What Do Metrics Want? How Quantification Prescribes Social Interaction on Facebook
Schäfer makes it abundantly clear what he thinks of Facebook and the interactions it encourages in media by referring to it as “bastard culture”. Enumerating socializing and using it to lift markets is pretty bastard-y. Capitalizing on human interaction is immensely bastard-y. I feel particularly disgusted with this concept that a capitalist framework is the only way people can achieve fulfillment psychologically. This may be me just immediately lurching at the assertion – which sounds incredibly dystopian and disingenuous – but yeah no, I highly doubt anyone knows enough about human interaction to charge such a massive claim like that. Fuck that. Quantification is ingrained in people from the youngest age inherently through money – which is viewed not as a resource, but as a score. Grades in school are not so much a level of ability but a score. This socializes people to go for the highest score – which is generally fine and dandy unless your efforts to get the highest score include creating a system that kills a lot of people and preys on
Wearables and how we measure ourselves through social media
I really like this usage of personal data – far more than any other usage. Having a personal device collect and express this data in order to provide insight and maintain agency in the hands of the user is phenomenal but can of course be dangerous given poor guidance based on health data. Jill mentions using wearables to modify posture by immediate feedback – managing the kinds of food you eat – managing the amount of alcohol. In the hands of the user and appropriate guidance otherwise, this is amazing. In the hands of administrative bodies, this is surveillance and needs to be used appropriately given balance for needs for security and needs for privacy.
The Social Photo
While this is plainly clear to most everyone, I find that in many ways – especially outside of academia – we don’t discuss how the ways we communicate are technologies in their own right. Communication began with Body Language, occasional vocalizing if physically applicable, and has led to communicating by way of a complex structure of computers transmitting bits much faster than it would take most people to physically say all the words in their message. The image being captured and not painted by hand lends to the image itself being a witnessing party in a way that no person could ever be, short of someone with a quite literal photographic memory. Much akin to how we deal with software updates (poorly), updates like the addition of nearly definitive imagery or facial recognition or sentient computers are bound to shake things up in shocking, bizarre, and perhaps dangerous ways.