. so you post more. And since social media is so quick, and so vast, the idea of something getting “old” can be a few days, or even just a few hours for some. 

TedTalk:

Babies and baby monitors
Even things that do not need to be measured, such as when is the best time for babies to fall asleep at and how to make that happen, is normalized in turn to create more perfect schedules that cater to the 9-5 working class. Because we do live in such a capitalistic state, a lot of our forefathers had intentions to “monopolize” time. When the industrial revolution hit, it became systematic that workers and time schedules be kept documented, and in turn commodified. In this way, time has steadily progressed as an item of commodity that can be transformed and utilized through machinery and every day “pleasure” mechanics that prioritize the keeping of a same, daily schedule. It is natural, for people to want consistency in their lives, of course, yet this consistency is going towards an idealized system of production, complacency, and behavior.

Technologies or medicines that are applied for one specific reason might be transformed into an every day usage of different data gathering, one that works more with convenience than necessity. Such as fit bits, that once may have been of relation to step-monitors for people trying to track their activities, are not widely used even for the most healthiest of people, so they can continue being healthy.

Social Photography:

Are we more aware of the present, then? Underneath it all, or aware that the present could very well be the past in a matter of seconds? Are we choosing to see 5 steps ahead instead of living in the moment?
I think this could be a phenomenon thats invoking a lot of quarter-life crisis’. I’ve noticed this in myself, as well as amongst the peers I’ve been talking to, have been feeling like their future is so uncertain because of certain, certains. This could include loans, job prospects, debt, etc. I also think this immortalization of online media that captures and solidifies moments such as births, deaths, or diseases, life events, life falls, etc., makes us more susceptible to be looking into the future, expecting these moments to happen. I don’t think that because we are able to see so many social photos documenting loss or pain, that its exactly making us more empathetic to it. I think we are rather disconnected from the moment because what we see on our social media feeds confirms our worst fears, and perhaps we become desensitized to it, as well as compartmentalize it.

Social Media:

This enumeration of Facebooks metrics makes me think of grade school and how teachers would create a “good-behavior” chart, and would write everyones names down in columns and rows awaiting to be labeled with glittery star stickers. This type of comparison to other students, as well as being able to see who got the most stickers, is a bit cruel to me. For some, this worked, as they saw that others were getting more stars than them. For some, this could be very disheartening, causing them to fight back against the grain. This type of mentality, that we will always be comparing ourselves to others, even though we might not want to, is ever more present in meta interfaces like social media that frame the individual viewing and the subject, as comparable. This is further solidified though the use of numbers, of course, like the article said.

What can’t we measure in a quantified world?:

This talk focused on how our world now consists of many numbers. What can machines and technology really measure about us? – And what does the data really mean? For example, the discussion about measuring steps and the apps that collect and track your data. There is always a directly quantified element – like steps or how long you were at certain locations. She made it very clear that a lot of what’s being quantified nowadays doesn’t really make a lot of sense – like the baby thing and, again, tracking where you are throughout the day (mostly what’s silly about that one though is that it assumes things like the place you’re at for a few hours is “work” or the first time your phone moves is “when you wake up”). What’s worse is that this tracking and collecting of data is only growing in popularity.

Why do you think people want things in their life quantified? Why is there such an infatuation with numbers – and is it conscious or subconscious?

The Social Photo:

The idea of photos bridging both the past and the future is really interesting. I also love the discussion of real photographs becoming more and more of value. It’s odd, but I realize this in myself as well. A few weeks ago, my Grandfather handed me a group of photos of my younger mother and aunts and uncles. Each one had a different texture and feel – and each was a different size. It was so satisfying to have a physical image with it’s own unique features compared to the others in the pile. There’s just something very nostalgic about physical photos as well – they hold a different sort of value than our quickly taken and forgotten digital ones.

What do you think the future of photography holds? Will we enter a phase of going back to physically printed photos again?

What do Metrics Want? How Quantification Prescribes Social Interaction on FB:

This article talks about the quantification of social data in social media overall, but through the example of Facebook. Ben makes the important point of how Facebook is using a capitalistic approach by quantifying our basic need for socialization. We, in real life, are looking for relationships and friends. Yet, when likes and friends are quantified and the numbers are constantly shown in our face and compared, this data becomes addicting and has meaning attached to it that isn’t as true as we’d like to believe or admit. It’s like Ben says, if the numbers weren’t in our faces, there wouldn’t be this constant engagement with Facebook – because we wouldn’t feel the need to have ‘more’ without the quantified data constantly being compared to each other.

