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?