Do you think (or know something about!) quantifying social data like this is having major effects on our generation and how our brains work? (If so, explain your thoughts)

What Do Metrics Want? How Quantification Prescribes Social Interaction on Facebook

“The audit employs quantification as its way of understanding progress and tracking compliance.”

“That prescription starts with the transformation of the human need for personal worth, within the confines of capitalism, into an insatiable “desire for more.” Audit culture and business ontology enculturate a reliance on quantification to evaluate whether that desire has been fulfilled.”

The Facebook Demetricator also questions the fact that we have to respond to information. Yes the physical numbers bring the idea that more is more. But, if the software makes all comments/likes/actions disappear, then theres no pressure to respond/engage/add with the material at all. In this sense, we take information in a new way, and aren’t expected to provide anything in return, which can be refreshing.

Social performance is valued by metrics.

What about Finstas? Finstas are kind of an example of how social platforms limit human emotion. Finstas come about as a desire to express negative/private vulnerability to a small selected public. The accounts are made private, and they rarely exceed more than 30 followers. Not only does this reflect a comparison of intimate vs public “friendships”, but it shows an effort to express a person’s more gloomy experiences, rather than a flashy public persona. Instagram is heavily image based, but finstas carry heavy captions. However, the audience, the followers who follow the finsta, often come into uncertainty. How should they respond to flows of emotional venting? Should they like it? Comment? Suddenly, they aren’t sure what to do because Instagram limits their reactions (like Sim characters??). To make matters worse, the people who post these things often don’t get lots of likes/comments. Following along with our value for metric validation, this can hurt our emotional state even more.

How do we think this effects the kids who are born and raised alongside this technology? Is there a different result in real life communication? If we were to live so heavily dependent on social media, will that weaken our skills of human compassion and agency (that lack from software)?

Nathan Jurgenson – The Social Photo – (book, pp. 1-15)

truth/fact = nolstagia/history = vintage/faux aesthetic

Damon Winter’s Afghanistan Photo: creates an archaic narrative with the black and white vintage aesthetic, regressing war to history rather than present day. Vintage aesthetics warp time and dislocates the event from the present day. This can be dangerous for the conflicts/communities in danger presently, because the lack of urgency that the photos evoke. Is the aesthetic worth it if it means events are dislocated from their reality?

social photography=domestic “images” vs photography=artsy professional

I feel like this statement speaks to the hierarchy that museums carry over their versions of “art”. I disagree that “real photography” has “formally artistic” patterns and photography that represents more candid personal material are only “images”. Why can’t informal imagery not be considered photography? Why does art have to only hold authenticity within gallery walls?

“For my purposes here, what fundamentally
makes a photo a social photo is the degree to which its existence as a standalone media object is subordinate to its existence as a unit of
communication.” Aren’t all photos mainly communicative though? Why is the author stressing such a hard divide between traditional art photography and a now, much more accessible versatile version of photography? Both can be viewed for aesthetic/skill AND for social context/narrative.

“Without an audience for every snap, photography before social media
had to work much harder for attention; it had to be important or special or worthy to justify being seen.” Yes and no. Yes, social platforms can bring an equal playing field for photography being seen. But no, it’s not much different from the past. Having lots of Instagram followers creates the an algorithm that promotes my post to the public. Having high reputation and privilege in real life also sets your work apart even prior social photography. What do you guys think?

Wearables and how we measure ourselves through social media | Jill Walker Rettberg | TEDxBergen

baby monitor=virtual nurturer/caretaker

We’re building technology to the point where it engulfs our lives. Fitbits, baby monitors, life analysis. They all our passing a line of aiding us to taking over our actions completely. To think that a baby monitor is held responsible (to some degree) for a baby’s nutrition and health empowers technology to be the caretaker. It shifts the nurturing aspect of a parent/guardian to technology. I’m kind of against this because of how much authority metrics our held to. Will we believe quantifiable data from a computer more than a babysitter? How does that change our relationship and trust with one another? How are we taking data as “pure truth”? Dataism: Ideology that data is truth. What does that leave the guardian/parent left to do as a guardian/parent?

Measuring through a phone relies on technology to be apart of your body at all times. There lacks a separation of identity between the person and the phone if we hold all the phone’s data to be ours.

Nathan Jurgenson – The Social Photo – (book, pp. 1-15)
When photography was new, it had similar social debates as smartphones and the internet. People were divided as to whether this new technology was helping or hindering us. In a way, I feel it’s a lovely mix of both.

“The center of conceptual gravity for describing how people communicate with images today should be less art historical and more social theoretical.” While professional and social photography communicate with images, it’s the social photography that is moving images toward a language of sorts, and a means to actively engage with other people. When we focus less on the aesthetics of the images and more on the meaning or the delivery, then we can start to really dive into how people communicate with images today.

Did you know that some people think in dialog, and some people don’t? I wonder if this image-based communication is a better way to include more people in the conversation. How possible is it for us to have an actual image-based language? Rather, I suppose it would be a sort of code. But then the code could actually span multiple languages, creating this connection between different cultures. Could memes and images be the “one common language” that we can use to dissolve language barriers?


Jill Walker Rettberg – “What can’t we measure in a quantified world?” (talk, 20m)
While this talk was largely about what we can and can’t measure, as well as the things we use to measure them, the thing that stuck out the most to me is how we are conditioning children to accept being monitored, tracked, and ranked based on their performance data from school. We’re constantly trying to automate our lives, but it’s at the expense of actual human interaction.

Will there become a time when we are reliant on machines and the data? Could we become so disconnected from each other and ourselves that we can’t interact without media (for example: only eating when the app says it’s an optimal time to eat, not when your body tells you to or when you choose to)? On the other hand, maybe we could become the best versions of humans that there ever could be — with the help of all of our tracking devices.


Ben Grosser – What do Metrics Want? How Quantification Prescribes Social Interaction on FB (article)

So, what do they want? They want us. They want us on their applications all of the time. They want your data. They want you to want to give more and more. Ben refers to the graphopticon, which is “a self-induced audit of metricated social performance where the many watch the metrics of the many”. Like a game, we’re rewarded for generating more content. More likes. More hearts. More followers. More, more, more.

Then comes Ben with the Demetricator, which is a browser extension which removes the metrics from Facebook. You can still navigate and use Facebook as you would without the extension, you just can’t see the how many likes or friends you have. Other numerical data is also removed, as to completely eliminate the need to drive the numbers higher. This helps to create a social environment that is more social and less dependent on numerical data.

If we know the numbers are bad for us, and we can (sometimes physically) feel the pain of numerical rejection, then why is it so hard for us to all activate the Demetricator?

What Can’t We Measure….

Her talk highly focusses on all the ways we are monitoring ourselves today. We’re addicted to measuring ourselves, whether it be through likes, followers, and in her case, through things like the fit bit, which literally measure our activity, we love it all and we eat it up like cake. We’ve now even invented technologies that allow us to measure babies, so from the minute their born we begin to measure their movements as well. This form and addiction of measuring is a version of tracking, a somewhat more personal form of tracking. She explains this as the concept of dataism. But although we can track so many things about us, how accurate are these measurements? What are they ACTUALLY measuring in an experience? She compares these questions to an app that measures sex, the app if designed to monitor motion and sound during sex, what it does not measure about sex is foreplay, caresses and other sexual movement. These apps, although, we’re addicted to what they measure are only a small bias of the experience.

When thinking about this, I was drawn to why? What is the point of measuring all these things? How tangible is the information we are measuring? Why do we feel the need to quantify ourselves?

What are the ways in which we measure ourselves and how does that change the way we see ourselves?

What Do Metrics Want?

As we know, we’re constantly measuring ourselves. We’re actively monitoring how many likes, followers, subscribers, and so on. This plays heavily on our need and desire for “more.” This growing desires ties closely in relation to the capitalist society we live in, growth in numbers helps capitalist survive, and in the individual sense we see more as a good thing. When we think of this in terms of social media, especially Facebook, we’re actively comparing our metrics of followers or likes to other people, as we do this comparison we set certain standards for ourselves. The more our numbers rise means the more our desires are met.

I can think back to a time where I was obsessed with Facebook. I was constantly adding people to be my friends because I wanted to show people around me that I was “cool” enough to know so many people, whereas it really boiled down to the fact that I was friending anyone I remotely knew. This is where my measuring self-worth began, the higher my numbers, the cooler I felt.

How do these habits of evaluating the self by social media metrics affect us? Our perceptions of the world? What is the consequence?

The Social Photo…

With the huge emergence of social media, we’re addicted to show our everyday with everyone, while they are all simultaneously doing the same thing. As states in the article, “cameras changed how we saw the world and thus changed the vision itself.” As we literally have a camera in our pockets with us every day, it changes how not only we react with photography but also how we react to the world. There’s the new saying that “food eats first” which plays on the idea that people feel the need to take photos and share what their eating even before they’ve begun to dig in. Why do we feel the need to share these types of things? And why is it so common? It’s a form of communication and also a form of sharing to compare. I wouldn’t feel such a need to share some aspects of my life but other people do, so I feel the need to do so as well to compare myself to that person.

I can look back on my phone camera roll and there are loads of invaluable photos, that if I had taken them before smart phones or social media, I’d question why I’d taken that picture. It’s a common experience we all share and thus then want to show one another, or hold onto the memory.

If we didn’t have social media, like Instagram, that enabled our need to share, would we be so inclined to share? What is the importance of the un-importance of a photo?

Nathan Jurgenson – The Social Photo – (book, pp. 1-15)

I remember when I first got Instagram, I’d add all my friends and wheel through all the different filters to see which one looked the best. I can definitely attest to these old, vintage, nostalgic styles. I think it’s interesting because I think people my age who were born in the late 90s, we grow up with these older technologies of cameras where we take these less accurate and pixelated images, yet now as we’re older we yearn to go back to those childhood days and place these filters on as if we were transported back.

Jill Walker Rettberg – “What can’t we measure in a quantified world?” (talk, 20m)

It’s crazy that in such a digitized world, almost everything we do can be tracked or measured. This idea of life-logging or self quantifying seems both immensely interesting and at the same time scary. We were already talking about third parties taking our data, how would we know that these apps aren’t reusing the information we give them? That’s another topic, though. I was surprised that someone even created an app to measure sex. Something that people would consider so intimate and emotional, data and logic just seems to be the complete opposite and frankly a mood killer. Speaking of tracking, I downloaded an AI texting app that keeps track of the texts that I send over my phone. It counts the amount of times emojis are used, question marks, words in order to measure and guess what kind of a person it is that you’re talking too and will tell you to check up on someone if they’re acting weird. While I have always thought that not everything could be measured, I might have just been convinced otherwise. Sure, some data is unreliable, but we learn from it, fix the tweaks, and we continue measuring.

Ben Grosser – What do Metrics Want? How Quantification Prescribes Social Interaction on FB (article)

I won’t lie, there are times that I have been on Reddit, and if something has a ton of upvotes I will upvote it without thinking too much into it and vice versa for ones with a ton of downvotes. While I would normally go with my gut, when I see these numbers, my instinctual reaction is to follow the majority. I also felt this way with mutual friends on Facebook. If I don’t know who they are, I might accept them just solely based on the fact that we have 300 mutual friends (I don’t do that now for my safety now, and will ask others about them before I accept). Even outside of social media. We are also judged on our self worth numerically through grades, net worth, and even age! If somebody is younger than me, I normally feel more confident talking to them since I feel a bit wiser. I’m wondering if our idea of good scores in academia correlates with our want for high scores in social media as well. The more metrics we give of ourselves, the more they use it against us.

Wearables and how we measure ourselves through social media

This TED talk is about dataism- how we objectively quantify everything now. More and more life logging app/products are invented (the vessel, bracelet records your calories, the location-logging app, love all of them). But we always ignore the uncertainty of the data. I agree with her when she says data shouldn’t be the representation of our lives, it’s just the trace we left behind. 

I wonder if we will ever overcome the uncertainty of the data? (Like the video we saw in class- a guy used 99 phones to create a fake traffic jam)

The social photo

“Social photography” is about photography and social media, which are the desire for life in its documented form. Almost everyone has phones and anyone can be a photographer. He also brought up the faux-vintage trend, which suggests the continuity with the nostalgia that all documentation implies. I feel like social photography is a fairly new word and I would like to know what it means to the generation before us. 

What Do Metrics Want? How Quantification Prescribes Social Interaction on Facebook

Ben built a software called “Facebook Demetricator” and it removes all the metrics from the Facebook interface, and it reveals users’ “desire for more” culture on social media. The metrics guides users’ behaviors and reveals prescribed patterns of sociality.

Imagine a social media without any quantification, will it be able to compete with all the popular social media platforms?